Chinese Couple Sells Kids To Fund Online Gaming

A Chinese couple who really like to game are under arrest for selling their kids and converting the money into game currency. From the article: "In 2009, Li Lin and Li Juan welcomed their second child, a baby girl, and came up with the idea to sell her for money to fund their online game obsession. They did so, receiving RMB 3,000 (less than $500), which they spent entirely shortly after. The couple then proceeded to sell their first child and got 10 times as much for him -- RMB 30,000, or about $4600. Upon having their third child -- another boy -- the parents followed in their previous footsteps and also got RMB 30,000 for him." I wonder what the "kid seller" achievement looks like?

Comments

Re:not neccessarily a "gaming" story

[jez9999]

I'm a proud liberal, I support abortion rights; but I was horrified to hear that around a fifth of all pregnancies end in abortion [wikimedia.org] (I should thank a right wing zealot for pointing that out by the way). No-one supports that. I don't happen to support criminalizing women for having abortions, but it does not mean that I consider fetuses to be "low value".

Honestly, why not? Assuming we're talking about early fetuses, they have - by all intents and purposes - as much sentience as the cells that form my gums. It's an utterly irrational religious tradition that places more value of fetus cells because of their 'potential'. But any set of particles has the 'potential' to become a human being if arranged in exactly the right way. It's ludicrous to place a higher value on them unless they actually have been.