As per the Adoption Rules 2022, the DM handed over the girls for adoption. DM Pawan Kumar handing over both the girls for adoption to a single couple mother residing in America at the Collectorate on Monday...

Gopalganj, Hindustan Correspondent. Two girls living in the city-based Vishesh Adoption Institute were handed over to a single mother and a US-based couple for adoption on Monday as per the rules of Adoption Rules 2022. In his chamber at the Collectorate, DM Pawan Kumar Sinha finally handed over both the girls to the mother and the couple for adoption. The said two girls were found by the Vishesh Adoption Institute on the road a few months ago. Now the rest of the life of both the girls will be spent in America. It was told that in Regulation 13 and Regulation 36 of Adoption Regulations-2022, the DM has to issue the final order of adoption within a period of two months.

On this occasion, the DM appealed to all the people of the district that if they find any orphan or abandoned child, do not keep him/her with you. Hand over the child to the Special Adoption Institute Hajiapur Gopalganj of the District Child Protection Unit Gopalganj, run by the Social Welfare Department. At the same time, if a childless couple wants to adopt a child, they can apply online through the website 'Central Adoption Resources Authority. For special information, Vijay Kumar Coordinator Gopalganj can be contacted at Special Adoption Institute Gopalganj on mobile number 8210491152. Assistant Director of District Child Protection Unit Prashant Mishra, Dr. Mankeshwar Kumar Singh, Dilip Kumar, Vijay Kumar Pandey and Vijay Kumar etc. were present on the occasion.

Hyderabad: From suspected baby-swapping in hospitals to cross-border surrogacy, human trafficking and contested adoptions, DNA fingerprinting has emerged as a decisive tool for courts, police and families. City-based Truth Labs and Genome Foundation are witnessing a steady rise in cases where biological parentage is disputed, denied, or demanded as proof.

In a district hospital, a couple from a small village alleged that their newborn was swapped and stolen by another couple, with hospital authorities complicit in the act. The allegation triggered caste tensions and community disputes. The district medical superintendent ordered DNA testing, which established that the infant was indeed the biological child of the couple, ruling out swapping.

A similar doubt shook a young adult's life when relatives convinced him he was exchanged at birth. An old couple even claimed him as their son. Depressed, he sought scientific clarity. Truth Labs' DNA test confirmed he was biologically related to the parents who raised him. Truth Labs chairman Dr KP C Gandhi says DNA fingerprinting has been solving several issues, including IVF fraud, exposing exploitation in fertility care.

Trafficking racket exposed

Police investigations into a suspected human trafficking case from Uttar Pradesh involving a couple and their son highlighted how DNA analysis exposed the racket. The accused claimed all the four girls aged 3, 4, 14, and 19 in their custody were their daughters. The diversity in the physical appearance of the children raised doubts. DNA profiling by the Hyderabad-based lab proved that none of the girls was related to each other, nor to the accused. Police arrested the couple and their son, extending the probe to their wider network.

A landmark ruling allows an adoptee to regain his or her biological surname without revoking the adoption.

Olmo, a man adopted in Bilbao in 1972, has successfully had a Spanish court recognize his right to change his adopted surnames to those of his biological parents. This favorable ruling, according to Olmo, "corrects forced adoptive identification without eliminating adoption." It is the first time a court has ruled on a claim by an adoptee seeking the restoration of his identity.

The recent ruling—still pending enforcement—issued in May 2025 by the Provincial Court of Navarre, sets a historic precedent by recognizing the right of an adopted person to be legally identified by their biological parentage, thus disassociating themselves from the adoptive identity attributed to them, without this or any other ruling in itself annulling the adoption. This decision represents a profound change in the interpretation of the rights of adopted persons. It establishes that the identity of origin, at the request of the interested party, prevails over the legal construction derived from the adoption.

But let's take it one step at a time.

The representation of the ideal adoption is sometimes purely aesthetic; but so is any family that boasts of a lack of imperfection within its core.

Experts have negotiated access to thousands of records from institutions for unmarried mothers in Northern Ireland.

The documents are being assessed by the Truth Recovery Independent Panel, which is the first stage of an investigation set up by the devolved government.

After the Panel finishes its work, it plans to preserve the records in a permanent archive - aimed at providing relatives and survivors with the opportunity to research their past in a single location, with appropriate support.

More than 10,000 women and girls passed through around a dozen "mother-and-baby" institutions between the 1920s and the 1990s.

