LONDON: Britain should formally apologise to unmarried mothers who were forced to give up their babies for adoption, according to an official report Friday that gave harrowing detail of the anguish suffered by the women.

Some 185,000 children were taken away for adoption between 1949 and 1976 in England and Wales, the report by parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights estimated.

The committee’s chairwoman, Labour MP Harriet Harman, said the bond between mothers and babies was “brutally ruptured” over the period.

“The mothers’ only ‘crime’ was to have become pregnant while unmarried. Their ‘sentence’ was a lifetime of secrecy and pain,” she said.

The committee acknowledged the “grave wrong” done to the mothers and their children, Harman said, adding: “It is time for the government to do the same and issue the apology they seek.

Getasew Ferguson was going through his paces at a regular Bond University Bull Sharks AFL training session when one word stopped him in his tracks.

Teammate Abe Forward had approached him after learning they were both from the same East African country. They soon discovered their similarities ran much deeper.

“Abe said ‘hello’ to me in Ethiopian,” Ferguson said.

“I was like, what! I was surprised because I never knew he was from my country. We spoke for a while and figured out we were both from the same orphanage, which was pretty cool.”

The pair, both 23, were born only a few hours away from one another. Now they are close friends.

The Dutch state has not done enough to ensure that the adoption of Dilani Butink from Sri Lanka goes smoothly, the court ruled this week. Do other adoptees also benefit from that statement?

Adopted Dilani Butink could hardly believe it this week. After years of legal wrangling, the Court of Appeal in The Hague confirmed what it had suspected for much longer: that the Dutch state and the Child and Future Foundation acted unlawfully when Dilani was transferred to the Netherlands as a baby from Sri Lanka for adoption in 1992.

Butink is one of many foreign adoptees struggling with falsified or missing information in their adoption file. Without the right ancestry data, a search for biological family is often an impossible quest. This is the first time that a judge has expressed such a critical view of the state's responsibility in foreign adoptions. With the judgment of the court in hand, Butink can claim damages from the state and the foundation that arranged her adoption at the time – for example for all the costs of her efforts to find her family.

baby gangs

Can other adoptees also draw hope from this statement? It looks like that. Lawyer Dewi Deijle, himself adopted from Indonesia, represents more than a hundred adoptees and has already tried twice on their behalf to hold the state liable for damage suffered. The government has consistently rejected those requests. Deijle postponed a step to court until now. 'Cause it's all so hard to prove. During the period that I was adopted, there were already stories about baby gangs robbing and selling children. I may have been one of them, but how can I prove that?'

Times have changed since Aotearoa's adoption system was written into law in 1955. Where once they removed all records of biological parents, there are now calls for the Ministry of Justice to give adopted children greater access to information about their birth family and culture, and support in reconnecting.

When Erica Newman's mother was growing up, the other kids at school had questions.

They wanted to know why she was brown when her parents were white.

She was seven years old when she found out she was adopted – but Newman says it wasn't until her mother was older, with children of her own, that she was driven to find answers.

"She always had a questioning and wondering about her taha M?ori, understanding that side of her family and her identity," says Newman, who is now the coordinator for the indigenous development programme at the University of Otago.

This week, the Court of Appeal in The Hague ruled in favor of Dilani Butink in the case she had brought against the Dutch state and the Stichting Kind en Toekomst. The case had previously been time-barred, according to the court. She was proven right on appeal.

The case in brief

Dilani Butink was born in Sri Lanka in 1992 and adopted shortly afterwards by her Dutch adoptive parents. She has not been able to find her biological parents on the basis of her adoption papers. After Zembla television broadcasts in 2017 about abuses during adoption from Sri Lanka, she held the State and the Foundation liable. Dilani states that her adoption was made carelessly, leaving her in uncertainty about her origin and the circumstances under which she was given up. According to her, this is a violation of her fundamental rights and the State and the Foundation have acted unlawfully because of the role they played in the realization of the adoption.

Invocation of prescription expired/unacceptable

The court upheld the appeal of the State and the Foundation to the statute of limitations in 2020 and rejected Dilani Butink's claims. In the appeal, the State dropped the limitation defence. The Court finds the Foundation's appeal to prescription to be unacceptable. This allowed the case to be dealt with substantively.

