Fabienne (39) is ten days old when she is adopted, from Sri Lanka to the Netherlands. At 21 she goes looking for her biological mother. She finds her mother Sita in Colombo. The woman tells Fabienne that she has another brother and sister. Her brother lives with Sita; her sister has also been given up for adoption. Once back in the Netherlands, Fabiënne soon finds her sister Victoria. Two years ago, Maria from Sweden reported to Fabienne. Maria thinks she is a half sister. The same mother is on her adoption papers. A DNA test should clarify the current situation.

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Having a child with strangers. A Belgian reality TV show from the private Flemish channel VTM is widely talked about among our neighbors: it proposes to bring together candidates who cannot have children but who want them. Its purpose is to help people conceive and raise a child with others without a romantic relationship. The first issue - a test episode - aired Monday evening, October 18.

The title is clear Ik wil een kind - translate "I want a child". The symbol of the show: the presenter riding a stork. The tone is set: you want a baby but you can't for medical or social reasons, so we will put you in touch with others in the same situation.

This is a bit the principle of dating programs such as Love is in the meadow or Married at first sight. Nevertheless, here there is absolutely no question of love or romanticism between candidates, but of bringing them together so that they form co-parents ... What the show calls "conscious co-parenting" or "co -parenting " -programmed parenthood "

What is co-parenting?

We are not talking about adopting or in vitro fertilization, but about conceiving a child and raising him together, without having a romantic relationship. These future parents will not necessarily be two. Parenthood can bring together two, three, four different people: a couple with a single person or two couples together, heterosexual or homosexual it doesn't matter. All will have to become the child's co-parents .

Ever since I entered what can generously be called my “mid-30s,” doctors have asked about my pregnancy plans at every appointment. Because I’m career-minded and generally indecisive, I’ve always had a way of punting on this question, both in the doctor’s office and elsewhere. Well, we can always adopt, I’ll think, or say out loud to my similarly childless and wishy-washy friends. Adoption, after all, doesn’t depend on your oocyte quality. And, as we’ve heard a million times, there are so many babies out there who need a good home.

But that is not actually true. Adopting a baby or toddler is much more difficult than it was a few decades ago. Of the nearly 4 million American children who are born each year, only about 18,000 are voluntarily relinquished for adoption. Though the statistics are unreliable, some estimates suggest that dozens of couples are now waiting to adopt each available baby. Since the mid-1970s—the end of the so-called baby-scoop era, when large numbers of unmarried women placed their children for adoption—the percentage of never-married women who relinquish their infants has declined from nearly 9 percent to less than 1 percent.

In 2010, Bethany Christian Services, the largest Protestant adoption agency in the U.S., placed more than 700 infants in private adoptions. Last year, it placed fewer than 300. International adoptions have not closed the gap. The number of children American parents adopt each year from abroad has declined rapidly too, from 23,000 in 2004 (an all-time high) to about 3,000 in 2019.

Plenty of children who aren’t babies need families, of course. More than 100,000 children are available for adoption from foster care. But adoptive parents tend to prefer children who are what some in the adoption world call “AYAP”—as young as possible. When I recently searched AdoptUSKids, the nationwide, government-funded website for foster-care adoptions, only about 40 kids under age 5, out of the 4,000 registered, appeared in my search. Many of those 40 had extensive medical needs or were part of a sibling group—a sign that the child is in even greater need of a stable family, but also a more challenging experience for their adoptive parents.

At a glance, this shortage of adoptable babies may seem like a problem, and certainly for people who desperately want to adopt a baby, it feels like one. But this trend reflects a number of changing social and geopolitical attitudes that have combined to shrink the number of babies or very young children available for adoption. Over the past few decades, many people—including those with strong commitments to the idea of infant adoption—have reconsidered its value to children. Though in the short term this may be painful for parents who wish to adopt infants, in the long term, it might be better for some children and their birth families. Many babies in the developing world who once would have been brought to America will now be raised in their home country instead. And Americans who were planning to adopt may have to refocus their energies on older, vulnerable foster children—or change their plans entirely. Infant adoption was once seen as a heartwarming win-win for children and their adoptive parents. It’s not that simple.

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) The Wendy's Wonderful Kids program works to find children and teens a permanent family. It's funded by the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. Now, the program is expanding by way of a partnership with the Department of Child Services (DCS) and the Villages of Indiana. So far the program has found homes for 160 kids in Indiana.

There are currently only three adoption recruiters in the program. The expansion will allow for more recruiters to be hired so the adoption process can be sped up. The number of recruiters will increase to thirty. Families who are looking to adopt and kids in need of a family will all benefit from the expansion. The Director of Foster Care and Adoption Service for the Villages of Indiana, Nicole Schultz, shares the impact the increase in recruiters will have on local families.

