OPPOSITION TDS ROUNDLY criticised the Government’s planned redress scheme for survivors of mother and baby homes and related institutions in the Dáil today.

The Social Democrats put forward a motion calling for the scheme to be extended, saying the current plan fails to consider human rights violations experienced by thousands of women and children who passed through the system.

Opposition TDs from every party, as well as independents, sharply criticised many elements of the scheme – in particular the exclusion of people who spent less than six month in an institution as a child.

Many TDs also hit out at the low levels of compensation due to be paid and the fact the scheme doesn’t adequately address the impact of issues such forced family separation, forced and illegal adoption, vaccine trials and racism.

Proposing the private members’ bill, Soc Dems TD Holly Cairns said that, alongside the Church, every Irish Government from the 1930s to the 1990s played a role in keeping the mother and baby home system up and running.

BY

HILARY GOODFRIEND

The Salvadoran civil war didn’t just see US-trained-and-financed far-right forces commit endless war crimes — it also ripped children from families, an unknown number of whom never found their way back to their parents.

Review of Reunion: Finding the Disappeared Children of El Salvador by Elizabeth Barnert (University of California Press, February 2023)

Between 1980 and 1992, the United States financed, armed, trained, and advised the Salvadoran military dictatorship’s war against a leftist insurgency. The conflict’s toll is usually accounted for in over seventy-five thousand deaths and ten thousand forced disappearances, the guerrilla forces responsible for only 5 percent of that violence. Lesser known are the traumas borne by hundreds, perhaps thousands of families who were torn apart during the violence, mostly by the US-backed military, through abductions of the children of peasants targeted in their scorched-earth campaigns across the Salvadoran countryside.

Gera ter Meulen will receive the De la Court Prize 2022 for her research into adoption and foster care. According to the jury, she set up her own scientific knowledge bureau and thus provides a good example of how an independent researcher can work. The prize rewards unpaid and independent research outside established academic institutions. This is reported by the KNAW.

Scientifically based and accessible information about adoption and foster care. That is the common thread that runs through Gera ter Meulen's research. Thanks to her research, this information is available for politicians, policy and practice.

KnowledgeDesk

Gera ter Meulen founded KennisBureau ter Meulen in 2017 . Before that, Ter Meulen was a researcher and coordinator of the ADOC (Adoption Triangle Research Center) for many years and she also worked in practice as a policy maker. Her office makes scientific knowledge about foster care, adoption and home care accessible. With her KennisBureau, Gera ter Meulen took over the valorisation of knowledge and conducting research from the ADOC and continues to do so.

social entrepreneur

Christine Burke vividly remembers the day she arrived at the Elim Maternity Hospital, run by the Salvation Army, as an unmarried pregnant 17-year-old.

Key points:

Christine Burke had to sign over her daughter for adoption in 1968

Nearly 18 years later she was reunited with her eldest daughter

States are being urged to follow Victoria's lead and introduce a redress scheme for people involved in forced adoptions

Women and child development department deputy director Bharathi Banakar said the mutt had obtained permission from

the government to run the child adoption agency

With the arrest of Murugha mutt seer in a case of sexual abuse of minor children, the department of

women and child development has decided to shift a special child adoption agency set up on the

mutt premises

KRO-NCRV and the Spoorloos program will conduct an external investigation into the intermediary who has linked Dutch candidates in Colombia to the wrong biological parents in the past. The broadcaster confirmed this on Monday after reporting from the AD .

By our entertainment editors

The broadcaster does not want to give any further explanation about the investigation. RTL crime journalist Kees van der Spek revealed last week that participants of Spoorloos in Colombia have been linked to the wrong biological parents. The fraudulent Colombian intermediary allegedly responsible for the mismatches is said to have cooperated in 16 cases.

KRO-NCRV has meanwhile admitted two 'mismatches'. Two other matches went well and were confirmed by DNA testing. The other 12 cases are still under investigation.

Presenter Derk Bolt previously defended the fixer in the Khalid & Sophie program . The presenter did this after he had previously said he did not want to say anything about the case.

If poverty, racism, and health care inequities were properly redressed, adoption would be a last resort.

