With abortion rights on the verge of collapse, some conservatives have acknowledged that pregnant people will need more support.

For some conservative politicians and anti-abortion advocates, that means increasing services – and one key solution is increasing adoption.

When Justice Samuel Alito wrote the leaked draft of his opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, he cited the conservative argument that someone who places a newborn for adoption today will likely find the baby a good home because of high demand.

In a footnote, he cited a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report from 2008 describing the domestic supply of infants available for adoption as “virtually nonexistent.”

That got the attention of writer and adoptee Aimee Christian. She wrote an essay for NBC News saying that adoption is no solution if Roe falls.

Minister for Legal Protection Franc Weerwind wants to resume intercountry adoptions and set up a 'new' adoption system with stricter conditions. The best interests of the child must come first [BD April 8; 'Adoption from abroad will now go through the state'].

Opinions differ on what this importance means. "Stop," says one. "Continue," says the other. The minister wants to accommodate both groups. The result, however well-intentioned, is a dragon of compromise that does not resolve structural abuses. It should not be about the supporters and opponents of adoptions from abroad. It is about protecting vulnerable children against the loss of their identity and preventing abuses.

irreversible

One child suffering from intercountry adoption is one too many. The same goes for their birth parents. Intercountry adoption is very drastic for children. They are separated from their birth parents and country of birth. This is irreversible and has a major impact on the development of their identity. When they look for information about their adoption, their original family and origins, that information often proves impossible to retrieve. This causes anger, pain and sadness among many, now adults, intercountry adoptees and their birth parents.

The problem with this adoption is that the system entails structural abuses. An 'adoption market' has emerged, in which the demand for adopted children creates supply. Even the government has been involved in fraudulent adoptions in the past. The minister acknowledges that it is impossible to set up the system in such a way that abuses can be prevented. He wants to reduce the risks by merging the brokerage firms and placing them under stricter government authority. But we already know that this will actually have no effect. The Netherlands has no say whatsoever in the countries of origin. The country of origin itself determines whether a child can be offered for intercountry adoption.

Once a child is adopted from foster care, it’s as if they are reborn in the eyes of many child welfare agencies.

In required data reports to the federal government, these agencies remove evidence that would illuminate the child’s past journeys through the system. They take away the ability to trace details of a child’s round trip from foster care to adoption and back again when an adoption fails, or to examine what might have led to a better outcome.

The result, a USA TODAY investigation found: No one knows how well each state is fulfilling its mission of finding children their forever homes.

At stake are the fates of more than 50,000 children adopted out of foster care every year. The federal government funnels about $3 billion a year to families who adopt from foster care, now the leading type of adoption in most states, according to data compiled by USA TODAY.

Cortney Jones, a child welfare advocate who spent 10 years in foster care and lived through a broken adoption, said following the paths of foster children into adoptions could boost the odds that adoptions succeed.

There was no safety net for Anthony Thornton when he walked out of his adoptive home six weeks before his high school graduation.

The Texas teen was on his own, left with nothing but two trash bags full of clothes.

Thornton told USA TODAY he had always been uneasy about being adopted. His siblings had been adopted out of foster care years earlier, but he resisted. Agreeing to it felt like a betrayal of his biological mother.

“There’s still relationships,” he said. “There’s still love and caring and kindness. And, you know, amid that toxicity and tumultuous living, it’s still your family.”

But at 14, Thornton said he felt he had a decision to make: agree to be adopted by his foster parents or run the risk of having to move elsewhere.

Jacqui McNeill was just 12 when her mom suddenly died of heart failure, but the child — one of 11 kids in total — didn't think twice about caring for her seven younger siblings.

Filled with anger and sorrow for years, Jacqui eventually found solace in her Irish Catholic faith and became closer to God, culminating in her decision to become a nun after high school. However, during her time in a religious community, she found that her desire to have her own child one day was too great to move forward with nunhood.

"You have to live a life of poverty and a life of celibacy for the church," says Jacqui, now 29, in this week's issue of PEOPLE. "People would come over and visit, and I would hold the babies the whole time or play with the kids. I would just cry when they left because it hurt so much to know that I was saying, 'I'm willing to not have kids in my life.'"

Inspired by the work of Mother Teresa, Jacqui decided to travel from her home in Ohio to India, where she worked for four months alongside children with disabilities at a foster home.

