At first glance, the post looks harmless. Someone is looking for a newborn to adopt. Maybe they can’t have children, maybe they’re just hopeful. But a recent investigation by Prothom Alo suggests that behind some of these posts, a darker conversation is going on, one where babies are talked about like goods: their age, their gender, their price, and how soon they can be delivered.
A marketplace in plain sight
Reporters spent about five weeks, from August 12 to September 16, going through 39 public Facebook groups. In 12 of those groups they read 288 posts. Sixty-three were from people offering a child for adoption, and 34 were from people hoping to get one. Some of the requests were strikingly specific: a newborn, a baby boy, a baby girl, even twins. Some posters said what age they wanted. Others said how much they could pay.
In one case, a six-month-old boy was advertised for Tk 200,000. An intermediary told the reporters that a newborn boy might cost around Tk 300,000 and a girl around Tk 200,000. These numbers come from people in the conversations, so they shouldn’t be read as an established “going rate.” But the fact that anyone is naming prices at all is the troubling part.
When desperation does the selling
Behind many of these arrangements are families who feel they have no other option. Poverty, broken marriages, and the simple inability to feed another child all push people toward choices they might never otherwise make. One woman reportedly said she was ready to give up her baby because her husband had left and she was already raising another child on her own. During the talks, the reporters were shown the baby’s photograph and vaccination card.
A separate Prothom Alo report looked at Uttar Charpukhiya, a village in Katiadi, Kishoreganj. Residents there alleged that five children had been sold over six years, four of them in just the last two. Some families denied that any money changed hands and said they had simply given their children up for adoption. Still, three of the children reportedly can no longer be traced by their families.
The real danger is what comes after
The worry isn’t only about money changing hands. It’s about what happens to the child once they leave. Legal experts quoted by Prothom Alo said that ads involving children, payments, and informal handovers can point to child trafficking and need to be investigated: who is being paid, who is acting as go-between, and where the child ends up. Law professor Shahnaz Huda warned that once a child is passed along informally, no one is watching. Without a proper legal trail, it becomes very hard to prove who the child is, where they came from, or where they are now.
A gap in the law
Bangladesh has no single civil adoption law that covers everyone. According to the experts in the report, people can seek guardianship through the family court, and different religious communities follow their own family-law rules.
That patchwork is confusing and slow, and for some families it makes a quick online arrangement look like the easier road. The problem also isn’t confined to Facebook. The investigation found private organizations that, for a fee, offer to arrange child transfers, so these informal deals happen both online and offline.
Who is looking out for the child?
Social media makes it easy for strangers to find each other. That’s a gift in most situations, and a hazard when the thing being negotiated is a human being. Taking down individual posts won’t solve this. Authorities need ways to identify the middlemen, verify children’s identities, follow suspicious payments, and make sure every transfer of guardianship goes through the proper legal channels.
For couples hoping to adopt, the lesson is just as plain: an arrangement that seems simple and friendly on Facebook can put both the adults and the child at serious legal and personal risk.
In the end, this story is bigger than one platform. It asks whether a vulnerable child can quietly vanish into an informal network just because someone wants a baby and is willing to pay.