Lucknow: A 35-year-old woman was arrested for allegedly torturing and inflicting injuries on the private parts of her six-year-old adopted daughter.

The accused, Poonam, was arrested late Wednesday night.

The victim’s father, Ajay Kumar, informed the police about the incident and rushed the girl to a private hospital where she is undergoing treatment. Kumar owns a food cart.

Station house officer (SHO) Thakurganj, Hari Shankar Chandra told reporters that the couple did not have any child of their own and Poonam claimed that Kumar had ‘adopted’ the girl six months back. However, she was not happy with his decision and would often misbehave with the girl.

Kumar told police that his wife used a kitchen thong and then put the hot oil on the victim’s private parts.

In February 2021, the investigative report of the Joustra Committee exposed the abuses surrounding intercountry adoption. An immediate adoption stop was the result. Shanthy (30) is a victim of illegal adoption. “Who says my life in Bangladesh would have been less happy? Less wealthy, I'm sure, but I would have grown up in my country, with my family.”

This interview was previously published in Flair 27-2021.

Shanthy (30) is team leader in mental health care and single. She found out that someone was hired to play her biological mother at the time.

Adopted

“'Here's your biological mother,' I was told when I was seven years old during a visit to Sri Lanka. I looked at the woman who wanted to grab me and immediately felt that it wasn't right. She was not my mother, I felt that so very strongly. I later told my adoptive parents. They didn't know what to do with it. The man who had helped with my adoption at the time had actually told her that this woman was my biological mother. Why would he lie about that?”

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WTVG) - After the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the topic of adoption has taken the spotlight.

So at what point does a biological father lose the right to contest an adoption? That’s the question before the Ohio Supreme Court.

At the end of the day, the case before the Ohio Supreme Court is all about deadlines and the rights of a biological father.

It involves a girl who was 17-years-old at the time she got pregnant and her then 18-year-old boyfriend. She told him early on she wanted to put the child up for adoption but he disagreed. Eventually they ended their relationship. He tried to keep in touch but her family cut off communication.

The baby was born about a week early and was almost immediately placed with a couple looking to adopt that child. 17 days after the baby was born, the biological father found out. He immediately filed with Ohio’s putative father registry, which gives unmarried men the chance to get parental rights. The only problem is that the deadline to do that is 15 days after the child is born.

Forty-three older orphans and children in foster care from Colombia will visit the United States, and nine will stay in the DC region for five weeks.

Kidsave, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, works to help older kids in foster care and orphanages find families and lasting connections with caring adults. Summer Miracles, Kidsave’s international hosting program, brings children who have little chance of finding an adoptive family in their home country to the United States.

The goal of the hosting program is to find these older children a forever home. Since 1999, 80% of the children who traveled with Summer Miracles have found adoptive families, according to Kidsave. The ages of the kids traveling this summer range from 9-16.

Virginia takes first place in the country for the worst percent of children who age out of foster care without being adopted, according to the Children’s Home Society of Virginia, a non-profit adoption service. According to Washington state-based Partners For Our Children, teenagers account for less than 10% of all adoptions, leaving many older foster care and orphanage children without a home or family and leaving them vulnerable as they enter adulthood. This age range is at great risk for homelessness and unemployment, and many fall victims to crime, trafficking and incarceration, according to Kidsave.

Mary Buelow and Nate Messer are Loudoun County residents who are hosting siblings, 11-year-old Krista and 13-year-old Jean. Kidsave describes Krista as a committed student with an upbeat attitude, and Jean as a passionate, charismatic, and responsible teenager.

THE OIREACHTAS CHILDREN’S Committee has recommended that the Government scrap the six-month time limit in its planned redress scheme for survivors of mother and baby homes and county homes.

Under the current proposals, all mothers who spent time in an institution are eligible to apply for redress, but a person who spent time in an institution as a child is only eligible if they spent at least six months there.

The six-month rule was widely criticised when the details of the scheme were announced last November – with experts saying it did not consider “the impact of early trauma“.

In a significant development, the Committee has now formally intervened and called for the six-month rule to be scrapped.

David Kinsella, a survivor of St Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home in Dublin and long-time campaigner, told The Journal he is “delighted” with the news and “hopes the Government will listen”.