In Northern Ireland, there were also three Magdalene Laundries – in effect, workhouses where women and girls were made to carry out demanding duties.

[Interview] Swedish Adoptee Hanna Johansson's 15-Year Quest to Find Her Roots and the Reality of International Adoption

"There's not much time left."

Dr. Hanna Sofia Johansson (49), a Korean-Swedish adoptee and human rights activist, first visited Korea in 2007 and has since returned annually to her homeland 11 times over the past 15 years, searching for her roots. Found abandoned in Wangsimni, Seoul, she has spent decades searching for her birth mother and father. However, she has faced countless setbacks, including the concealment of adoption agency records, the disappearance of her old neighborhood due to rapid urban redevelopment, and the stalled administrative procedures.

Dr. Johansson's story goes beyond simply exploring her personal roots. It vividly exposes the structural problems and national responsibility that over 200,000 Korean adoptees have faced over the past 70 years. In 2022, the Sweden Korean Adoptees Network (SKAN), to which she belongs, filed a request with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate 21 cases of international adoption, confirming the widespread nature of systemic, illegal adoption practices, including manipulation of adoption records, forged signatures, and falsely recorded parental information.

Dr. Johansson firmly states, "Korea must no longer be a 'child exporter' in the world." He emphasizes the urgent need for post-adoption support commensurate with economic power, expanded support for single parents, and a shift toward a more non-discriminatory social perception. The following is a summary of the key points from our month-long interview with Dr. Hanna Sofia Johansson.

Professor takes note of the Prime Minister's words about possible compensation in the spiral case. This may have implications for other human rights cases between Greenland and Denmark.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen gave an official apology on behalf of Denmark for the third time in six years.

It was given to the Greenlandic girls and women who had IUDs inserted without consent as part of the so-called IUD case.

Compared to the Prime Minister's previous apologies, there is one thing that stands out.

Life imprisonment still exists, all families who have lost a child will be able to tell you about it.
 

Anyone who is now at least 40 years old remembers what they were doing the day Julie and Melissa's bodies were found, fourteen months after their disappearance. This legal case, which already had the country on tenterhooks, then plunged a little deeper into horror . It traumatized an entire country like no other had probably done before it, mixing the shameful dysfunctions between the gendarmerie and the police with the doubts and bottomless pain of the parents of the two girls; their lives were then irremediably plunged into an endless nightmare. Life imprisonment still exists, all the families who have lost a child will be able to tell you about it.

Belga

A still from "The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger" (2010), Jane Jin Kaisen & Guston Sondin-Kung

Conference info

Co-organizers: Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University & Center for Korean Studies, University of Tübingen

Date: 7-8 May, 2026

Mirjam Hunze, 53, from Willemsoord, and her Chilean Adoptees Foundation have managed to find a biological mother for the first time. It's a breakthrough in a bizarre story of child theft and kidnapping that began in the 1970s. "I'm deeply moved."

It concerns Anna Nilson from Sweden, who had been searching for her biological mother in Chile for years. A successful DNA test provided the final answer: her mother was found.

This was achieved thanks to the efforts of Mirjam Hunze's foundation. "As a foundation, we are incredibly proud that we managed to travel to Chile ourselves and successfully administer a DNA test," she says.

Each year, women make the desperate decision to abandon their babies. Specially designed ‘baby windows’ can help – but some argue they make matters worse

When Romina discovered she was pregnant in 2021, she was 39 years old and homeless, without a euro to her name. She did what many a lonely and frightened woman has done throughout history, on learning that she was going to have a baby, and pretended she wasn’t. “If you don’t think about it, it doesn’t exist – something like that,” she told me, more than three years on.

By the time she noticed the changes in her body, she had been homeless for nearly seven years. Before that, she had lived a comfortable, secure life in The Hague, with a man she had fallen passionately in love with. But the man had become controlling, she said, preventing her from working or seeing her friends, spying on her and eventually threatening her if she left him.

She left him anyway, one night around Christmas 2014, and so opened a very dark chapter in a life that, to hear Romina, had already known its fair share of darkness – her parents’ divorce when she was three; years of sexual abuse at the hands of a stepfather; her mother’s many suicide attempts, the last of which, in 2009, succeeded; estrangement from her two half-siblings; and separation from her two sons (one of whom was just a toddler) after she entered into that last, abusive relationship, leaving them with their fathers.