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

Annick | 36 years | °India | founder Adoptie Schakel | child coach | buddy at a-Buddy

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

I was almost five years old when my adoptive parents picked 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.

In the beginning I told my parents and grandmother about India. About a blue house, a train, rooms with other kids… They didn't know if my stories were fantasy or reality, but because it was so detailed, they thought it must be some of it. So they wrote everything down in a booklet. I myself did not know for a long time: did I have to remember it, was I dreaming or fantasizing?

The Delhi High Court has issued various steps for enabling adoptive and biological

parents to obtain the required certification and no- objection from District Magistrates,

foreign authorities and Central Adoption Resource Authority(CARA) in relation with inter

country adoptions.

Justice Pratibha M Singh issued the following steps to be considered by the concerned

For the first time, the Dutch government has been ordered to pay compensation to an illegally adopted person. The court in The Hague ruled on Wednesday that the government 'could and should have done' more for Patrick Noordoven, who came over from Brazil in 1980 as a baby.

The damages awarded are a direct result of the damning report published by the Joustra Commission in February on child adoptions from abroad . Noordoven filed the lawsuit last year because he was unable to know his origin due to the negligence of the Dutch government. Initially, the government invoked limitation, but after the report dropped that defense. That decision paved the way for lawsuits like this one.

Noordoven started in 2001 with a search for his biological parents . He soon discovered that there had never been an official adoption procedure in his case. Through the Public Administration Act (WOB request) he found out that the government had investigated illegal adoption in Brazil in the years after his arrival in the Netherlands. Although the government therefore knew that the adoptions of Noordoven and 41 other children were wrong, they did not see to it that the children could later trace their origin.

Because it is established in Noordoven's case that the Dutch government was aware of the abuses, the court awarded him compensation on Wednesday. This could not be established in other intercountry adoption cases. For example, a Bangladeshi woman was told today by the same court that she is not entitled to anything. The amount of Noordoven's compensation will be determined later.

Right to identity

In its order, the judge had noted that the adoption proceedings were initiated in the case on the premise that the “child was abandoned and his biological parents could not be found.”

The baby boy, who was given in pre-adoption foster care to a couple from Andhra Pradesh, was reunited with his biological mother on Wednesday following a court order.

On a day marked by high drama, the Family Court, Thiruvananthapuram, ordered the release of the baby to his biological mother after “dropping and summarily dismissing” the adoption proceedings.

Ground Zero | A missing baby and a flustered state

K. Biju Menon, the Family Court judge, had advanced the proceedings in the case and passed the order by evening considering the plea of the State. The case was originally scheduled to be considered on November 30.

On 24 November 2021, the District Court of The Hague substantially awarded the claim of the illegally adopted Patrick Noordoven against the State of the Netherlands. The judgment of the court can be found here.

Patrick Noordoven was illegally adopted from Brazil in 1980. His parentage was thereby misrepresented, by giving him up as the biological child of the Dutch couple who adopted him illegally. Shortly after his illegal adoption, the police conducted an investigation and concluded that Patrick Noordoven and 41 other children had been adopted illegally from Brazil to the Netherlands. Nevertheless, after the investigation, the State did not take measures to enable Patrick Noordoven to know his parentage and the circumstances of his illegal adoption. The Court concluded that by doing so, the State acted in violation of Patrick Noordoven's right to identity and knowledge of his parentage.

As a result, Patrick Noordoven had to devote 20 years of his life to finding his biological parents. In addition, he has conducted years of research to clarify how his illegal adoption took place and what role the Dutch state had played in it. The court therefore ruled that the State is liable for the damage that Patrick Noordoven has suffered as a result.

The court rejected the claim that the State is (also) liable for the fact that the illegal adoption of Patrick Noordoven was effected with the help of a Dutch diplomat or was facilitated by the Dutch Diplomatic representations in Brazil.

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Today the court ruled in two cases concerning intercountry adoption. One case concerns the adoption of a woman from Bangladesh. This woman's claims are dismissed. The other case concerns the illegal adoption of a man from Brazil. In that case, the court partially grants the claims.

Adoption from Bangladesh

The woman was adopted from Bangladesh in the Netherlands in 1976. She accuses Wereldkinderen, Terre des Hommes Nederland and the State of having cooperated in the fact that her biological mother renounced her under false pretenses. According to her, they also did not do enough to properly investigate the abuses in intercountry adoptions from Bangladesh, including hers, and to inform her about this.

