State Adoption Resource Agency writes to CARA

The couple from Andhra Pradesh who had returned the baby under their foster care to its biological mother in Kerala may retain their seniority in the adoption process.

The State Adoption Resource Agency is understood to have written to the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) to maintain the seniority of the couple in the adoption process.

If a baby, which is given in foster care or adoption, has to be returned for no fault of the foster-care or adoptive parents, State agencies usually request the Central authorities to retain the seniority of such parents, sources privy to the process said.

The parents can opt for the States from which they wish to adopt the baby. Once babies are available for legal adoption from those States, the allotment process, which is a system-generated one, will be set in motion. There is absolutely no human intervention in the process of allotting a baby. The allocation process is run in a transparent manner even while maintaining the confidentiality of the process. One cannot predict how and when the allocation process of the baby starts, sources said.

Thiruvananthapuram: For Ajith and Anupama, victims of an illegal

adoption case, who were recently reunited with their child after over a

year, a fresh issue has emerged.

The Thiruvananthapuram-based couple has filed a police complaint in

connection with a poster that raises the demand for a government job

Coming to the rescue of a 10 year-old girl given in adoption in a battle for custody between two women, the Madras High Court has ruled the minor cannot be separated from her foster mother who had cared and nurtured the child for a decade.

The court allowed the girl’s biological parents and siblings free access to her during the weekends, but made it clear she would stay with the woman who cared for her for 10 years after she was given in adoption to her.

The biological mother, who had given her second daughter in adoption when she was about 100 days old to her brother’s wife, cannot take her back after 10 years of living with the foster mother, a division bench of Justices P N Prakash and R Hemalatha, said recently.The court allowed the girl's biological parents and siblings free access to her during the weekends, but made it clear she would stay with the woman who cared for her for 10 years after she was given in adoption to her.

The bench set aside an order of the Child Welfare Committee in Salem, lodging the distraught girl in a local care home.

The child should be handed over back to her adopted mother Sathya who shall permit Sivakumar and Saranya, the biological parents of the child in question, to have free access to her, during weekends, along with her other siblings.

This article is the 24th in a series about Koreans adopted abroad. Apparently, many Koreans never expected that the children it had sent away via adoption would return as adults with questions demanding to be answered. However, thousands of adoptees visit Korea each year. Once they rediscover this country, it becomes a turning point in their lives. We should embrace the dialogue with adoptees to discover the path to recovering our collective humanity. ? ED.

We adoptees are the embodiment of "han," a term that could be described as an "internalized feeling of deep sorrow, grief, regret and anger." Sharing this feeling makes us so very connected to our ancestors. As adoptees, besides what we carry genetically, we are spiritually very Korean.

My Belgian name is Leslie. I was born in Busan in 1978. My mother's name was Lee, so after adoption I became Less Lee. I was taken away from my birth environment when I was few months old. It was traumatic, but I couldn't realize it, nor express my feelings about it. Other adoptees have similar or other traumatic experiences from the start.

There are many horrible stories of adoptees growing up. People tend to try to measure the misery of adoptees' lives, but abuse, loneliness and desperation shouldn't be measured; they are always a heavy weight.

When I accompanied a Korean adoptee friend in a reunion with their siblings, it struck me that the siblings living in Korea were so envious and jealous of my friend. Many Koreans have an image of adoptees as children who won a "golden ticket." And yes, some adoptees may truly feel like that, and feel very grateful for being adopted too. But it's just prejudice when you don't know someone else's life.

Hyun Sook Han never tired of her role as a matchmaker of sorts, connecting thousands of Korean children with American adoptive families over four decades in Minnesota.

Her work as a social worker and pioneer in international adoption fulfilled a promise she made to children she saw left behind in snowbanks as she fled her home on foot during the Korean War.

She vowed to one day come back to help them — and made building families through adoption her life's work.

Han, 83, died of kidney cancer Nov. 5 at her home in Shoreview.

Han was born in 1938 in Seoul and lived during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War.

In a country of over a billion people, the average waiting time to adopt a child via legal route is three years. However, most governments sideline delays in the adoption process as a non-issue. I In India, adoption involves multiple stakeholders - Center, States, CARA and PaPs (Prospective Adoptive Parents) to come together. This has made the process complex. Considering that it impacts children languishing in the CCIs on one hand and PaPs on the other, who wait endlessly to adopt children through legal routes, a group of 300+ PaPs (collaborating under the aegis of Adoption Action Group) have signed and sent a letter to the Ministry of WCD to fix these issues

Adoption Action Group (AAG), a PaP registered with CARA, works to bring together and unite the adoptive community in India and provide a platform for them to voice their concerns by highlighting the loopholes in the adoption system. While there are many advocacy groups and counselling forums on parenting that talk about child rights and adoption as a subject, this is the first group dedicated to the cause of adoptive parents and the struggle they go through on adopting in India.

