Chinese parents tried to sell their son in a street auction to pay for life saving cancer treatment for his twin sister.
Shocking pictures showed the 29-year-old mother of the twins standing on the streets in Qingdao, a major city in eastern Shandong Province, Eastern China, with a sign offering to sell her son to the highest bidder.
The boy was standing alongside his mother, Meng Xiangyan, as she appealed for someone to come forward and buy him.
The twin sister suffers from severe leukemia and would most certainly die unless she receives urgent medical treatment.
The mother said she and her husband love both of their children, but they are prepared to sell their son to a good home in order to guarantee a chance of life for both of them.
"Our beautiful life has changed ever since my daughter was diagnosed with leukemia in August of last year, this is when we spent all of our savings and borrowed everything we could from friends and relatives, we sold our apartment and it still was not enough,” she explained.
The family is now living in a small 10 square meter flat close to where the therapies are being carried out.
In a similar story, also in China, a woman was spotted trying to sell her one-year-old daughter on the streets in order to pay her husband's USD 15,000 medical bill.
Ni Qiong was photographed roadside in Fuzhou, southeastern China, with a sign imploring pedestrians to purchase her daughter.
She and her husband, Zhou Xinggui, are both migrant workers, but he was in hospital needing a surgery after falling off scaffolding.
The woman’s placard read: 'Please buy my daughter. My husband is waiting for surgery fees in the hospital as his boss ran away. I would like to sell my daughter and save my husband.'
The wife claimed that her husband's employer fled after an industrial accident that left her husband in the hospital.
Many locals who witnessed her in distress were sympathetic to her plight, and some gave her money, but no-one offered to buy her child.
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