Jessie, a vibrant young Canadian journalist, is travelling the world to expose the post-communism practice of selling Romanian babies to adoptive parents by exploring the fate of Romanian children born to families too poor to care for them.
As we become absorbed in Jessie’s journalistic quest, we slowly come to realise that it is more than a professional investigation. Jessie herself was sold as a child to an adoptive family in Canada.
An estimated 30,000 children were sold to adoption brokers in post-communist Romania following the misguided vision of former President Nicolae Ceasescu to produce babies to fuel the communist state’s decrepit economy. International
buyers and local sellers met in hotel lobbies around Romania and negotiated prices that ranged from $5,000 to $10,000 for new-born Romanians.
How did Romania become the adoption capital of the world? Can adoption for proft ever be justifed? What really happened to the lost children of Romania, the unwitting victims of a bankrupt political system?