AAG does not represent any non-profit or an organisation. It is a collective of PaPs and adoptive parents who are together to make adoption a smoother process. The collective has people from all walks of life. With 26,000 PaPs (as per an RTI response) waiting to adopt, the number of children adopted in the 0-5 age group last year is less than 3,200. This year in the last eight months less than 1,800 children have been placed with PaPs in the 0-2 category. In addition to this, the country has an extremely limited number of government bodies to bring more children into the adoption pool — 486-Specialised Adoption Agencies (SAAs), 642- District Child Protection Units (DCPUs), 5810- Child Care Institutions (CCIs). This has a direct impact on the families and parents who choose to create a family via adoption. In addition to this lack of response from CARA and information gaps make it difficult for the PaPs to sustain their journey. Ultimately, the system is not only discouraging those who are keen to adopt but adding to the dangers of illegal adoptions.

Abandoned, orphaned or surrendered kids enter the adoption pool through the legal process and paperwork initiated by CWCs. Only the kids declared legally fit to adopt come to CARA's adoption pool. Once a child is recused or surrendered it is the responsibility of the CWC to ensure the well being of the child. In cases where the child is adoptable the CCIs and the CWCs should work in co-ordination to initiate and complete the process in due time. In many cases this is never done. Many of these children grow up in institutions getting older and hence losing their chance of early adoption.

Adopting a newborn abandoned child

The newborn girl, who was rescued over a month ago after being found abandoned near Harur bus stand, was handed over to Bethal Agricultural Fellowship Adoption Center, Salem, by Collector S. Dhivyadarshini on Wednesday. The infant, named Anupriya by the Collector, was at the NICU ward of the Dharmapuri government medical college hospital for over 40 days.

Those seeking claim to the child must contact the administration within 60 days from November 24.

The adoption row showed scarce signs of abating on Thursday.

The infant's mother, Anupama S. Chandran, has vowed to continue her struggle to unseat those at the helm of the Kerala State Council for Child Welfare (KSCCW) and Child Welfare Committee (CWC).

Ms. Anupama sought the prosecution of KSCCW general secretary J.S. Shiju Khan on the charge of violating the provisions of the Juvenile Justice Act. She also wanted the CWC disbanded.

The United Democratic Front (UDF) Opposition and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have thrown their weight behind Ms. Anupama. Notably, Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP) legislator K.K. Rema and social activist P.E. Usha were with Ms. Anupama through every step of her protest.

The State Government had ordered the Women and Child Development Department director to inquire into the incident and fix accountability on those responsible for the wrongful adoption.

Wanted and (not) found: Annick tells

We talk quickly about seeking, finding and contacting first parents, but not everyone has to search, can find or has contact. In this series, various adoptees tell how they experience this.

Annick | 36 years | °India | founder Adoptie Schakel | children's coach

“Meanwhile, the images have faded, but they are still there”

I was almost five years old when my adoptive parents came to pick me up in Zaventem. That was in December 1989. A year and a half before that, my uncle took me to the orphanage in Madras. He came to visit me regularly, but after six months I was transferred to Calcutta. I grew up in Tongeren with an older brother.

The Hague Conference is well known for its work on the International Adoption Convention in 1993. This intergovernmental institution currently brings together 89 member states, including France. Its lawyers mainly deal with issues of private international law. They draw up international conventions which the member states decide to ratify, or not.

In 2015, the Hague Conference created a Group of Experts to establish international parentage laws for children born from surrogacy, a practice which is banned in many countries.

This Group of Experts entitled “Parentage/Surrogacy” includes officials from the Ministries of Justice, lawyers, academics, as well as some associations who contribute as “observers”, such as the UNICEF. The group only met 9 times in 7 years and extremely succinct reports are available on their website.

The ICASM (International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood) has been denouncing these meetings for years. According to the coalition “working to harmonize national laws on filiation for children born from surrogacy, boils down to legitimizing surrogacy and encouraging it on a world scale”. Since 2020, the ICASM has been denouncing the fact that “The Hague Conference (HCCH) is working hard to regulate surrogacy. This is a real blank cheque to the globalized surrogacy trade, mostly in the poorest countries of the world.” Since 2020, the ICASM has been countering with a “Draft International Convention for the Abolition of Surrogacy”.

The same outcry can be heard from the “CoRP”, (COllective for the Respect of the Person). “You cannot claim to protect a child by endorsing a practice whereby he is bought and sold, treated as an object and cut off from his origins,” asserts its president, Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram. As co-author of the book The Markets of Motherhood (2021), Odile Jacob aims at the most powerful lobby of American reproductive clinics in The Hague.