Woman who facilitated adoption, which was legally rejected, was later arrested for being child trafficker

After news reports on a woman, Julia Fernandez appeared that she was a child trafficker and sold infants, a mother moved a civil court, seeking to get her baby back from a couple with whom Fernandez had facilitated the adoption of the petitioner's infant.

The mother, an Ulhasnagar resident, had purportedly borne the child out of wedlock and had come in contact with Fernandez who convinced her for adoption. She had now married the father of the child.

In her application against the adoptive parents filed before a city civil court, she had sought that they be directed to return her baby. Her plea stated that she was unable to raise the infant due to personal difficulties. And, Fernandez facilitated his adoption to the couple, saying they are wealthy and her son will be well looked after.

Accordingly, she said the couple also filed an adoption petition in court. She said during the adoption proceedings, her husband informed the court that they did not want to go ahead with giving up their son for adoption. Accordingly, in March last year, the court rejected the couple's adoption petition. The mother said that despite that, the couple has not returned the child and are illegally holding his custody.

Fake Lawyer Case: Madras HC Directs Bar Council To Verify Advocates' Antecedents Before Permitting Them To Hold Posts In Statutory Committees

The Madras High Court has directed the Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry to verify the antecedents of lawyers

before they are permitted to hold significant positions in the statutory committees.

The direction was made while dealing with a habeas corpus petition by a mother seeking production of her 17-year-old

adopted son, whereby the Court had come across a 'fake lawyer'.

They were born in South Korea, Brazil, Australia, Rwanda and Sri Lanka. They were all adopted. All grew up in France. And today, they tell each other.

Une histoire à soi , a feature-length documentary written and directed by Amandine Gay, in theaters from Friday August 26, for a rare time, gives the microphone to the main stakeholders in matters of adoption. Not the adoptive parents, even less the institutions, but indeed the children… grown up. A step back which makes it possible to propose, beyond the intimate, a downright political angle to the discourse.

“We come from somewhere. We are the fruit of a prior history. We all come from someone”, said one of them, analyzing his career.

“The idea is to show that adoption is not a limited moment in time,” explains the director in an interview. “But let it last a lifetime. »

An idea in tune with the times, exploited earlier this year by Nicolas Ouellet in his web series You come from where , then next year by Phara Thibault in his autobiographical monologue Chokola , on the boards of the Little Unicorn.

LOCAL ADOPTIVE MOM CHOSEN AS A 2022 CONGRESSIONAL COALITION ON ADOPTION INSTITUTE (CCAI) ANGELS IN ADOPTION® HONOREE FROM MISSOURI WITH SENATOR BLUNT

Adoptive mom of a sibling pair and author, Marcy Bursac, selected to travel to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC for CCAI’s Angels in Adoption® Leadership Program.

St. Louis, MO – Because of her tremendous work in the adoption, foster care, and the child welfare community, Marcy will be traveling to Washington, DC Sept. 20-21, 2022 to participate in congressional meetings with federal policymakers, receive advocacy training and education training, meet with fellow advocates, and receive recognition at the Angels Celebration. Honorees represent a wide spectrum of individuals involved in child welfare who are making a difference. Since the program’s inception in 1999, more than 2,900 Angels have received this honor.

About the Marcy Bursac

Adoption was Marcy's Plan A. She and her husband adopted a biological sibling pair.

The established adoption process should not be bypassed to increase the numbers

Policy intervention without knowledge of the ground realities often ends up as an exercise in self-gratification for those in authority and results in little or no benefit for the intended target group. Wanting to do good must be matched by knowing the right thing to do in the circumstance, and in the case of children, be guided by child-centric policies. Whether the recent recommendation of a parliamentary panel to bring more abandoned children into the adoption process will fulfil these parameters is an issue that warrants further discussion. A recent report, “Review of Guardianship and Adoption Laws”, by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances and Law and Justice has pointed to the huge mismatch between the number of people wanting to adopt children and the number of children legally available for adoption, and suggested that the way to remedy that would be to ensure that “orphan and abandoned children found begging on the streets… are made available for adoption at the earliest”. To do so, it has suggested periodic district surveys to identify children who are orphaned/abandoned. The report argued that in a country with millions of orphans, only 2,430 children were available for adoption. It is true that there are always more people wanting to adopt children than the number of children actually available for adoption; it has been so historically, but the increasing chasm, as the report indicates, will undoubtedly have to be addressed. According to the report, there were 27,939 prospective parents registered with the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) as on December 2021, from nearly 18,000 in 2017. There were 6,996 orphaned, abandoned and surrendered children residing in childcare institutions considered adoptable, but only 2,430 were declared legally free for adoption by Child Welfare Committees. It claimed that the waiting time for adoption had increased to three years from one year, in the past five years. The total number of children adopted in 2021-22 was only 3,175.