Wereldkinderen and Terre des Hommes Nederland have invoked limitation. Since it has been more than twenty years since the woman was adopted, the woman's claims are time-barred. No exception is made in the case of this woman, because on the basis of the available information it cannot be assumed that the woman was given up for adoption against the will of her biological mother and that she was not transferred to the Netherlands in accordance with the applicable rules. The woman also waited too long with the liability of Wereldkinderen and Terre des Hommes.

The State initially also invoked limitation. After an independent commission investigating intercountry adoption (COIA) had reported in February 2021 on an investigation into possible abuses in intercountry adoptions and the role of the Dutch government in this regard, the State dropped the appeal on prescription. The court has therefore assessed the content of the woman's claims against the State.

The fact that while I'm typing this two toddlers tearing down the living room, screaming with laughter, doesn't really make any sense from a medical point of view. My husband and I had wanted a child for years before their arrival and did our best to get it, but to no avail. There was nothing wrong with his sperm, the cause was mine.

Or more precisely, with my endometriosis, a condition in which the lining of the uterus grows outside your uterus – which not only causes a lot of pain, but often also infertility.

Because our desire to have children continued to be great, we finally decided to sign up for adoption. We were sure we were going to love a child who hadn't grown in my womb just as much, and we weren't deterred by the fact that for many years only children with so-called 'special needs' were eligible for an intercountry adoption process.

Those 'special needs' could be anything from a missing limb or a baby with HIV infection, to mothers who had used drugs or alcohol during pregnancy. We learned all about it during the compulsory adoption course that every aspiring adoptive parent in the Netherlands must follow. Six half days in an impersonal office, somewhere on an industrial estate, with about five other couples who also hoped to hold a child in their arms through adoption.

That course was not the only requirement to qualify for an actual adoption process. Our finances were checked extensively, we had to undergo a medical examination by an independent doctor to check that our risk of death was not too high to allow us a child, we had to fill out 1001 forms and had three conversations with someone from child protection who had to determine whether we would be suitable parents.

Thiruvananthapuram: Based on a court order to conduct a DNA test in

the controversial adoption case, experts from the Rajiv Gandhi Centre

for Biotechnology here collected samples from Anupama S Chandran,

her partner Ajith Kumar, and the baby. The test results arrived positive

on Tuesday.

Immediately after her birth in Sri Lanka, Sharinda Nathaliya Wolffers (33) was adopted by Dutch parents. This year she saw her biological mother for the first time. "People who can't have children and therefore adopt, give me a bad taste."

“You are not able to take care of your baby, sisters in the Sri Lankan hospital, where I was born, told my mother. You better give your daughter up for adoption.

My mother was not married to my father during the pregnancy. That is really not possible for a poor woman in Sri Lanka, who has little money to live on.

My mother was not married to my father during the pregnancy. That is really not possible for a poor woman in Sri Lanka, who has little money to live on.

As a ten-day-old baby, I was introduced to my Dutch adoptive parents. They could not have children, but with all their good intentions they adopted and raised me in the Netherlands. Still, my adoptive mother realized that her happiness meant my birth mother's grief.

Senator Klobuchar recently brought up international adoption in a Judiciary Committee hearing with DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Below is a brief transcript of the exchange.

Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Oversight of the Department of Homeland Security

November 16, 2021

KLOBUCHAR: Thank you. Last question here; along with Senator Blunt, I co-chair the congressional Coalition on Adoption Caucus. Many of the members on this committee are members; it’s very bipartisan. Over in the house, it is Adam Smith and Representative Aderholt that chair the commission. And that’s why we’ve introduced the Adoptee Citizenship Act to make citizenship automatic for all international adoptees who were legally adopted by U.S. citizens as kids, regardless of when their adoption was finalized. Since 2004, international adoptions have fallen nearly 93 percent. And I have always viewed this, and part of it, of course, is a pandemic; part of it is things that Russia did, things that China did. But there’s a whole lot of kids in other countries as well that need a loving family, and there’s a whole lot of Americans that would like to adopt kids. We are proud that the domestic numbers have actually gone up during the last few administrations; with foster kids getting adopted, that’s all good. But international adoption has actually been a part of the way that our country is connected to the rest of the world. Not to mention the humanitarian issues. Will you work with me to identify barriers and find ways to ease the citizenship process for foreign-born adoptees and also in general, as we’re talking to the State Department, Senator Blunt and I about this issue to work to get back to the situation where we were welcoming adopted kids into our country?

MAYORKAS: Senator, I would be privileged to do so. I was privileged to work with then-Senator Mary Landrieu on international adoptions as well as with Ranking Member Grassley on that valiant effort.