Judge condemns ‘odious’ scheme to buy baby
• The Quebec couple had one child and wanted another, but health issues meant the mother could not risk another pregnancy. So they turned to the internet.
According to a court decision from last year, the couple made contact through an online forum on procreation with a woman in central France who was pregnant and prepared to sell her baby.
They made a plan for adoption — the monetary details are not disclosed in the ruling — and on Oct. 2, 2016, the pregnant woman boarded a plane for Quebec. She had taken out health insurance without disclosing her pregnancy, and about a month later she gave birth in a Montreal hospital.
Medical staff were told she had come to Quebec to look for the child’s father, but they grew suspicious and alerted child- protection authorities when the mother showed no interest in her newborn son. It was the Quebec couple who cared for him day and night.
The mother and t he couple — whose names are not disclosed — initially insisted that she planned to fly home with her newborn son, having failed to find his father. But when questioned, they disclosed their true plan.
The mother said she was anxious to get back to France and leave the infant with “his parents.”
The mother gave the child “no care, no attention, never took him in her arms,” the ruling said. “She has no attachment to him and explains that she does not consider him to be her son.”
Hearings revealed the woman was mentally unstable and had been monitored by child- welfare officials in France. She never wanted the child, but when she realized she was pregnant, it was too late for an abortion. The day before flying to Quebec, she had fled a residence for at-risk pregnant women in the city of Chartres.
The Quebec couple were not the only prospective buyers of the child.
In France, a man who is not the biological father told authorities the woman had agreed to sell him the child for a large sum. He complained that she defrauded him. The mother told staff before she left the residence in Chartres that the man was harassing her over money and that she feared for her safety. She later said the transaction with him was connected to a Romanian child-trafficking ring.
On June 29, in a decision first reported this week by La Presse, Quebec Court Judge Francine Gendron ordered that the child remain in foster care. She had harsh words for the mother.
“Rather than making a responsible decision when she realized she could not abort, she decided to profit from her condition and sell the child she was carrying to the highest bidder,” Gendron wrote, calling the scheme “odious.”
According to the decision, Quebec’s International Adoption Secretariat filed a complaint of child trafficking last year with provincial police. The complaint targeted the couple who attempted to purchase the baby, but not the mother because she has since returned to France.