Ranchi: Adoption process in the state has become increasingly difficult for prospective parents in recent times. The waiting duration has significantly lengthened, with families now having to wait between 2.5 to 3 years before being matched with a child. The waiting list in Jharkhand exceeds 3,000 families.

Govt agencies offer children aged between 0 to 6 years for adoption, comprising those who have been surrendered by their parents or found abandoned.

Sangita Sahay, a social worker at Karuna NMO, said, "Parents in line to adopt is more than the children available for adoption across the district. Since 2018, the number of families seeking to adopt has surged. Now, prospective parents are required to wait at least 2.5 to 3 years before they can adopt a child. These days, the lists from 2021 are being released.

"The current situation is evident at Ranchi's two adoption agencies. Karuna houses 18 children whilst Sahyog Village has seven children available for adoption. Adoption costs Rs 64,000, and agencies conduct post-adoption monitoring to ensure child welfare.

Alka Sharma, superintendent at Sahyog Village, said, "This number is likely understated, as many interested families do not even register with the agency, leaving a significant number unaccounted for. The demand for adopting both a baby girl and a baby boy are the same.

The Chhattisgarh police on Monday arrested a woman for brutally thrashing two girls at a private adoption centre in Kanker district after a CCTV video of the incident went viral on social media, officials said.

The Kanker district administration has suspended the licence of the NGO that runs the adoption centre, following the incident. The district programme officer of the state Woman and Child Development (WCD) department was also suspended for negligence, officials said.

“Seema Dwivedi, superintendent of Visheshkrit Dattak Grahan Agency (Specialised Adoption Agency), run by Pratigya Vikas Sanstha, was seen thrashing the children in the video,” said director WCD, Divya Umesh Mishra. HT can’t verify the authenticity of the video.

Mishra said that a complaint was submitted by the district administration on Saturday and an inspection was carried out on Sunday.

As per the inspection report, seen by HT, Dwivedi admitted that the video clip belonged to the same centre and it happened around a year ago.

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In this summer column, six people tell us which summer will forever be etched in their memory. This week: Leena de Wilde (33) was seven months old when she flew from her native India to her adoptive family in Groningen. Twenty years later, she visited the children's home where she lived for the first time. "If my disability had been discovered then, I would never have been adopted."

You might already know Leena de Wilde (33). At the age of nineteen, she participated in the Mis(s) Verkiezing, an initiative by former presenter and CDA MP Lucille Werner, for women with a physical disability. Since then, Leena has made her job of posing for the camera and goes from casting to casting. As a result, she regularly appears in commercials, videos and campaigns.

"I want to make a positive contribution to the image of people with disabilities. I've been in a wheelchair since I was three, so I've been doing everything sitting down my whole life. I don't know any better. I don't experience many disadvantages, I want to show that," says Leena cheerfully.

When Leena was one and a half years old and had been living with her adoptive parents in Groningen for almost a year, she was diagnosed with cerebral palsy (a posture and movement disorder caused by damage to the brain, ed.). This disability was said to be a result of oxygen deficiency at birth.

"I was born on the streets of Mumbai, India. As far as I know, my biological mother took me to the Bal Anand orphanage shortly after I was born, because she was unmarried and did not have the financial means to take care of me. My parents never put much emphasis on my physical disability and always looked at what was possible in my upbringing. I inherited that positive attitude from them."

Decision on Wob request regarding communication with the COIA

Freedom of Information Act request | 02-03-2022

On 2 March 2022, the Minister for Legal Protection made a decision on the Government Information (Public Access) Act request regarding communication by a data subject with the International Adoption Investigation Committee.

Decision on Wob request regarding communication with the COIA (PDF | 7 pages | 174 kB)

Annex I to decision on Wob request regarding communication with the COIA (PDF | 240 pages | 22.6 MB)

Ok..i am not really good at linking stuff, so I have just lifted the whole story from guardian…nice!

