The Tragic Tale Of China's Orphaned Children

Since 2005, the number of children in Chinese orphanages has been declining at a steady rate. In spite of that, around 10,000 adolescents are abandoned and introduced into these already overflowing orphanages annually. This has been an ongoing issue, but despite recent efforts to rehabilitate orphanages and their ability to bring in new children, the problem has yet to find a sustainable solution. However, there are many ways that this issue can be resolved, such as adoption. International adoption helps abandoned children find new homes with loving families. With the invention of baby hatches, which provide protected areas to leave a baby who can no longer be cared for, abandoned young are less likely to suffer before being brought to

He points out that disabled children are becoming the main population in orphanages because "as the once-draconian rules limiting couples to one child are being phased out, parents are giving up these children because they simply can’t afford their care in a country whose social safety nets remain poorly constructed and incomplete." Vanderklippe suggests that despite the improvements in Chinese government regarding orphans, the issue still remains prevalent; only now with a different population of children. According to Vanderklippe, recently China opened several new sites called baby hatches, which serve as a more humane option to allow mothers to place their children inside, who would then be taken in soon after. This plan backfired on a particular orphanage in Guangzhou, which was overcome with 262 mostly disabled children in the months since opening late January. The orphanage was forced to close, leaving nearly a tenth of those children dead. Despite the struggles within China's orphanages, there is still hope for these children and their futures. Vanderklippe mentions a welfare specialist who explains how the system is improving with increased welfare for the whole country. The article confirms that "change is

Some of them, however, haven't been the most humane, or the most legal courses of action. At its peak in the 1990's, dying rooms were used to leave children to die of malnutrition, and it slipped through the government's legality concerns because of the "Zero-Population Growth" philosophy. The article "The dying rooms: Chinese orphanages adopt a 'zero population growth policy'" explains that "Baseless these charges [against doctors who seemingly allowed children to die] are not. There is mounting evidence that the practice of letting unwanted children die of starvation and neglect is not limited to Shanghai, but is found in orphanages nationwide". Mosher elaborates on how the doctors and orphanage staff got away with this horrible act through a loop-hole in laws by saying "When these damning records were reprinted in a 394—page Human Rights Watch/Asia report last month, they were condemned as “sheer fabrication” by a staffer at the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute." As this sentence suggests, the dying rooms were all over China, trying desperately to reduce numbers in one of the most inhumane ways possible, with no one to care that it was wrong or unfair. Luckily, within the past twenty years, dying rooms have been erased from orphanages, and replaced with much healthier, safer, and more caring ways to tend to these