But the process of adoption in the country was tightened — procedurally and legally — in response to rampant malpractices and inter-country adoption rackets. CARA was installed as the nodal body for in-country and inter-country adoptions, to monitor and regulate the process, ensuring through stringent rules that the adoption is in the best interests of the child, and no illegality is involved. While the parliamentary committee has interpreted that there is automatic happiness when a child in an institution is placed in a home, it is important to exercise caution. No doubt, the country should take care of its children orphaned due to circumstances, but even as it acknowledges that institutionalisation may be detrimental over the long term, it should pay equal attention to the finer aspects of child care, and allow itself to be guided by a child-centric philosophy. There are no shortcuts in ensuring orphaned children come to no harm.

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When Cristina Prisco, 42, was growing up as an adopted only child in the Bronx, she always had a clear idea of where she came from — or so she thought.

“There wasn’t really a day that went by that I didn’t think about where I was born and how my story started,” Prisco told The Post exclusively.

Her supposed origin story, long accepted by Prisco and her adoptive parents, was that she had been born to a poor woman in Chile. The birth mother couldn’t afford to raise her baby herself, so she gave Cristina up to a Catholic orphanage.

Prisco’s adoptive father, Benito Zagaglia, travelled to Chile in the spring of 1980, using an Italian passport to enter the country under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

He brought his baby home in May of 1980, holding her close the entire 11 hour flight from Chile to New York City where her adoptive mother Ann Marie Zagaglia anxiously awaited. Little did the newly completed family know that their baby was a victim of child trafficking.

Last month, cops arrested a woman trying to sell a 15-day-old girl; now, a mid-day investigation shows that despite past such cases against her, she ran a baby-selling racket from a Sion nursing home with impunity

Wanted in two human trafficking cases, 35-year-old Julia Fernandez had been brazenly running a baby-selling racket from her Sion-Koliwada nursing home for the past seven-eight years, the police said. She was caught last month selling a 15-day-old girl, after a Pune resident raised the red flag. The Mumbai Crime Branch is now probing whether she conducted abortions.

Julia faces four more human trafficking cases that are registered at Mankhurd police station, Wadala TT police station, Bandra police station and Mahatma Phule police station in Kalyan. On July 31, the Crime Branch of the Mumbai police department arrested her accomplice Shabana Shaikh, 30, too. One of Julia's victims is fighting a legal battle to get back her son, who was snatched and sold about a year back.

“Despite being most wanted in two human trafficking cases, she had been running her baby-selling shop from Sion-Koliwada for seven-eight years. Our team nabbed her on July 31 from her nursing home in Sion-Koliwada,” said an officer.

The rescued child is at Mahalaxmi-based Bal Asha Trust, a charitable organisation that helps abandoned and destitute children in Mumbai. “The baby is healthy. My nurses are taking care of her. We will also do further tests and initiate adoption process, if needed,” Vaishali Bhakte, a social worker from the trust, told mid-day.

On April 3rd 2020, the Child-Parent Security Act (CPSA) passed in the New York Legislature, meaning that commercial or “compensated” surrogacy is now legal in the state of New York. Similar laws are in place in 46 other US states. “Compensated surrogacy will be legal in New York in February of 2021!” read the Circle Surrogacy’s jubilant advert. But to those who consider commercial surrogacy to be dangerous and exploitative, the CPSA has effectively sanctioned the pimping of pregnancy; as demand for surrogate mothers increases, so does the likelihood that women will be coerced into the arrangement by abusive husbands or boyfriends. Not to mention the associated health risks for the woman giving birth.

