Sri Lanka government officials have admitted to what many have known for a long time: in the 1980s the country was home to an underground network of “baby farms” that sold infants to foreign nationals. A 1987 raid on a location holding 22 women and 20 newborn babies that brought comparisons to prison-living essentially ended the racket that saw infants being bought or stolen from their mothers. In some instances, new Sri Lankan mothers were told their child had died shortly after being born when in fact they were stolen from the hospital and then shipped with falsified records to countries like the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and the UK. It is also alleged that women were impregnated solely to keep up with the demand for adoptive children.
History
Sri Lanka’s Baby Farms Turned Childbirth Into a Big Business
It seems like a plotline from The Handmaid's Tale, but babies being farmed for international adoption was a very real occurence in 1980's Sri Lanka.
