Yang Shuiying and two of her daughters on the front porch of her house in Tianxi village, Guizhou province. Another daughter was taken away by a family planning official, who said he was going to sell the child for foreign adoption. (Barbara Demick / Los Angeles Times)We have an extraordinary story coming from the LA Times.

For years the world has been told that Chinese babies, mostly girls, were abandoned by their parents in deference to a traditional preference for boys and China’s one-child per family rule. For large numbers of Chinese girls, this is the case.

It seems that baby-trafficking has become a business in China, with government officials stealing children from families for profit.

“In the beginning, I think, adoption from China was a very good thing because there were so many abandoned girls. But then it became a supply-and-demand-driven market and a lot of people at the local level were making too much money,” said Ina Hut, who last month resigned as the head of the Netherlands’ largest adoption agency out of concern about baby trafficking.

Read: China adoption: Some Chinese parents say their babies were stolen for adoption.