Nearly one-third of registered adoptions in Iran over the past decade were illegal, according to state welfare data, exposing a hidden child-transfer market that advocates say can leave babies vulnerable to sale, abandonment, domestic servitude and other forms of abuse.
Parisa Valentina Pouyan, director of the Pouya Helpers of Child Workers Institute, told Iran’s labor-focused ILNA news agency that baby-selling is a hidden and complex phenomenon driven not only by poverty but also by addiction, cultural pressures, weak oversight, lack of parenting education and failures in state protection systems.
“Buying and selling children is one of the most horrifying forms of social harm and one of the most damaging acts committed against children,” Pouyan said.
Her remarks followed renewed attention in Iranian media to the case of a mother accused of selling several of her newborns over different years for small sums, reviving concerns about underground markets for infants and the future awaiting children transferred outside legal adoption channels.
A recent analytical report by Iran’s State Welfare Organization, known as Behzisti, found that illegal adoption remains a serious challenge for the country’s child-protection and judicial systems.
According to the report, 18,240 adoption cases were registered from 2013 to 2024, of which 13,020, or 71 percent, were legal, while 5,224, or 29 percent, were recorded as illegal.
Behzisti is the main state body responsible for welfare and child-protection cases in Iran, including formal adoption procedures. Illegal adoptions take place outside that system, often through private arrangements, brokers or concealed transfers of newborns.
Pouyan said official and precise statistics on baby-selling do not exist because the practice is hidden. But she said poverty creates fertile ground for such cases, especially during wider social and economic crises.
Still, she warned against reducing the issue to poverty alone.
“Would every poor family sell its child?” she said. “If parents have sold a child once and their living conditions improve a little, does that mean they will never do it again?”
Pouyan said global experience shows baby-selling has become a lucrative trade in some places, and that poverty is only one driver. She cited addiction, sex work, cultural pressures and the possibility that a mother herself may have been a victim of child-selling as factors that can feed the trade.
She said the hidden nature of illegal transfers means the child’s future is often irrelevant to the transaction.
“In this kind of trade, parents who sell their baby or child do not care whether the buyers have the conditions and qualifications needed to become parents,” she said, adding that in illegal transfers “money comes first.”
Pouyan said she had personally been approached several years ago by someone seeking a child for a couple living abroad, both doctors, who wanted to adopt by finding a parent willing to sell a child. She said she rejected the request and warned she would report any such case.
According to Pouyan, the darker danger is that not all buyers are seeking parenthood.
In some cases, she said, children are bought or taken through illegal adoption channels for domestic labor or other forms of exploitation.
“I have seen a case in which a child was illegally adopted and, a few years later, became the family’s servant,” she said.
Pouyan said Iran’s response to baby-selling and illegal adoption is weakened by poor oversight, ineffective intervention by responsible agencies and possible misconduct inside institutions meant to protect children.
