BABIES FOR SALE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21280, 25 February 1939, Page 11

BABIES FOR SALE

DISCLOSURES IN ENGLAND

GOVERNMENT WELCOMES NEW NEW BILL

There were gasps of indignation in the House of Commons recently when Miss Florence Horsbrugh (Con., Dundee) waved a baby “price list” in which British babies were “catalogued” at prices up to £6oo—one of the many damning pieces of evidence she had collected for her exposure of the baby farming racket in England, states the London “Daily Mail.” “No, go on, go on,” urged M.P.S when Miss Horsbrugh—a rather severe figure in plain blue costume and collar and tie—asked whether members were tired of her revelations.

And she proceeded to startle the House with amazing facts and figures of the profiteering traffic in unwanted children.

Baby farmers, she said, were growing rich on the profits of their trade, were blackmailing unfortunate young women to pay excessive maintenance, or else publicity would result.

Bill Welcomed

Miss Horsbrugh was chairman of a committee set up by the Government to investigate the question of the adoption of children. The committee reported, but nothing was done about it, and hers was a day of triumph, for the Government welcomed her Adoption of Children Bill, which, with the proper registration of all adoption societies, aims at putting paid to the baby farmers. It was given a second reading without a division. She told of the increasing traffic in unwanted children, of the fabulous prices which were being advertised

abroad for British babies, who subsequently might change hands several times until, when they grew up, they did not even know their nationality. “I feel very strongly that British babies should not be given away to the people of any other country,” she declared. “They are our responsibility. They should only be adopted by British people.”

Here are some of Miss Horsbrugh’s revelations:

A young mother took her child to an adoption society. Two years later she received threatening letters from the society asking her for maintenance. She asked for the child back and found that it had died at the age of three irtonths.

“I have actually held in my hands a price list of children. They were ‘catalogued’ at £5OO, £6OO, and other large sums. In one case a child advertised at £550 fetched £l5O.

Newspaper Advertisements

“I have seen newspaper advertisements which read: ‘I am a baby boy. I have no mummy. Do give me a home at Christmas.’ The type of woman who puts in such an advertisement waits to see how many people want children and then goes round collecting them to supply the demand.”

The Government, said Miss Horsbrugh, must have legislation over the “middle men” in child adoption, the people who actually arranged the adoptions. Anyone could set up an adoption society, apply for a licence, and call it anything they liked. “In some cases it is merely a moneymaking concern. One society was called the Church of England Adoption Society, but the society had no official connection with the Church of England. Some societies do their best to give the children good homes, but there are other distressing cases where people are making money by the buying and selling of children.’

It was proposed that people arranging the adoption should have to notify the local authority several days before the child went to its adopted parents. Welfare workers could then visit the child until it was legally adopted.

Large numbers of British children had been sent abroad to places where there was no adoption scheme. People could desert children and turn them out. She had seen photographs in Dutch papers of British babies for sale.

Mr Geoffrey Lloyd, Under-Secretary, Home Office, said the Government welcomes the Bill as "a very useful measure.”