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ISS Reports

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Stopping foreign adoptions deprives children of their right to a family.

A childhood in an institution. Without parents. Without family. Without the unconditional love and the close, secure care that only parents can provide. This will be the reality for many children if Norway stops adoption abroad.

That could also have been the situation for my two boys. They are both adopted from South Africa.

Adoption regulations in South Africa require social workers to first provide advice and guidance with the hope that biological parents or someone else in the family can care for the children.

If this does not lead to success, they try to find adoptive parents in their home country. But in South Africa it is difficult to find parents for children over one year old, children born prematurely and children who have been exposed to drugs during pregnancy.

Denmark's only mediator of international adoptions, Danish International Adoption, stops its work.

Danish International Adoption (DIA), which as the only organization in Denmark mediates international adoptions, has decided on Tuesday to stop mediating adoptions from abroad to Denmark.

This means that in practice it is no longer possible to adopt from abroad.

The decision was taken by DIA's board of directors after the Ministry of Social Affairs, Housing and the Elderly notified the organization that the last five countries from which DIA mediates adoptions will be suspended for a period of time.

Below you can learn more about how adoptions from abroad work:

Adopted foundlings want the opportunity to take back their biological family name, but the legislation is tight-lipped.

Dear politicians.

I was reunited with my biological family in 2019. I came to Denmark adopted as a lost child in 1976. I now have one burning desire: to be allowed to mark this by taking back my biological family's name and thereby mark my identity towards myself and the outside world.

All over the world there are television programs that in one way or another seek to reunite family members who have been separated for one reason or another. A large part of these are adopted, and under domestic skies the program "Sporløs" has run successfully year after year for decades. The programs reflect that as an adoptee you need your identity, and this cannot be found for everyone in the adoptive family.

We are in the year 2000 or 2001, I don't remember well. The legal team of the association for which I work in Guatemala City, Casa Alianza, handles cases of children stolen and given up for illegal adoption during the eighties and nineties. Guatemala has become a country that exports girls and boys and the network of illegal adoptions that destroys families and snatches babies from mothers in vulnerable situations is in full swing. I am sent to support a journalist from National Geographic magazine who is investigating the issue. After seeing white couples carrying babies from Guatemala in the lobby of the Camino Real hotel, the NatGeo journalist and I headed to a home in the historic center of the city run by Orthodox nuns. It seems there are babies there to give up for adoption, we want to investigate. I had never seen Orthodox nuns in Guatemala. The nun who takes us from one home to another is afraid of the street and she accompanies us with an armed man. I'm walking in line, in zone 1, with an Orthodox nun and her imposing black headdress on top of her head, her leading the way, I think I'm a second in Greece or Russia. The American journalist, blonder than the sun, walks behind her; Then me, looking like a foreigner too, and bringing up the rear with an armed man. The situation borders on the ridiculous, ubuesque and painful, similar to everything that will be investigated. I, who walk very often in zone 1, make myself uncomfortable having a man with a machine gun escorting me.

That childhood torn from their families in those years is now 30, 40 or 45 years old. We are in 2023 and I know Javier on Facebook. A Frenchman born in Guatemala in 1977, stolen from his mother in zone 18 in 1980 and adopted by a European couple.

On October 11, 2023, the day of his 46th birthday, Javier – a pseudonym he chose for security reasons –, after a report he filed for having been robbed in his childhood, is in his native country, Guatemala. It is his first time in Guatemala since he was robbed. In January 2024, Javier returned to Guatemala, I wanted to meet him in person, as well as his story, and I invited him to have breakfast at my house. I am moved by his questions: «So this little package that says “Ducal”, are beans?», «But beans are also eaten in another way, right?» It makes me a little sad that the new Guatemalan doesn't see beans cooking in the pot, but rather packaged beans. But I told him about the difference between strained beans and standing beans. “And when is mango season?” he asks. Then he tells me, very happy, that he took Guatemalan cooking classes and that he already made his first pepián.

Javier tells me about his two different identities and I get a little lost there, but he explains: «I have two identification documents, a French one and a Guatemalan one, with different last names. Precisely because I am one of the stolen children of Guatemala. It's not just having several different surnames, it's having two very different identities, each with its own nationality. In 1980, my brother and I were stolen from my mother through a Casa Canada home, now Casa Guatemala, making us believe that we were so sick that only a stay in a hospital in the United States could cure us. This subterfuge took us out of the country, and in reality they took us to France. "We have never been to the United States and in France they have never treated us for a serious illness."

Recently, two trafficking rackets were busted in West Bengal.

In the wake of the statewide child trafficking racket that was recently unearthed, a woman who was adopted as a child by a Swedish couple after being abandoned by her biological parents 28 years ago, now wants to find out if the process was legal and without any corruption.

Suya, now known as Julia Gärdefäldt was born on March 19, 1984 to a poor family from the south-western fringes of Kolkata. She contracted tuberculosis when she was four years old and her father, Babu Biswas, who was a mason was unable to pay for her treatment. He left the child at an orphanage Society For Indian Children’s Welfare, Ashirwad, in south Kolkata where she was kept for about two years before a Swedish couple adopted her.

Julia was the third of the four children of her parents. Her mother, Sandhya Biswas, now bedridden with a severe ailment spoke to DNA saying that if possible she would want to meet her daughter. “Her father had kept her at the orphanage by convincing me that she would be taken care of there and given proper medical attention. I had never thought that she would go away to a far away country. If she returns now, we would like to find out who was responsible for her adoption and whether it was done legally or not, given all the scams which are being unearthed now,” she said. After her husband's death, Sandhya now lives with her brother Sahadeb Bor. Her son and Julia’s brother Raju Biswas and his family too live with her. The two other daughters have been married off.

Julia, on the other hand, also spoke to DNA from Sweden and said that she was interested in returning and finding out the facts of her adoption. “Along with the legal aspect of my adoption, I would also want to meet my biological parents and family who had abandoned me owing to an ailment,” she said.