Gestational surrogacy is where the egg and a sperm (the embryo) are formed from material belonging to either “commissioning parents,” or from egg and sperm donors. The embryo is then transferred into a mother who carries the baby to term for the parents. The New York law allows for commercial gestational surrogacy in which the birth mother has not contributed any of her own genetic material and for commissioning parents to be named on the birth certificate. Under this law, if the birth mother changes her mind and wishes to keep the child, she will have no legal right to do so. It also requires that the baby produced from a surrogate pregnancy be born in New York, but not that the surrogate mother is a New York resident.

Traditional surrogacy (also known as partial surrogacy) involves the surrogate’s egg being fertilised with the sperm of the intended father. This remains illegal in NYC, a legacy of the 1986 Baby M case, where a surrogate mother refused to give up her baby and fled to Florida. She fought and lost a custody fight against the couple who had contracted to pay her $10,000 to bear the child. A task force was appointed in the wake of this case, resulting in traditional surrogacy and commercial surrogacy being banned in 1992. Traditional surrogacy remains against US law but the 2020 CPSA overturned the ban on commercial surrogacy in New York state.

The campaign to legalise surrogacy in New York is a decade old. Versions of the legislation were first introduced in 2012 and again in 2017. Intended parents, lawyers seeking to profit from dealing with surrogacy cases, and of course the clinics and agencies, all argued that because other states had legalised commercial surrogacy, New York should follow suit. Others argued it was discriminatory to “prevent gay couples from having the same right to fertility treatment as heterosexuals.” I heard from one lesbian couple in the US that they couldn’t agree on which one would carry the baby so they decided to “outsource the pregnancy.”

Commercial surrogacy is banned in the UK, but there are regular attempts by industry profiteers to introduce it. A number of UK couples and individuals travel to Ukraine where it is legal, but it is impossible to gage exact figures. In Ukraine, more than 2,000 children are born through surrogacy every year. The majority of “commissioning parents” are foreign, heterosexual couples. During Covid lockdown and the subsequent war, business continued and clinics merely “stored” the babies until intended parents were able to travel to collect them. Surrogate mothers continued to be sourced across the country and would give birth in collective housing facilities.

A New York adoption agency deliberately split up infant twins in the 1960s as part of a controversial study. Melissa Hogenboom tracks down some of those involved to find out why they are still searching for answers about this intrusive experiment.

Kathy Seckler was 16 years old when she made an unexpected discovery that changed her life completely – she had an identical twin sister. It was 4 September 1977 – she recalls with utmost clarity, her voice wobbling only slightly – when a friend told her that she resembled a girl she knew called Lori Pritzl, and asked if she was adopted. Seckler's birthday was the same date as Pritzl's and the two girls looked exactly the same. Seckler had known she was adopted since a young age, enjoying a happy and loved upbringing, but she then learned that Pritzl had also been adopted from the same agency as her.

The girls immediately spoke on the phone and realised their friend's suspicions must have been true – that they were twins. Seckler recalls breaking down in tears when she met her twin sister for the first time. "I saw Lori crossing the street… a big smile on her face," she says. "Then we hugged. It was quite an experience… I felt less alone. Being an adopted child, I always felt different… I felt like, 'Wow, I have a comrade there'."

They were both smokers, had similar artistic interests like dancing and drawing, and both liked music. "It was surreal," says Pritzl. "I felt like I was staring at myself in the mirror."

They could have found out earlier – their similarity to each other had been pointed out previously by acquaintances who knew both families. Pritzl had shrugged it off – doesn't everyone occasionally hear that they look like someone else? However, the girls lived about 15 miles (24km) from each other and they had family friends in common. Unbeknownst to both girls, their parents had known about the other twin for about a decade, but had been told to keep it a secret.

When Cristina Prisco, 42, was growing up as an adopted only child in the Bronx, she always had a clear idea of where she came from — or so she thought.

“There wasn’t really a day that went by that I didn’t think about where I was born and how my story started,” Prisco told The Post exclusively.

Her supposed origin story, long accepted by Prisco and her adoptive parents, was that she had been born to a poor woman in Chile. The birth mother couldn’t afford to raise her baby herself, so she gave Cristina up to a Catholic orphanage.

Prisco’s adoptive father, Benito Zagaglia, travelled to Chile in the spring of 1980, using an Italian passport to enter the country under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

He brought his baby home in May of 1980, holding her close the entire 11 hour flight from Chile to New York City where her adoptive mother Ann Marie Zagaglia anxiously awaited. Little did the newly completed family know that their baby was a victim of child trafficking.