"But obviously with three recruiters, they're spread thin. But, if we can expand that to thirty we can be in the thousands for adoptions in Indiana" says Schultz.

Melissa Crace and her husband Ryan adopted their son Shane in 2019. They went through the Wendy's Wonderful Kids program to adopt their son. Crace says the process was made simple thanks to the support and guidance from a recruiter. Crace faced fertility issues and turned to adoption to make her dream of becoming a mother a reality.

"Shane's only been in our family for four years, but it feels like he's always been there. And even on the hard days because of autism and just life in general, I don't know where our lives would be without him" says Crace.

Directorate of Child Protection bans celebrations, birthdays and such, of outsiders at child care centres

Have you any idea what children at child care centres or orphanages may feel while you celebrate your birthday

or anniversary with them? Perhaps you simply make them realise they don’t have what you do.

Children at these facilities — where some of them don’t even know their birth dates — ask caretakers when their

turn would come to celebrate.

AN OIREACHTAS COMMITTEE has been told that people who were illegally adopted as children feel they are forced to ‘continuously break the law’ because the birth certificates they use contain false information.

As part of its pre-legislative scrutiny of the Birth Information and Tracing bill, the Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth today heard views from a number of organisations.

The legislation will enshrine in law a right for adopted people to access their birth certificates, and birth and early life information.

Representatives from the In it together – Who Am I? group told the committee that each of their birth certificates “contain false information making them illegal, not just incorrect”.

There are 151 officially recognised cases of false birth registrations, but the group said DNA discoveries suggest this number is higher.

To Kyle Belz-Thomas, an ideal life included a noisy house full of children. “Kyle is a strong, determined, caring man who would do anything to protect and support his family,” he once wrote of himself. He grew up as the youngest of three in New Baltimore, a suburb of Detroit on the shore of Lake St. Clair. His mother, who comes from a large Italian family, sent him to an all-boys Catholic high school, where he felt out of place and was teased regularly. When Kyle was twenty, he moved into his own apartment and came out to his family; to his relief, they were accepting. In 2014, on a dating app, he met Adam, an artist with a day job as a private-client banker, and spent the next year trying to get him to go on a date. Adam finally told him, “Come and find me, I’ll be outside mowing my lawn,” giving him only an approximate location. A week or so later, they went out for dinner and drinks. “He was nice, and he cared, and he was interested in what I did,” Adam told me recently. In 2016, they got married and moved with their three dogs into a four-bedroom house on more than two acres in a rural area outside Detroit. Kyle was thirty-five and working as an I.T. manager. He wanted to adopt a child in the next year. “We were both getting older, and, being a gay couple, we figured it would take a while to be matched with a baby,” Kyle said. “And we’d heard horror stories.”

They started researching adoption agencies. Then a friend of Kyle’s mentioned that a former middle-school classmate of theirs named Tara Lee was running her own adoption business. In January, 2017, he and Adam drove to a nearby Tim Hortons to meet her.

Lee, who was thirty-five, was waiting for them at a table with a manila file folder of paperwork. She was small, with shiny black hair, dark eyes, and a nose ring; her voice was high, like a child’s. She explained that she was a licensed social worker with a boutique adoption agency called Always Hope. She didn’t look or speak like the staff members from other agencies; she cursed and had tattoos running down both arms, which gave her a folksy air that she said made it easier to bond with young pregnant women, who were often dealing with addiction, poverty, and other challenges. During their meeting, Adam noticed an expensive-looking watch on Lee’s wrist that seemed at odds with her image.

Many adoption agencies are affiliated with churches that disapprove of gay couples; Lee said that she had never worked with a same-sex couple, but that she had no objection to it. “It felt like a comfortable fit,” Adam recalled. He and Kyle signed the paperwork that day and gave Lee a deposit of twenty-five hundred dollars. They prepared a twenty-two-page book about their family, filled with descriptions and photos of their home and of their parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews. One image showed Kyle cradling a newborn; another showed Adam in his art studio, where he makes custom figurines of people’s pets.

Lee began sending them profiles of potential birth mothers, or “first mothers,” as they’re sometimes called. In April, 2017, Lee sent an e-mail about Angel, whose due date was July 8th. After a horrific sexual assault, Lee said, Angel had become pregnant, and was now determined to give up the baby. She was twenty-one and already had a two-year-old son, whom she was raising on her own. Lee encouraged Kyle and Adam to send their book to Angel, and they were thrilled when Lee told them that Angel had chosen them as adoptive parents. The total cost of the adoption would be around twenty-five thousand dollars, which included eight thousand dollars for Angel’s living expenses. According to state regulations, those could include housing, food, and medical treatment.