LENE Kamm came to Lagos from Denmark last week to attend a conference. But she used the opportunity to search for her father, Emmanuel Owhin whom her Danish mother, Else Gyring Nielsen said is a Nigerian. Born in Denmark in 1957, Lene’s story was published last Saturday in The Guardian. But as it turned out, her father died in 1982.
However, she didn’t come in vain for she was able to unite with her half brothers and sister as well as other members of the family who read her story in The Guardian. The reunion was made possible through the effort of her half sister, Sarah Owhin who returned from London a day after the publication oblivious of it all.
Sarah, 35, recalled that her phone kept ringing around 8 pm last Saturday but she initially ignored it because she didn’t want to be disturbed at that hour of the day. Besides she had just returned from London.
Unknown to her, it was one of her friends, Austin Eni Okojie calling all the way from Abuja. Her mother, Josephine Owhin, urged her on to pick her phone and answer her caller. She eventually did so in disguise. The dialogue, according to Sarah, went thus:
“Can I speak to Sarah?”, asked Okojie.
“No, Sarah is not around; she’s in London. It is Esther her daughter,” she replied.
“Please call Sarah in London and tell her that one of her sisters from Denmark is looking for her father Emmanuel Owhin and wants to meet with his children or relatives.”
“How did you get to know about it,?”
“The story is in The Guardian of today”
She thanked him and pondered in her mind who this person could be. For Sarah, a graduate of Ondo State University who is now based in London, the next step was how to locate Lene in Lagos. She contacted The Guardian to make enquiries.
She was eventually taken to meet Lene with her mother Josephine at the head office of Support A Child, organisers of the workshop that brought Lene to Nigeria, at Victoria Island. There, she was interrogated by Mrs. Abisola Williams, mother of Olatoun Williams, organizer of the workshop.
Sarah’s mother explained that Emmanuel Owhin was her husband and that they met while she was working with the Pilgrimage Board in Lagos and he Owhin was managing director of his company, Fountain Services, an advertising and publishing company based in Ebute-Metta, Lagos in 1968. She explained that her husband was a freelance advertiser with Daily Times at that time. She later tied the nuptial knots with him and the union is blessed with three children: Sarah, Emmanuel (Jnr) and Samson.
Mrs. Williams called people such as Prince Tony Momoh, former minister of information and one time editor of Daily Times to confirm the authenticity of the story. She also called Jane Ejueyitchie-Oroye, a former principal of Oueen’s College Lagos and an Itsekiri woman to ascertain whether she knew anyone called Emmanuel Owhin. She discovered that Emmanuel Owhin’s grandmother was an Itsekiri woman and she lived and died in Lagos.
Linkage confirmed, Olatoun Williams came to take Sarah and her mother to meet Lene who was staying at an hotel in Ikoyi. On sighting her sister, Lene broke into tears. She was consoled by Sarah who said: “God just decided to unite you with your family, since you have been nice to many people helping them to reunite with their families. You don’t need to cry.”
From there, Lene was taken to the family house in Mushin. There, she took so many pictures and met some other of her relatives. Later in the day, her brother, Mark Owhin who had just come from the United Kingdom was hinted about the story and initially he could not believe it. Mark, who was born in 1962, is an engineer based in the UK. He also came to the hotel to be united with Lene. But he forgot his glasses in his car parked outside the hotel. So his sister, Lene, who also equally uses glasses, gave him her glasses for him to read her story in The Guardian.
“I am happy to meet my sister. We are going to keep in touch. We are going to be exchanging letters and we look forward to more good things to come,” he enthused.
Lene is happy that her colleagues from Denmark have already found some resemblance in her and her Sarah. Lene reached her children in Demark and they had a live communication with her brother. Her son, Jens, a lawyer, was very happy that at last, his mother has discovered her roots.

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A former Arkansas pastor has pleaded guilty to three counts of rape involving his minor children and been sentenced to 50 years in prison, according to a statement released yesterday by Arkansas authorities.

As part of a negotiated plea agreement, James “Jamie” Cowan, 46, pleaded guilty to raping minors on Nov. 12, according to a statement released by Jana Bradford, Arkansas prosecutor for the 9th West District. In addition to his 50-year sentence, Cowan also received 30 years of a suspended sentence upon release.

Cowan must serve at least 70% of his sentence or 35 years, Bradford said. This would make Cowan 81-years old at the time of release, “effectively making this sentence a life term,” Bradford added.