"I didn't understand how anybody could look at these kids and see anything but beauty, vulnerability and innocence," she says. "I would have brought them all back with me at 24 years old."

Vijaya, a woman hailing from Thiruvananthapuram is leading a life of loneliness and is seeking to adopt two youngsters to end her misery.

Thiruvananthapuram: Days that roll on without anything to do and anyone to keep her company. Vijaya, a woman hailing from Thiruvananthapuram, is leading a life of loneliness and is seeking to adopt two youngsters to end her misery.

This 62-year-old woman is in need of two kids who will bring back the light into her life. She is looking for youngsters above the age of 18 to be part of her family.

Vijaya lost both her daughters in a car accident. Her daughters aged 18 and 21 died in an accident during a family trip around 13 years back. She and her husband survived the accident. Vijaya lost her husband, a police officer, three years back due to heart attack. She has been leading a lonley life since.

She started thinking about adoption after she started sinking further down into solitude. Her relatives were very supportive of her decision. Considering the legal complications in adopting a child, she decided to adopt youngsters above the age of 18. This mother wants to adopt youngsters who are interested to study but are stuck without finding the proper resources to do so. She is also open to adopting orphaned kids.

AMERICA REFRAMED

Geographies of Kinship

BY DEANN BORSHAY LIEM. A MU FILMS PRODUCTION IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE CENTER FOR ASIAN AMERICAN MEDIA.

SEASON 10 EPISODE 5

GEOGRAPHIES OF KINSHIP weaves together the complex personal histories of four adult adoptees born in South Korea with the rise of the country’s global adoption program. Raised in foreign families, each adoptee sets out on a journey to return to their country of birth and map the geographies of kinship that bind them to a homeland they never knew. Along the way there are discoveries and dead ends, as well as mysteries that will never be unraveled.

A Japanese American veteran had the reunion of his life when he met seven of his siblings for the first time after undergoing a DNA test to find out more about himself.

Michael Bennett, 70, was born in Japan in 1951 to a Japanese mother, Yoshiko Nakajima, and an American father, Dick Webster, who served in the country after World War II.

Despite his attempts to stay in Japan, Webster was eventually forced to transfer back to the United States, leaving Nakajima alone with their son. Now a single mother with a mixed-race baby, she ultimately decided to give up their child for adoption.

Bennett arrived in the U.S. with his new American family in 1953. He grew up with knowledge of his biological parents and why his mother opted to have him adopted.

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Instead, they tell parliamentary panel to improve access to education to delay marriages

An umbrella body of child rights organisations set up by Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi, which appeared before the parliamentary panel studying the Bill on raising the age of marriage for women to 21 from 18 years, has opposed the move and emphasised the need to improve access to education to delay marriages.

The India Child Protection Forum [ICPF] comprising nearly 70 civil society organisations, represented by its convener Amod K. Kanth as well as Ravi Kant from the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation, made its submissions before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports headed by BJP MP Vinay Sahasrabuddhe on Monday.

The panel has been meeting NGOs for the past one week and is expected to submit its report in June. Last year, Parliament had sent the Prevention of Child Marriage Bill, 2021 to the Standing Committee after the Opposition parties expressed concerns over raising the age of marriage for women and demanded greater scrutiny of the proposed law.

The ICPF told the panel that the Prevention of Child Marriages Act, 2005 had failed to stop child marriages in the country, which was evident through the National Crime Records Bureau data which show that only 2,530 cases were registered under the Act between 2016 and 2020, while the National Family Health Survey-5 (2019-2021) indicated that 23.3% of women surveyed were married before attaining the legal age of marriage of 18.

Marieke Simons

Legal Adviser on Children's Rights and Juvenile Law

Lately there has been a lot of talk about out-of-home placements of children. Especially in the wake of the Allowance scandal. The Defense for Children's Children's Rights Helpdesk has seen for some time that – apart from the Allowance scandal – many things are not going well with regard to out-of-home placements. What's going well? What can be done better? And what does the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child say about this?

As a last (rescue) remedy

Every child has the right to grow up with his parents. This right is included in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. An out-of-home placement should therefore be seen as a last resort and must be necessary for the child's unthreatened development. A child may only be removed from home if there is no less invasive remedy. This is so because it makes a huge encroachment on the lives of parents and children. For example, help must first be made available in the home situation that is necessary to allow the child to grow up at home, in their own family. The parents have that right, but more importantly, the child has that right. Because growing up at home is often the best thing for a child.