OTHER PHILIPPINE NEWSPAPERS NEWS

Illegally adopted Filipino babies abroad traced

MANILA — Humanitarian workers using DNA tests are offering to help track down Filipino babies illegally sent to Singapore for adoption in affluent countries.

“Women posing as their mothers would go to Singapore using fake identification to make authorities believe that the babies are theirs,” said Amihan Abueva, regional coordinator of the NGO Asia Against Child Trafficking.

“But once in Singapore, the babies are left behind,” Abueva told a forum on “DNA-Prokids: Using DNA To Help Fight Child-Trafficking.”

“The trouble is that there are no complainants,” Justice Undersecretary Ricardo Blancaflor told reporters on the sidelines of the forum at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City.

“Parents also do not know where to go. They do not even know whom to accuse since no one knows where the child went,” Blancaflor said.

DNA-Prokids is an international humanitarian initiative that establishes and uses the genetic identification of children taken by force in an effort to return them to their families.

Began in 2004, the effort is headed by two forensic scientists—Dr. Jose A. Lorente of the University of Granada in Spain, and Dr. Arthur J. Eisenberg, co-director of the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification.

The UP Natural Sciences Research Institute’s DNA Analysis Laboratory recently joined DNA-Prokids’ efforts to deter child trafficking by providing free services to families with missing children.

Lorente warned the meeting that child trafficking was now considered an international epidemic and could be “the No. 1 crime worldwide by 2010.”

“Heroin, at least, can be detected. But it is very difficult to prove that the child carried by an adult is really his,” he said.

No systematic method

“As long as there is no systematic method to track down parents and bring back their children to them, children [will continue to be] abducted. Guatemalan children, for example, are abducted and brought to the United States and Europe where there are markets for illegal adoption,” Lorente said.

Dr. Maria Corazon de Ungria, head of the UP National Scientific Research Institute’s DNA Analysis Laboratory, explained that DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid “is the blueprint of all living creatures and those once alive.”

DNA tests are now commonly used to establish the paternity of a child, especially in child support cases.

According to De Ungria, a child inherits DNA properties from both the father and the mother. Y-DNA testing, which detects the male Y chromosome, establishes the father-child link.

Mitochondrial DNA that is passed on from mother to child is used to trace the mother’s family or genetic lineage.

Because DNA is chemically stable, can survive over several years even after the death of an individual, and is unique to every creature, it is considered a reliable measure of genetic origin.