Supriti Dhar
“Urgent: A baby boy is available. Age: six months. Asking price: Tk 200,000. Location: Chattogram.”
Ever since I read these words, something has been clawing at my chest.
A six-month-old baby is “available.” His “asking price” is 200,000 Bangladeshi taka. A location is provided.
Is this an advertisement for a commodity? A post offering an animal for sale? Or are we talking about a human life?
The mother in me cannot accept this language. Stories like this cause an almost physical pain somewhere deep inside me. A child came into this world only six months ago. Yet his name, his future, his safety, his identity, all have been pushed aside and replaced by a price.
The words appeared in an investigative report by Prothom Alo, one of Bangladesh’s leading Bengali-language newspapers. The investigation did not uncover one or two isolated Facebook posts. It revealed a disturbing online marketplace where babies are being offered and sought through public Facebook groups.
The reporters examined 39 public Facebook groups. In a closer analysis of 288 posts from a dozen of those groups, they found 63 posts offering children and 34 seeking children. In one case, a six-month-old boy was offered for Tk 200,000. Elsewhere, someone was looking for a baby boy within a budget of Tk 50,000. There were even discussions about babies who had not yet been born. There are intermediaries, financial transactions and arrangements for paperwork. https://womenchapter.com/views/41165
One of the most disturbing findings is that baby boys command higher prices than baby girls.
Even after a child has been turned into a commodity, our age-old gender discrimination survives. A child’s value is still not equal. Whether the baby is a boy or a girl can determine the price. In a society where girls have long been treated as less desirable, that same prejudice appears to have found its way into this digital marketplace. https://womenchapter.com/views/41165
But this is not an article written to put a mother who gives up her child in the dock.
A woman carries a life inside her body for months. The physical process of pregnancy and childbirth does not become less painful because a woman is poor. Yet after birth, the realities awaiting mothers can be worlds apart.
One mother may return home to a prepared nursery, medical care, food and security. Another may not know how she will feed her baby the next morning. She may not know where they will live, how she will pay for treatment if the child becomes ill, or whether she herself is safe.
We romanticise motherhood easily. We say that when a mother sees her baby’s face, all her suffering disappears.
But what does motherhood look like for a woman who has spent her pregnancy in crisis, knowing that she may not have the means to keep her child alive and safe once that child is born?
This is where motherhood collides with poverty, inequality and capital.
And if a market grows around that desperation, the moral question cannot be directed only at the mother. The question belongs to our society, our economy and our state.
There is another question too: how much control does a woman have over her own body and reproductive life?
Some women may never have wanted the pregnancy in the first place. Decisions about reproduction may not have been theirs to make. A husband’s wishes, family pressure, lack of access to contraception, or social and religious restrictions can leave women giving birth repeatedly at the expense of their own bodies and lives.
Elsewhere in the world, surrogacy allows a woman to carry a pregnancy for intended parents, sometimes in exchange for payment. Surrogacy itself raises difficult ethical questions about commercialisation, exploitation and women’s bodies. But where it is legally regulated, there is at least supposed to be a framework addressing consent, medical care, contracts, parentage and the future of the child.
What this investigation has uncovered in Bangladesh is something different.
Here, posts on Facebook say a baby is “available.”
There is a “demand” or an “asking price.”
There is a “location.”
Look at the language.
Available.
Demand.
Location.
The language of the marketplace.
The language of commodities.
Have we now put human beings on the open market too?
Adoption, guardianship and raising another person’s child as one’s own are not new to human society. Countless children around the world have found families, love and security through such arrangements. Nor is there anything wrong with the longing of a person who desperately wants to become a parent.
But giving a child a family and buying a child are not the same thing.
That distinction is precisely where the state must intervene.
Bangladesh does not have a single, universal adoption law applicable to everyone. Although legal mechanisms exist for guardianship and alternative care, the unregulated transfers documented by Prothom Alo expose a dangerous gap: after a child changes hands, effective monitoring of where that child goes, who takes them and whether they remain safe can be woefully inadequate. Experts cited in the investigation also called for an effective legal framework and monitoring system. https://womenchapter.com/views/41165
And this is where we should be most afraid.
Because the most powerless person in this entire transaction cannot speak.
A six-month-old baby cannot say, “This is where I want to go.”
A child still inside a mother’s womb has not even entered the world, yet negotiations over that child’s future may already have begun.
We do not know how many of these children ultimately find loving homes. We do not know how many lose their identities. We do not know who may end up in the hands of traffickers, who may face abuse, or who may be taken out of the country.
We should not claim outcomes for which we have no evidence.
But isn’t the fact that we do not know terrifying enough?
If a child can be transferred from one pair of hands to another and the state can then lose sight of what happens to that child, who is protecting the child’s rights?
Reading the investigation, my hands and feet repeatedly turned cold. I tried to remember other brutal stories from the past. But I refuse to use the horrors of the past to make the unbearable reality of the present seem any less serious.
Instead, I want to ask: When did we arrive here?
When did it become possible to write “asking price: Tk 200,000” beside a human life?
When did the sex of a newborn begin determining its market value?
When did Facebook groups and middlemen find a place between the desperation of a vulnerable mother and the longing of someone who wants a child?
When did we become so accustomed to commodification that a human life could be advertised for sale?
There is poverty. There is corruption. There is disorder. There are failures in state institutions.
But underneath all of these, perhaps an even deeper crisis has taken place:
a crisis of humanity.
We have put our labour on the market. Our intellect. Our bodies. Even our relationships. Have we now put our children there too?
Does everything have a price?
Even the life of a six-month-old baby?
Tk 200,000?
I truly do not know where we are, or where we are heading.
The authorities in Bangladesh must act. It may already be late, but perhaps some children can still be protected from those who see their vulnerability, and the desperation of their mothers, not as a human tragedy, but as a business opportunity.
Supriti Dhar
Founding Editor, Women Chapter