The decision to offer a plea deal was made after consideration of the victims’ wishes, “ensuring they would not have to endure the further trauma of testifying in a court trial,” Bradford said.

In a motion for a bond reduction, Cowan says he is a pastor. The Arkansas Justice Project’s Post reported Cowan is the former pastor of the Little River Community Church and a TikTok video said the church was in Winthrop, Arkansas.

Some of you might remember Bill Pierce, the first president of the National Council for Adoption. Bill did not invent sealed records and other wild and weird adoption ideologies, but he facilitated and cemented them into the minds of politicians and the public starting in 1980 when he signed on to NCFA. (Although he was a former vice president of CWLA, he told me that until NCFA he didn’t know squat about adoption. He just needed a job.) This particular job was financed by the Gladney Center for Adoption with the help of a Texas Oil Depletion windfall. Its specific goals were  to(1) keep OBC and records sealed and (2) promote adoption.  He became such a hardcore beltway SOB that John McCain once personally physically booted him out of his Senate office. The naive believed that once Bill retired or died our problems would be over, which, of course, was not true. Sealed records had become the default rule of both adoption law and adoptee lived experience in the US and still is, despite our inroads.

When pariahs meet. Capital University Law School, November 2, 2002. Between us we annoyed liberal do-gooders and social workers in spandex and were banished from their island.

Some may also remember that I had what was considered by many as a bonkers relationship with Bill.

A few months before he retired from NCFA I began to receive emails from someone claiming to be a priest in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, who wanted to talk about adoption. It was Bill, of course. (In case you didn’t know, Bill, this is SO Bill!) Shortly after that, someone claiming to be an adoption professional or something in England joined alt adoption, “the meanest newsgroup on the web,” the site of Bastard Nation’s birth, and where all the bad adoptees hung out online.  “She” lasted several weeks until during some batty discussion about clotted cream  (seriously!) accidentally outed “herself” as Bill. With Bill out of the bag, the game was afoot.  We welcomed him with suspicious but open arms. Maybe he was lonely.  He loved being part of our show. He was fun. Actually fun!  And he was a good debater, with a good vocabulary, unlike some of our “members” who liked to say dumb things like claiming that BN was a pagan cult that burned stick figures on the beach.  He didn’t suffer fools, and often the fools that landed on alt adoption got it from both him and us.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Anupama and Ajith, the couple who previously made headlines with a high-profile adoption controversy, have welcome second child, a baby girl. Ajith shared the news on social media, expressing joy over the arrival of their daughter. The family, including their elder popular on YouTube and other social media platforms, where they regularly share videos with a significant viewer base. 

The couple gained national attention when Anupama accused her parents of putting her first child up for adoption without her consent. This alleg sparked a political storm, drawing in the CPM, the Kerala government and the Child Welfare Committee (CWC). Anupama’s legal battle to regain c son became a prominent media story, shedding light on child adoption policies and procedural lapses. 

In the initial stages of the controversy, Anupama’s parents handed the child over to the CWC, who arranged a temporary adoption with a couple f Pradesh. However, once the story became public, the adoption was halted. Following a court-supervised DNA test that confirmed Anupama’s pare Andhra couple returned the child to her and Ajith.

A sweet reunion took place recently for Vamarr Hunter and his mother Lenore Lindsey, who placed him for adoption shortly after giving birth to him decades earlier.

“It’s the most joyful story and time in my life,” said Lindsey, “In my senior years, all of this has come together.”

Lindsey was just 17 years old when she gave birth to Hunter, and he was 35 when he learned he was adopted. Years later, he decided to search for his mother and underwent genetic testing, according to ABC 7. He learned that his birth mother lived in the same South Shore Chicago neighborhood that he did and that he was a regular customer at the bakery she owned, Give Me Some Sugah. He said the experience “further strengthens my faith.”

After connecting with his birth mother, he was also able to meet the sister he never knew he had as well as an entire extended family he didn’t know for most of his life. Hunter has four children of his own, all living in the same neighborhood as their grandmother without realizing it.

“When I called him, that connection was so immediate,” Lindsey said. “I can’t even explain it. It was just like everything in my heart just broke open.”