Switzerland is under scrutiny for fraudulently rehoming thousands of babies. The failures go back further than previously understoodThis story was initially published with our partner, New Lines magazine.
When Paul Harwood, a founding member of the Central Intelligence Agency, relocated to Paris from Vietnam, he was keen to expand his family. It was 1961, the Berlin Wall was about to go up and Europe was embroiled in a Cold War crisis, keeping Harwood and his fellow agents on their toes. But besides his undercover work at the U.S. Embassy, Harwood was on a more personal mission: He and his wife, Mary Ellen, were trying to adopt a baby girl.
They ended up using an agency run by a Swiss welfare worker named Alice Honegger. Harwood welcomed her assistant to his apartment on the top floor of an older house in central Paris. A staircase led up to a room ready for a child, reachable via a gallery and complete with its own bathroom.
“Mr. and Mrs. Harwood are extremely likable people, kind, very calm, and I don’t see them as typical Americans at all,” reads the report she wrote for Honegger in St. Gallen, a canton in the country’s northeast near the blue-green waters of Lake Constance. “They are both of medium height, with brown eyes and brown hair.” The Harwoods wanted a girl to complement the little boy they had previously adopted in the United States.
On Aug. 2, 1962, the couple received a letter from Honegger’s agency with the news they had spent years agonizingly waiting for: a “very handsome” little girl of Italian nationality who was a perfect match for them, with the same color of hair and eyes. She added that the child’s expatriation papers were still missing but assured the new parents she would urge the birth mother and the Italian authorities to send what was necessary.
The baby arrived in France in November of that year and, by 1963, had been named Ann Elisabeth Harwood, according to her adoption papers. A few days after her arrival, Honegger wrote to the Harwoods asking them to stay in touch through the child’s development and to thank them for a future donation which would allow the agency to continue its work protecting “abandoned mothers and children.”
Throughout her nearly 50-year career, Honegger was keen to portray her work in an altruistic light, with the feelings of outcast women her main priority. But in actuality, she capitalized on the desperation of pregnant women with few options, coaxing, cajoling and sometimes simply stealing their babies to place them with affluent Americans. Among her clients were spies, diplomats and alleged criminals.
Switzerland’s past and present adoption system is under scrutiny following government-commissioned investigations that showed how thousands of children from at least 10 countries were fraudulently adopted between the 1970s and 1990s. The 2023 report shows that Swiss authorities were aware of the practices of child trafficking, falsification of documents and false indications of origin regarding children from Bangladesh, Brazil, India and elsewhere.
Our two-year investigation shows how Honegger cut her teeth exporting the children of migrant women and perfected her modus operandi for intercountry adoptions, setting the standards for this illicit and morally questionable industry. We reveal how her dubious practices date back much earlier than previously understood, to the late 1940s, leaving a legacy of distrust among the adoptees — including Harwood’s daughter, who, at 62, only recently discovered her true origin story.
By piecing together archival material in Switzerland, Canada and the U.S., interviews with adoption center workers, researchers and adoptees, and Honegger’s official correspondence obtained by archival requests, New Lines and Investigate Europe have found evidence that Honegger placed at least 2,000 babies with families until the 1970s and expanded her network to other parts of the world.
“Alice Honegger was very interested in having power over human beings,” journalist and researcher Sabine Bitter — who was commissioned by several Swiss cantons to investigate international adoptions and the activity of agents like Honegger — told New Lines. “She notoriously ignored the law and set her own rules.”
Honegger was first connected to illegal adoptions in 2017, some 20 years after she died. That year, the St. Gallen canton issued a report saying that up to 70% of the 750 adoptions of Sri Lankan children sent to Switzerland from the late 1970s to the 1990s were illegal. The report sent shockwaves across the Swiss adoption industry.
Today, adopted people from the 1950s and ‘60s are looking for answers. They want to know the truth about their adoption. They want to discover their birth parents and understand who is responsible for their lives.
A photograph of Ann Elisabeth Harwood, later Lisa Helmick, as a toddler.Courtesy of Lisa Helmick
In March 2022, while standing in line in a downtown store in Bassano del Grappa, my hometown in northeastern Italy, I met the Harwoods’ adopted daughter. She heard my Canadian partner’s accent and introduced herself as Lisa Helmick, a fellow North American but with an Italian mother from Bassano del Grappa. We got to talking and later had a drink together, when she told me how she was adopted by an American family and had recently found her birth family.
Her name is Ann Elisabeth, “but everyone calls me Lisa,” she said, explaining how her father was in the CIA. I had just become a mother myself and Helmick’s story seemed the opposite of mine: While I had come back to Bassano del Grappa from Sarajevo to deliver my baby, Helmick’s mother Aurora had departed Bassano del Grappa to give birth abroad to her only child.
