Selling children and babies online in the shadow of the lawlessness and increasing poverty

In recent years, the illegal buying and selling of babies and children has increased in the media and cyberspace, following the spread of poverty and deprivation. This debate has intensified following the discovery of many Telegram and Instagram channels that were openly seeking customers for babies and children who were to be sold by brokers. The CEO of the Noor Sepid Hedayat Harm Reduction Institute believes that the main factors behind the increase in the sale of babies in the country are the lack of attention from support institutions to providing necessary sex education to addicted, homeless, and abusive women, the difficult conditions for legal abortion, and the lack of access to contraceptives for these women.

According to HRANA news agency, citing Rokna, the number of openly addicted women in Tehran, estimated at around a thousand according to police and prosecutors, is not a happy life. Most of them live in dangerous and polluted hangouts with addicted men, and many of them become pregnant unintentionally.

There are also many homeless or abused women in Tehran who, due to poverty and financial difficulties, and sometimes even under pressure from their affected families, are forced to engage in prostitution. Given that many of them do not have the necessary sexual education or do not have access to contraceptives, they also have unwanted children.

Now, if these children are to grow up in the same drug addicts' hangouts or in the damaged environments of the south and outskirts of Tehran, they will definitely have a bad time. The mothers of these unwanted children, who have experience living in such environments themselves, know this issue better than anyone, and therefore, in order to earn money and ensure that their children have a better fate than themselves, they prefer to give their babies to mafia gangs selling babies from the moment they are born; gangs that have become quite active in cyberspace these days with the spread of social networks in the country.

Weak abortion laws cause unwanted births

Meanwhile, undoubtedly one of the most important factors leading to the birth of these unwanted children and their sale in cyberspace is the lack of sexual education among many addicted and homeless women, their lack of access to contraceptive methods, and their inability to abort unwanted fetuses.

In such circumstances, many experts in the field of social harm emphasize that if support institutions had planned properly to prevent the birth of such children, these children would not have been born at all, and the mafia gangs selling babies would no longer be active.

This is a point that Sepideh Alizadeh, CEO of the Noor Sepid Hedayat Harm Reduction Institute, pointed out, stating: "We live in a country where the law on safe abortion is not implemented well, because until a pregnant addicted woman can prove to the authorities that she is in hardship and cannot care for her child, her fetus will be older than a certain age and the court will no longer allow this mother to have an abortion."

This addiction activist continued to emphasize: "Basically, addicted and homeless women who become pregnant unintentionally are not capable women who can quickly obtain an abortion order, and by the time they obtain an abortion order, many of them have fetuses older than 18 weeks, and there is no longer any possibility of a legal abortion."

Women in slums do not have access to contraception

In the meantime, a solution that may be even more effective in preventing the birth of unwanted children by addicted and sleep deprived women than expediting the process of obtaining legal abortion permits is to educate these women on contraception methods, and at the same time, they should be provided with the necessary tools in this regard; an issue that the country's support institutions do not pay any attention to, and this issue has fueled the continuation of the vicious cycle of selling babies in Iran.

Explaining this issue, Alizadeh said: "There are many women in the sleeping carton who, despite their desire not to have children, have given birth to several children because they lack the necessary education, each of whom is in a nursery or the home of one of their relatives or acquaintances. The main reason for the birth of these children is that it is mostly not possible for women in the sleeping carton to use the IUD or other contraceptive devices."

This addiction activist stated that some of the women in the sleeping cartons have turned to prostitution out of necessity, and emphasized: "Support institutions should definitely provide these women with free contraceptives so that they do not have children unintentionally, because the children of these women are either sold by mafia gangs or are forced to spend their early childhood and childhood in very harmful environments."

Unwanted contraception is not common among women with sleep apnea.

However, unfortunately, not only is there no support for such homeless women in our country to prevent pregnancy, but even most of the experts in the country's health centers themselves are not trained to provide the necessary education to these women and treat these women in a derogatory and judgmental manner.

Alizadeh, while referring to this issue, said: "I once sent a prostitute to a health center to receive an IUD, and unfortunately, because the experts at this center had not received the necessary training, they treated this woman in a humiliating manner. Then, by holding training sessions for this woman, they emphasized to her that instead of using a permanent contraceptive device, it is better for her to use temporary methods so that she can have children again in the future if she wants to."

The CEO of the Noor Sepid Harm Reduction Institute, Hedayat, continued: "The experts at that center did not know that the woman already had four children, each of whom she had placed in a home or a nursery, and that she basically did not need to have more children. Examples like this also show that voluntary methods of contraception are not common among women in the sleeping cartons, and that there is still the possibility of many of these women having unwanted children."

Immigrants and marginalized people also sell their children.

According to this addiction activist, it can be said that currently in our country, addicted, homeless, and abused women, some of whom are forced to engage in prostitution and some who become pregnant while living in polluted hangouts and with addicted men, face difficult conditions for legal abortion or unwanted pregnancy prevention, and this leads to the birth of many unwanted children.

In such circumstances, when these women cannot keep their unwanted children, they naturally either hand them over to mafia gangs selling babies, either to earn money and to secure their children's future, or to families that have a relatively good financial situation and can raise their babies in more suitable conditions.

Alizadeh, of course, also pointed out during his speech that it is not just addicts and homeless women who sell their children, and that some immigrant and marginalized families who struggle with many livelihood problems are also sometimes forced to sell their children.

He shared a memory about this and said: "I know an Afghan family who, when they faced difficulty in paying the mortgage on their house, were forced to sell their fourth child to an Iranian family. Instead of giving the same money as a grant to the Afghan family, that Iranian family bought their child and sold it to a wealthier Iranian family."

The cycle of social harm continues with the birth of unwanted children by addicted women.

Another important point is that drug addicts, prostitutes, or other women who sell their children out of poverty and desperation do not necessarily sell their children to their families, and in most cases, it is mafia gangs that buy these children from drug addicts.

Many of these children have no other fate than being sold into begging gangs, stealing, and exploiting child laborers. All of these cases mean that the failure to prevent the unwanted birth of children of addicted and homeless women and the lack of support from relevant institutions for these women practically leads to the continuation of the vicious cycle of social harm and its transmission from one generation to the next.

Alizadeh also expressed his thoughts in this regard by mentioning a memory: I know a woman who, when the institutions and charities were supposed to help her, no one came to her aid. After 30 years of sleeping rough, this woman had 7 children, each of whom gave birth to children. Now, the number of members in her family is 30, all of whom are severely affected. This is while if this woman had been supported from the very beginning or her pregnancy had been prevented, we would not have witnessed the addition of 30 affected individuals to society.

This addiction activist concluded by stating: "Examples like this woman show that if we do not prevent social harms from the very beginning, including unwanted births of newborns of addicted women and sleeping cartons, these harms will intensify day by day and continue from generation to generation. But unfortunately, our country's support institutions pay no attention to this issue."

Source: HRANA