Children’s minister Roderic O’Gorman said the Mother and Baby Homes Commission report revealed “the truth of what happened” in the institutions in a letter to Orders seeking a financial contribution to the Government’s redress scheme.

In a series of letters to the religious orders that ran Mother and Baby Institutions, as well as to the Archbishops of Dublin and Armagh sent on January 12, 2021, Mr O’Gorman said the Commission had “delivered an independent, comprehensive, and factual account of the institutions under investigation, and the experiences of the women and children who resided there for a period”.

“Publication of the Report is a landmark moment for the Irish State. The Report reveals the truth of what happened, within the walls of Mother and Baby Homes and beyond them, to many thousands of women and children. Importantly, it also captures those journeys and experiences in the words of those who experienced them first-hand,” he said.

In its final report, the Commission found:

“no evidence” that women were forced to enter mother and baby institutions by Church or State authorities;

More than 50 years after her newborn baby was taken from her in a Brisbane hospital, Lily Arthur is still fighting for justice on forced adoption. Hear how she was reunited with her son.

IPOH: After paying RM9,000 to an unregistered agent to adopt a child, Cheah Yoon Moy is now worried about the future of her daughter.

The 53-year-old trader paid an agent whom she had met through a friend in Johor to adopt her daughter 14 years ago.

“I was working in Kuala Lumpur and unmarried. My mother was concerned that when I get older, no one would be there to look after me so she asked me to consider adopting a child.

“After asking around, a friend of a friend told me that an agent could help me out. I drove all the way from Ipoh to Johor Baru to adopt my daughter, who was four months old at the time, with a payment of RM8,500,” she told reporters during a press conference held by Ipoh Barat MCA coordinator Low Guo Nan.

Cheah said upon adopting her daughter, the agent also provided her with a birth certificate with her name registered as the biological mother.

When most people think about the adoption process, the expenses for the birth mother (parent) are rarely considered. These expenses include pregnancy-related medical and living expenses. In some cases, expenses can extend beyond birth to postpartum recovery.

Almost all U.S. states have laws governing the fees and expenses that adoptive parents are expected to pay when arranging a private-placement or independent domestic adoption.

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There are also provisions that limit birth parent expenses. These limits are usually vague (“reasonable and customary”), which leaves it to the court to decide what is reasonable in each family’s case.

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Holt’s interim CEO shares a message with Holt supporters.

To our valued partners, collaborators, and friends:

I am humbled to serve as the interim CEO in addition to my role as CFO at Holt International. I am confident our team will remain strong together during this transition and help pave a path of resilience well into the future.

My career and personal passion are rooted in organizations like Holt International. My wife, Cathy, and I have a heart for adoption — we have three adult children, the youngest of whom was adopted from China. I started my nonprofit journey in 2001 as a missionary, serving in Tanzania as the finance director for the Lutheran Mission Cooperation. Before joining Holt as CFO five years ago, I served in leadership positions for complex, mission-focused organizations that provided social services or healthcare within the U.S. and abroad. Prior to my nonprofit roles, I worked as regional director of procurement and logistics for a Fortune 100 company. I trust that my diverse background and experience will serve Holt well at this time.

Our mission still lies ahead of us. As a leader, I’ve always taken a multifaceted approach for increasing revenue, expanding services and establishing long-term strategic visions. This approach will guide me, putting the children, families and partners we serve as my top priority every day.

Anthony Lynch was adopted at 20 months. For National Adoption Week, he writes about how adoption is like having a superpower

Identity and belonging are feelings that everyone wants, and they are often taken for granted. However, my path to them has been different from most.

I was adopted at 20 months from foster care and grew up in London. My parents already had two biological daughters when they adopted me, before going on to adopt another son five years later.

In our family, there is no hierarchy between the birth kids and the adopted kids. We are all one massive family, and I remember feeling really loved and appreciated. In my eyes, adoption gives children who can’t live with their birth families the life that every child should have: a life with a loving family that enables them to fulfil their potential.

I was lucky enough to have parents who supported me in everything I wanted to do. They encouraged my passion for music, and I went on to perform at the Barbican, Glyndebourne, and the Royal Albert Hall. Likewise, they supported me throughout my education and after graduating in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Exeter, I am now studying a Masters in Philosophy of Medicine and Psychiatry at King’s College London.

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