Helmick had just moved to Bassano del Grappa with her husband to reconnect with her birth family, settling into a centrally located apartment with exposed wooden beams. “I’m trying to catch up with the time I’ve lost in the past 60 years,” she told me.
She always knew she was adopted but had been told by her parents that her mother was too poor to care for her. In 1999, when Helmick was training in Virginia to become a teacher, her father Paul died. “Everybody at his funeral thought he was working for the State Department,” Helmick’s husband Jeff tells me. Harwood didn’t reveal much about his job and past. Details of his daughter Lisa’s story were among his secrets.
But he left her some documents in a safe-deposit box in the bank. They detailed, in English and French, information about her adoption on onionskin paper with a large red wax stamp of the law firm that formalized the adoption in 1963. “When I opened up the envelope, it was amazing because a sentence stated my mother’s name, the town she was from and that I was named after her. So it was a shock. It was a surprise.”
For the first time, Helmick read the name of her birth mother, but she didn’t believe it was real. “I thought it was like Jane Doe protecting privacy. Well, because the names were the same,” she says. Confusing Helmick further was the fact that the mother and the daughter had the exact same name, Aurora Gramatica. The only detail that stayed in her mind was the Italian woman’s hometown, Bassano del Grappa. It was the initial element for searching for her birth family. But that’s not what happened.
“It was not the right moment,” Helmick explained. The 9/11 attacks happened shortly afterward and Jeff, as a colonel in the U.S. Army, had to go to the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan. “I folded the documents up and I had three kids to raise.” Seventeen years passed before she began her search. “Had I done this a little earlier, I would have been able to talk to my mother,” she said, her words tinged with regret.
Life imprisonment still exists, all families who have lost a child will be able to tell you about it.
Anyone who is now at least 40 years old remembers what they were doing the day Julie and Melissa's bodies were found, fourteen months after their disappearance. This legal case, which already had the country on tenterhooks, then plunged a little deeper into horror . It traumatized an entire country like no other had probably done before it, mixing the shameful dysfunctions between the gendarmerie and the police with the doubts and bottomless pain of the parents of the two girls; their lives were then irremediably plunged into an endless nightmare. Life imprisonment still exists, all the families who have lost a child will be able to tell you about it.
The Karnataka High Court was considering a Writ Petition seeking direction to the Central Adoption Resource Agency to allow the mother to adopt her minor child.
The Karnataka High Court has allowed adoption of a minor child by mother and step-father after the biological father failed to take a definitive stance on the issue in the Court, construing it as his approval.
The Court was considering a Writ Petition seeking direction to the Central Adoption Resource Agency to allow the mother to adopt her minor child.
The single judge bench of Justice BM Shyam Prasad observed, "...this Court is also of the view that if the inference is not drawn with the fifth respondent not taking a stand despite opportunity, the minor, who is keen to go in adoption with the petitioners with whom he is living, could lose the advantage of belonging to the family completely with all consequences that would be."
The Petitioner was represented by Advocate Sharanadeep while the Respondent was represented by Additional Solicitor General Arvind Kamath.
Couples were charged around Rs 30 lakh for the process, purportedly meant for the surrogate. However, the probe revealed that in several cases, the children handed over were not biologically related to the commissioning parents.
The Enforcement Directorate has unearthed a massive illegal surrogacy and child trafficking racket in Hyderabad, where a fertility centre supplied babies not biologically related to couples opting for surrogacy. These babies were taken from poor and vulnerable pregnant women, lured into giving up their newborns immediately after childbirth.
Acting under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002, the agency carried out search operations on September 25 at nine locations across Hyderabad, Vijayawada, and Visakhapatnam.
The searches at the Universal Srusthi Fertility and Research Centre, allegedly run by Dr Pachipalli Namratha, also known as Athluri Namratha led to the seizure of incriminating documents exposing the large-scale fraud, including records of couples who were allegedly defrauded and details of properties amassed by Namratha.
A three-month-old girl was reunited with her biological parents in Tripura’s Gomati district after police and childline officials foiled an alleged unlawful adoption attempt in Karbook subdivision.
Officials said the infant’s parents, Kanchan Chakma and Santana Chakma, handed her over to a childless couple from Madhumag para. In return, they allegedly received Rs 10,000 and an additional Rs 1,500. Later, when the parents sought the baby back, the adoptive family refused. The issue came to light after local media reports, prompting police to intervene and recover the child within 24 hours.
Sub-Divisional Police Officer Gamanjoy Reang said neither family admitted to exchanging money during questioning, though the biological father earlier acknowledged the payment. He added that financial distress and the burden of raising a second child likely influenced the decision. The Chakma family, dependent on a small rubber plantation, already has a two-year-old son.
