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Couple sentenced to prison after selling baby for $205

Published: 21 Aug. 2025, 20:53

[KOREA JOONGANG DAILY]

Two people in their 40s were sentenced to prison on Thursday for abandoning and selling two of their newborn children, one of whom was exchanged for hospital fees.

The pair, who were in a relationship but not married, gave birth to a son at an obstetrics clinic in Busan in March 2013 and handed the baby to a couple who had posted online that they were seeking to adopt without following formal adoption procedures.

In January 2018, the pair repeated the crime after giving birth to a daughter. They posted online that they were looking for someone to raise a newborn and transferred custody of the infant to a person who responded, requiring them to pay 288,000 won ($205) in hospital fees.

“The defendants abandoned their children immediately after birth without following legal procedures, and they repeated the same crime, which makes their culpability serious,” the Busan District Court said in a statement. “The girl was born premature and grew up without even being registered under inappropriate circumstances.”

The court sentenced the man to one year and two months in prison and the woman to two years behind bars, suspended for three years. The court also barred them from working in child-related institutions for three years and ordered them to complete 40 hours of a treatment program. The man received an additional one-year sentence for other crimes, including unlicensed driving, embezzlement, fraud and forgery of private documents.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
BY JEONG JAE-HONG [[email protected]]