Why desperate Chinese mother offered her triplets for adoption on social media site
- Mother appeals for help after family abandoned by gambling debt-laden husband
- ‘I feel so bad that I have to separate you’ – message to babies goes viral
A mother of triplets in eastern China offered her sons for adoption on a live-streaming social media platform after her gambling debt-laden husband abandoned her when the children were barely four weeks old.
Her husband, surnamed Zhao, returned after the incident was covered by local media, Zhejiang-based news site Thehour.cn reported on Monday. The mother’s account on the social media site TikTok was deleted, but screenshots of her posts offering the babies are still in circulation.
The 27-year-old woman, identified by her surname, Li, who is from Feidong county in Anhui province, married Zhao, 36, in 2013. After she became pregnant in 2017, she discovered her husband had stopped work and had run up 100,000 yuan (US$14,000) in gambling debts, according to Anhui Television.
In screenshots on the broadcaster’s WeChat account, Li’s TikTok post read: “Watching you all sleep soundly is making me cry, I feel so bad that I have to separate you [the triplets].”
After her post went viral, social media users donated baby clothes, nappies and toys and advised Li to try to keep her children. She told Anhui TV she could not afford to feed her boys and felt compelled to give them up for adoption.