I want my baby back baby back baby back
Posted by guestblogger on March 19th, 2009My wife and I just had a beautiful baby boy. The kid is healthy, good looking (yes, I’m biased) and doesn’t appear to have any problems beyond an overabundance of poop and a propensity to cry loudly when he needs something. We’re actually crazy about him.
But in the dark moments, around 3:30AM when he’s woken up 3 times previous, has been fed and has a new diaper but refuses to go to sleep, I find myself wondering, “Did we get the wrong baby? I’m pretty sure we ordered a quieter model. What if he’s not really ours?” That’s inevitably followed with “could we return him? What could we get for him on the black market?”
Okay, so I don’t really have those thoughts, but let’s say for the sake of argument, that I do. Let’s look at the first scenario.
After doing some extensive Googling, I found that an estimated 1 in 8 (between 100K and 500K) babies get mixed up and go home with the wrong parents. That’s atrocious! In this economy, with sky-high health insurance, you should get what you pay for. I mean, can you imagine, buying a Lexus and going home with a Toyota Avalon? I mean, sure it’s a decent replacement. But it’s not the Lexus you ordered.
Now, let’s look at scenario number two- by far the more interesting.
I’ve never bought anything on the black market. The closest I’ve come is buying a pirated cassette tape in Indonesia when I was 18. That was more grey market. It was out in the open and established vendors were doing it (I guess even Metallica’s power sphere has its limits). So when I looked into the black market for babies, I was amazed at its depth.
It’s actually very well organized. They have black market baby brokers, black market baby operations, black market baby document creators, black market baby children’s homes and black market baby clinics who are all part of this burgeoning industry. Let me tell you, it doesn’t sound cheap. But surprisingly, it is. With the price of legitimate adoption as expensive as it is, the black market has apparently been forced to lower its prices and undercut them. Prices have gone up though. 40 or 50 years ago, babies were only worth $500. These days, a woman in Wisconsin sold hers for $6000. Not bad, but still far less than traditional legal means.
I guess it’s kind of like ebay. There’s a risk of getting scammed, you can’t be sure about the scruples of the seller, and the quality of the item might be exaggerated. Nothing against ebay, mind you.
Aside from the fact that I really like our kid and want to keep him, the shocking truth is that selling him on the black market just doesn’t make financial sense. I guess we’ll just have to figure out a better way to pay the mortgage.
Tags: baby