Last week, judgment rained down on the young West End parents who allegedly posted their week-old baby for sale on Craigslist for $10,000. After a tip, police officers arrested the parents for public mischief, later releasing them due to lack of evidence.

Meanwhile, child-protection workers took the infant into care, despite the fact that the 23-year-old mother was breastfeeding the baby at the time police entered the apartment. Vancouver police spokesperson Const. Tim Fanning said: “This certainly, in my 27 years, is one [case] that I thought I’d never see,” according to the Globe and Mail.

Although the CBC’s online story contained few details, anonymous readers posted 92 near-unanimously scathing comments. The most colourful was: “These two a-holes are ‘known to police’ as ‘addicts’. If they weren’t on something heavy—like crack—it’s doubtful they’d be on that radar. Crack makes people do despicable things. These two were willing to sell their kid for drug money is my bet. They do not deserve to have that kid, period, and if the authorities buy this story, they are idiots.

"Biology doesn’t give you the right to that kid, bub. Now, if you want to do something useful with your life, try getting clean and getting a real job. Oh yeah, and maybe get a vasectomy while you’re at it.”

Although both the Ministry of Children and Family Development and Vancouver police won’t release details of this case, this was not a unique event. On May 24, for example, a German couple allegedly offered their seven-month-old for sale on eBay for one euro. They claimed the baby was “too loud”.

On March 27, an Oregon man appeared in court after he allegedly posted a “hoax” baby-for-sale ad on Craigslist. On March 26, Pauline Burgman allegedly listed her daughter for sale in Salt Lake City on the Web site of KUTV-TV.

So what’s going on?

One local neuropsychologist doesn’t rule out problems with hormones in the phenomenon. Simon Fraser University professor Neil Watson told the Georgia Straight that childbearing leads to “endocrine events…that are just staggeringly complex, and also dramatic in their size”.

Men, too, experience changes in hormones with a new baby, he said. Furthermore, after 30 years of study of the effects of hormones on nonpregnant people, study into the effects of hormones on new parents is just beginning, he said.

“We’re really in very early days,” Watson said. “Scientists generally believe there’s something there, but we don’t know the details of that.”

Even in the CBC comments, one wrote: “Lots of parents DO joke around about selling or giving away their kids (I’ve known several).” However, she wrote, most don’t take the “joke” this far.

Beyond faulty chemistry, those who work closely with B.C.’s families note that the services just aren’t there to support the mental-health issues that can come with the stress of a new baby. According to Carol Ross, the executive director of the Parent Support Services of B.C., sleep deprivation, fractured time, loss of an income, isolation, and physical recovery are just a few of the challenges facing all new families.

Ross told the Straight that any added pressures, such as poverty or being single or addiction “escalates” the enormous pressures new parents experience. And, she said, those who are intimidated by systems have no advocates who can help them connect with the supports that exist. She said she is sad for the parents, and the $10,000 baby, and she does not judge them.

Even at PSSBC, which offers confidential “parents circles”, Ross admitted that it’s difficult to draw out moms at risk.

“Sometimes they need a buddy system,” she said, ”someone to go arm-in-arm with. And that’s pretty hard to find.”

In the West End there are several programs for parents, from the three community centres’ weekly drop-ins run by a public health nurse to Gordon Neighbourhood House’s Mother Goose parenting program. But all of them require the mom to join a group; no one from government or a nonprofit will simply help a parent do her laundry or dishes or take a nap.

That’s got to change, according to the MLA for Powell River–Sunshine Coast. For 15 years, Nicholas Simons worked in child-protection services. Now, he’s the NDP critic of the Ministry of Children and Family Development (spokesperson Seamus Gordon said the ministry would not comment on this story). Part of the reason Simons “burned out” of working in family support, he told the Straight, is his frustration at the lack of tools—other than apprehending children—that the government offers struggling parents.

“Maybe you need to help them [a family] not put the child into a dangerous situation by helping them fix a handrail on their deck,” he said. There’s no facility for that. Ditto, he said, a family he’s currently working with who have an 11-year-old son who weighs 250 pounds. The ministry has no tools for helping the son, save apprehending him. Deep cuts to the ministry in 2002 have contributed to the lack of those tools, he said.

“Until this government recognizes that child poverty is directly associated with child welfare,” Simons said, “we’re all hooped.”

The Downtown Eastside’s Sheway is Vancouver’s pioneer agency in supporting healthy pregnancies and young parenting for families with drug issues. But the program is capped at 120 women due to funding restrictions.

That’s far fewer than need it, according to Pat Chisholm, the past president of the B.C. Association of Pregnancy Outreach Programs. In an interview with the Straight from Cranbrook, Chisholm noted that drug addiction and motherhood are not mutually exclusive: “I can tell you the Eastside is not the only place in B.C. struggling with mental health and addiction problems.”

Chisholm noted that pregnancy outreach was initiated in the province in 1989, but funding stopped growing in the mid-1990s, forcing B.C.’s 50 independently run programs to rely on donations and volunteers to boost their capacity.

Parent Support Service’s Ross believes that no nonparent understands how much families are forced to cope with on their own. But among the CBC readers who commented on the $10,000-baby story, at least one was compassionate:

“People make stupid mistakes, but don’t compound the mistake by removing a seven-day-old infant from her breast-feeding mother. Can we not teach and monitor this young woman rather than condemn another child to the inadequacy of state care?”

Evidently not.