Children, not just for christmas.

I often wonder aloud (and here) why people bother having children at all if they are not going to raise them properly, and by properly I mean provide shelter, food, stability, love, rules, mental well being and total commitment to their upbringing. I mean, when you look back over that list it's not exactly rocket science. Nothing above and beyond the call of duty all parents take on board.
Right?
But then every now and then a story comes along that leaves me astounded at the callous attitude some people take towards their children, the lack of empathy and love is staggering. Last night I watched a disturbing documentary about China where traffickers bought and sold children as though they were nothing more than livestock. There was no compassion and no other underlining process to their decision making only what they could get for a child of a certain age. One of the traffickers had even sold his own youngest son, reasoning that the older boy he'd had would 'find his way back'. It was a heartbreaking piece of television I can tell you. I watched that man talk about the best 'type' of child to traffic and how he was just an 'agent' and I wondered how a person such as he could even be created. To have not even a shred of humanity or heart, never even to consider the human misery he inflicts. It was unbelievable.
Then I got up this morning and-coffee in hand- scanned through the morning papers. And lo and behold there in the guardian comes another story of parental ball dropping.
Observe.

"A Dutch couple living in Hong Kong yesterday found themselves at the centre of an international controversy after they gave up their daughter for adoption seven years after they adopted her themselves.
Raymond Poeteray, 55, who has worked as a Dutch diplomat for more than 20 years, and his wife, Meta, adopted Jade, an ethnic Korean girl, when she was four months old.

Poeteray told the South China Morning Post that the adoption had gone wrong. He said that his family was "trying hard to deal with it".
He added that his wife was receiving counselling following the decision to give up Jade. "It's just a very terrible trauma that everyone's experiencing," he told the newspaper. "I don't have anything to say to the public. It is something we have to live with. My foreign ministry knows about my situation. I have also been in touch with the Hong Kong government and they have been very helpful to me and so has my own employer." The couple have been heavily criticised in the Dutch press and by the South Korean community in Hong Kong who are trying to find a new permanent home for Jade.
A spokesman for the South Korean consulate in Hong Kong said the couple had found it difficult to raise the little girl because of "culture shock".

"[The Poeterays] now have their own children," the spokesman said. "They decided it was difficult to raise [Jade] because of cultural shock. They said she's not willing to eat their food. That's one of the reasons. It's a strange reason. She was raised from a very early age. It's a very uncommon case. It's a difficult situation for us to understand."

The Korean community in Hong Kong has been asked to find a family to adopt Jade, who has been in foster care in Hong Kong since leaving the Poeterays. The case is complicated as her residency status is uncertain; she is neither a naturalised Dutch citizen nor a resident of Hong Kong. She goes to school in Hong Kong and speaks Cantonese and English but not Korean.

Since adopting her the Poeterays have had two children of their own."

Honestly, having raised a child for seven years as your own, how on Earth could you turn her over to strangers? How could you walk away from her, knowing her future is so uncertain, to deprive her of her family, her home, her siblings, her sense of self? Just what makes a person place so little value on a child like that?
The Poeterays are not peasant farmers trying to eke out a living in a backwards rural place, they are educated, wealthy Europeans. And yet instill a far greater nose wrinkling disapproval in me that the scummy trafficker who tells it as it is and doesn't try to disguise his avarice.
These people don't deserve to have children, certainly the poor children don't deserve to have them as parents.