Parents in China who are too poor to pay exorbitant fees for violating that country's one-child policy are now accusing government officials of stealing -- and selling -- their babies.

Western parents who adopted children -- mainly little girls -- from China fear that they may have participated in a cruel scheme concocted by corrupt government officials to steal babies from their parents and offer them up for foreign adoption, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times.

According to the newspaper, one child can fetch as much as $3,000 in adoption fees, motivating officials of China's family-planning offices in remote villages to kidnap children from parents who are too poor to pay the fine levied against them for violating the one-child policy.

In China, couples are only permitted to have one child -- two if the first baby is a girl. If they violate this law, they are subject to impossibly high fees of as much as six times their annual income, according to the Times. These fines are called "social-service expenditures" and make up a large part of government funding in rural areas.

"The family planning people are even more powerful than the Ministry of Public Security," Yang Zhizhu, a legal scholar in Beijing, told the newspaper.

The officials took the babies forcibly, and sometimes even falsely asserted that they have been abandoned by their parents. The children were then turned over to an orphanage. Once that happened, parents lost all rights to their children, according to the article.

"We were always terrified of them,"said Yang Shuiying, whose daughter was taken away by a family-planning official in the spring of 2004.

According to the Times, Yang tried to stop the inevitable, but, being alone at the time, she was in no position to physically resist.

Another parent told a similar story. Zhou Changqi's 6-month-old daughter was taken in 2002 by family planning officials in Guiyang, in Hunan province.

The father tried for three years to get into the Changsha Social Welfare Institute, one of the major orphanages sending babies abroad, but they wouldn't allow him in. He was told that his daughter had been sent to America.

This story came to light when a concerned teacher, who has relatives in Tianxi village, reported the confiscations to police. When there was no response, he posted about it on the Internet, according to the Times. His posts were picked up by the Chinese press in July 2009, and he is now in hiding for fear of reprisals. The Times did not identify the teacher by name.

The United States Embassy in China released a statement in July stating that the seven officials suspected in the plot to sell babies for profit have been arrested, according to the Times. "The United States takes seriously any allegation that children were offered for inter-country adoption without their parents' knowledge or consent," the statement read.

According to Adoptive Families magazine, adoption of children from China to the United States began in 1992. In 2007, Americans adopted 5,453 children from China, the largest number from any country outside the U.S.