Adoption has taken a front-row seat in US political discourse since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Remarks from the Supreme Court, most notably from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, position adoption as a viable alternative to abortion. Even some progressives sing the praises of adoption in cases where abortion is not accessible or desired. However, framing the tragedy of losing reproductive freedoms as a problem easily solved by the relinquishment of a child obfuscates the reality of adoption as an institution that is steeped in systemic injustice. Moreover, such a framing underscores the way adopted people—the ones purportedly “saved” by adoption—are overlooked. Finally, the overarching social narrative that places adoption on a pedestal and views adoption as an alternative to abortion completely misses the point that it is not a reproductive choice at all. It’s a parenting choice—and one that should be a last resort, instead of being lauded as a great act of charity or a cure for a world where abortion is all but outlawed. In an ideal world, where poverty, racism, and health care inequities were properly redressed, the need for adoption would be practically eradicated.

In the conservative adoption fairy tale, a pregnant person who does not feel that they are capable of adequately parenting hands off these duties to people who have been desperately hoping to become parents. The child, it is assumed, will fare better, escaping a life most assuredly filled with poverty or neglect. Above all, this child “could have been aborted,” so adoption rescues them from annihilation.

While it is true that many parents who relinquish children for adoption cite financial concerns as a chief obstacle to parenting, it does not follow that adoption is the solution. Positing adoption as a solution to impoverished parenting ignores the fact that another solution exists: supporting struggling families. The sociologist Gretchen Sisson has found that even the smallest financial assistance would have empowered many birth mothers to keep their babies rather than relinquish them. Instead, parents are punished for their poverty, which is conflated with neglect in the child welfare system, as Dorothy Roberts’s scholarship shows. Roberts has demonstrated how Black families in particular are targeted by what she calls the “family policing” system for the crime of being poor while being Black. In other words, Child Welfare Services are far more likely to remove Black children than others, even in cases where no eminent threat to the safety and well-being of the child is present.

Furthermore, the idea that a birth parent selflessly “chooses” to relinquish a child for adoption is not supported by research or by the testimonials of birth parents. Sisson’s interviews with birth mothers overwhelmingly indicate that adoption agencies engage in manipulation and coercion. Ann Fessler’s book The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade chronicles similar predatory practices. In short, the idea that parents freely decide to relinquish their children is an oversimplification at best.

The Bombay High court has granted bail to a man accused of raping a

woman and abandoning her, on the condition that he would marry her within

a year.

Justice Bharti Dangre observed that the prosecutrix and accused were in a

consensual relationship, and the man refused to marry her when she was six

As a child, the adopted Joedi already watched 'Spoorloos' and hoped that Derk would go to Colombia for her too. And it worked. In Colombia, Derk not only finds the mother, but also the father of Joedi. The DNA test provides certainty, but Joedi also looks very much like her biological mother.

Before the broadcast, Derk Bolt tells where participants with doubts can report . He finds it particularly painful that not all matches have gone well in the past. Derk guarantees that this can no longer happen with DNA testing.

YUDI

The 36-year-old Joedi was adopted from Colombia. She has known for a long time how to track down her biological family. “When I thought about my biological family, I naturally thought 'I want to meet them, so I want to go find them'. Spoorloos always passed by in the same stream of thoughts, she says. “After that, Derk always came. That whole train of thought is one.”

When Derk was kidnapped in Colombia in 2017 , while making the program, Joedi was equally afraid that he would never go there again. “Then I thought 'well there goes my dream'. Quite a selfish thought when I think about it now," admits Joedi with a laugh. “Because I think it is quite traumatic and intense to experience that, but I actually thought first of myself and then of Derk.”

It is a very charged place in Breda: the Mother Heil clinic. Young unmarried pregnant women stayed in the clinic until the 1980s. They were forced to give up their baby for adoption. This not only caused a lot of grief for the mothers, but also traumas for the children. The documentary about this loaded history can be seen on Omroep Brabant TV on Sunday.

Profile photo of Noël van Hooft

Written by

Noel van Hooft

'The secret of Mother Heil' is a documentary by Tom van den Oetelaar, Agnes van der Straaten and Bert Geeraets, commissioned by Omroep Brabant.