There are no official statistics for abandoned babies, and abandoning children is a crime that carries stiff penalties. But some parents are willing to take the risk because, if they can only have one child, they don't want it to be a girl. Dr. Zhung, an exiled paediatrician, helped Amnesty International confirm many of these details. She authored a book, 'Death by Default,' and helped produce a series of documentaries, the 'Dying Rooms', aired in London and filmed by an undercover team which visited 9 orphanages in 5 provinces in China. Many were simply left to die in local hospitals.
People consider illegitimate children to be bad spirits,' says the home's founder.
The children who are in the home all study the Q'uran and go to the mosque. They are often targets for police officers and roving death squads, and there have even been instances of massacres reported. A string of infanticides and stories critical of adoptions by foreigners made the news in 1996. After 54 children were killed by parents who could not afford them, the Agost Schoepf-Merei maternity hospital in Budapest put an incubator at its entrance so mothers could anonymously leave unwanted babies. Orphanages are filled with the abandoned.