The group of parents, who have reached out to the ministry through an advocacy group known as ‘Adoption Action Group’, include both resident and non-resident Indians

A group of 250 prospective adoptive parents (PaPs) and adoptive parents has written to Union women and child development minister Smriti Irani, seeking various reforms in the existing adoption norms in the country so that the process becomes faster and transparent.

While PaPs are those who have registered with the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) — a statutory body under the ministry of women and child development (WCD) — and are yet to receive a child, the adoptive parents are those who have already received a child through the authority. The group of parents, who have reached out to the ministry through an advocacy group known as ‘Adoption Action Group’, include both resident and non-resident Indians.

In a letter dated October 7, the group highlighted several issues, including the delay in getting referrals (notification issued after CARA finds a suitable match for any PaP), lack of information and transparency from CARA, lack of clarity on the new processes or plans adopted during the pandemic, increased threat of illegal adoptions and trafficking of children orphaned by Covid-19, among others.

“These issues have a direct impact on the process and current waiting time for PaPs...From an already long wait of two and a half years, we are now into a three-year-long process and heading towards a waiting period of more than three years,” the group said in the letter.

Without naming Pawar or his kin, the tax authority said evidence gathered by the department during the raids carried out at about 70 premises across Mumbai, Pune, Baramati, Goa and Jaipur has revealed “several prima-facie unaccounted and benami transactions”.

The Income Tax (I-T) Department on Friday said it has unearthed unaccounted income worth Rs 184 crore after its searches on October 7 at premises of two real estate groups in Mumbai linked to the family of Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar.

Without naming Pawar or his kin, the tax authority said the evidence gathered by it during the searches carried out at about 70 premises spread across Mumbai, Pune, Baramati, Goa and Jaipur revealed “several prima-facie unaccounted and benami transactions”.

“Incriminating documents evidencing unaccounted income of about Rs 184 crore of the two groups have been found,” said the tax agency in a statement on Friday.

On October 7, the tax agency had searched a firm where Pawar’s son, Parth, is a director; a few firms owned by Pawar’s sisters; two real estate firms linked to Pawar; and premises of directors of four sugar mills across the state reportedly indirectly linked to the Pawar family.

Does everyone have a right to know their biological parents?

Damian Adams grew up knowing that his parents had used an anonymous sperm donor to conceive him, and as a teen, he was even proud of this identity. He considered donating to help other families have children. Becoming a father himself, however, changed everything. When his daughter was born 18 years ago, he cradled her in his arms, and he instantly saw himself in her and her in himself. He felt a biological connection so powerful that it made him reconsider his entire life up until then. “What I’d had there with my daughter,” he says, “was one thing I had been missing in my life.” He felt the need to know where he came from.

Adams, a biologist in Australia, would spend years searching for his biological father, running into one dead end after another. Meanwhile, he also began campaigning to end donor anonymity for others like him. In 2016, he and fellow activists pushed the state of Victoria to retroactively abolish anonymity for all sperm donors. (A previous law had already banned it from 1998 onward.) Donor-conceived people in the United Kingdom have also successfully campaigned to ban anonymous sperm donation. In the United States, where anonymous donation is still technically offered, some donor-conceived people are asserting a right to know their genetic origins and even to contact their biological parents, who may or may not welcome the surprise.

All of this was unimaginable a few decades ago. Doctors used to routinely advise parents to keep the use of a sperm donor secret—even from their own children—and this silence reinforced a sense of shame about the practice. Today, parents are strongly encouraged to tell the truth; moreover, DNA tests mean they couldn’t hide it even if they wanted to. As more people find out they are donor-conceived, they are in turn finding one another: They are gathering in online communities such as “We Are Donor Conceived” and other Facebook support groups catering to a mix of donors, parents, donor-conceived people, and others who have learned that their parents are not who they thought they were. There are also several podcasts, at least two magazines, and even training courses for therapists who work with people in this situation. The shared identity that connects this online community is small by proportion but large in raw numbers. An estimated 30,000 to 60,000 children conceived with donor sperm are born in the U.S. every year, though that statistic may well be an underestimate. The fertility industry doesn’t have to keep records, so the true number is unknown.

In learning more about their own conception, some donor-conceived people have been shocked by the lack of transparency in the industry that created them. They have been disturbed to find, in some cases, that they have dozens of half siblings from the same donor, that doctors have secretly impregnated patients with their own sperm, or that donors have lied about themselves to sperm banks—all at least partially because donation was anonymous. Now donor-conceived people like Adams are questioning the need for any secrecy at all. In a forthcoming book called Uprooted, Peter Boni, who learned he was donor-conceived at age 49, lays out a “Donor-Conceived Bill of Rights” that demands, first and foremost, the end of anonymous donations and includes access to a donor’s medical records, limits on the number of offspring per donor, and consequences for outright fertility fraud. “Can you point to any federal law,” Boni asked me rhetorically, “that protects the rights of the donor-conceived child?”