Authorities decided not to register a case as the matter was resolved amicably. Both families were counselled on the legal adoption process and cautioned about possible consequences of bypassing it. The baby was formally handed back to her parents in the presence of police and child welfare officials.
Child welfare has resurfaced as a rallying cry in Korea, particularly after a series of heartbreaking cases of abandonment and infanticide. This renewed attention reflects domestic concerns as well as a global shift in how adoption and child protection are understood. The 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption embodied this change, shifting focus from the interests of prospective parents toward the rights of children. Ratified by more than 100 countries and set to take effect in Korea this October, the convention reframes adoption as child-centered, emboldening many adoptees to organize and press for recognition of their lived experiences.
While adoptees have gained a stronger voice, unwed mothers — the primary source of children placed for adoption — remain marginalized. Society views unwed motherhood as an individual failing that signifies moral inferiority, even as intercountry adoption was shaped by broader structural forces.
It began in the devastation of the 1950-53 Korean War, with tens of thousands of children orphaned and dependent on foreign relief. Stigmatized in a society that prized ethnic homogeneity, mixed-race children born to Korean women and foreign servicemen fueled intercountry adoption. Declining birthrates and concerns reflecting existing racial hierarchies in the United States further heightened demand for Korean children.
The 1997 Asian financial crisis undermined government efforts to curb intercountry adoption by producing new waves of poverty and family dissolution. In its aftermath, the government embraced a market-oriented welfare model characterized by deregulation. Above all, powerful, profit-driven adoption agencies — shielded by lax oversight — perpetuated the system. In this context, lacking both institutional support and societal acceptance, unwed mothers were often left with adoption as their sole recourse, a constrained choice that nevertheless exposed them to further stigma.
When we talk about adoption, we often imagine a journey marked by deep wounds related to abandonment or the severance of the biological bond. Yet, many adoptees report a balanced, rich, and peaceful life, despite their particular history. How can we explain that some experience their adoption well, while others suffer more? This article explores the factors that promote a positive adoptive experience, drawing on scientific research and testimonies from adoptees.
1. A secure attachment upon arrival
The quality of the bond formed between the child and their adoptive parents plays a vital role. According to John Bowlby, founder of attachment theory, a secure attachment is built when the parent consistently and caringly responds to the child's needs.
Even if the child has experienced initial abandonment, establishing a stable, loving, and consistent environment often helps heal this wound. Studies by Mary Ainsworth (1978) show that children who develop a secure attachment become more resilient in the face of adversity.
Wait for adoption longest for special needs children: Data
New Delhi, Nearly two-thirds of children waiting for adoption in India are those with special needs, even as the overall adoption numbers have seen a record rise over the years, government data shows.
According to the Union Women and Child Development Ministry's latest annual report accessed by PTI, 3,684 children were declared legally free for adoption in 2024 and 2,177 were available for placement through the Central Adoption Resource Authority . Of the 2,177 children, 1,423 or 65 per cent were those with special needs.
Despite sustained efforts and awareness campaigns to encourage adoption of children with special needs, official records accessed by PTI through an RTI query show that the numbers remain much lower.
Special needs adoptions peaked at 401 in 2018-19, plunged to 166 the following year, and the number has since remained between 300 and 370 annually.
The world’s most successful entrepreneurs often captivate us with their business acumen, vision, and relentless drive, but there’s one factor in the early lives of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison that many people overlook: they were all adopted. Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder, each grew up in adoptive families that provided stability, guidance, and emotional support. While adoption is not the sole reason for their extraordinary achievements, it may have shaped their resilience, ambition, creativity, and determination to succeed against the odds. These inspiring stories offer a glimpse into the unknown early lives of billionaires and highlight how early life experiences can influence lifelong success.
Steve Jobs: Parents who adopted him nurtured his creativity
Steve Jobs was born to Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian student pursuing a PhD, and Joanne Schieble, an American Catholic of Swiss-German descent. Because Joanne’s parents opposed the relationship and pregnancy, she opted for a closed adoption. The couple originally selected to adopt Jobs backed out after learning the baby was a boy. He was eventually adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a working-class couple who promised to save for his college education. Jobs was fiercely loyal to his adoptive parents, viewing them as his true family. Throughout his life, he often referred to his biological parents as “my sperm and egg bank.” The nurturing environment provided by Paul and Clara helped cultivate his creativity, curiosity, and relentless pursuit of innovation, which later defined his career at Apple and Pixar.
Jeff Bezos: From Jeffrey Jorgensen to Amazon founder
A three-month-old girl was reunited with her biological parents in Tripura’s Gomati district after police and childline officials foiled an alleged unlawful adoption attempt in Karbook subdivision.