The term “birth mother” is set to be dropped from legislation on adoption and tracing working its way through the Oireachtas, Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman will tell a parliamentary committee on Tuesday.

Mr O’Gorman is to give evidence on Tuesday afternoon to the joint committee on children, equality, disability integration and youth, which is carrying out pre-legislative scrutiny on the general scheme of the Birth Information and Tracing Bill.

In his opening statement, the Green Party Minister will say that he has met with a group of mothers to discuss the “deeply sensitive issue of the term”, which is used in the heads of the Bill.

“I am clear that a more suitable term is needed,” he will say, although no alternative term has yet been agreed. Mr O’Gorman has met with a group of mothers who feel the term is “reductive and hurtful”.

“Some find the term natural mother more appropriate, other prefer the term first mother,” he will say, noting that a survey of adopted people undertaken by the advocacy group Aitheantas finds that there is a preference for the term.

FRA’s Management Board elected Rick Lawson as its new Vice-Chair on 24 September. He will take office on 11 October.

Rick Lawson joined FRA’s Management Board as the Dutch member in October 2020. He is Professor of European Human Rights Law at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. His work covers fundamental rights in the European Union, as well as the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights.

Elise Barbé, a French Supreme Court of Appeal judge, continues as Chair of FRA’s Management Board.

The Management Board is FRA’s independent oversight body. It is responsible for adopting the agency’s multiannual Programming Document, and its annual Fundamental Rights Report. It monitors the Agency’s operations and adopts its budget. It also appoints FRA’s Director, as well as the members of its Scientific Committee.

The Management Board consists of one independent member per Member State, nominated for five years. Members have high-level responsibilities in national human rights institutions or other public or private sector organisations.

Paul was in his 80s when someone called to say she was his daughter, conceived in a fertility clinic with his sperm. The only problem? He’d never donated any

by Jenny Kleeman

Sat 25 Sep 2021 06.00 BST

For 40 years, Catherine Simpson thought she knew who she was: a nurse, a mother of three, a daughter and a sister. She looked like her mother, Sarah, but had the same temperament as her father, George: calm, unflustered, kind.

Then her father died. There was a dispute over his will, and that led her mother to call and tell her something that made the ground dissolve beneath her feet. George had had a vasectomy long before Catherine was born. She and her brother had been donor conceived in Harley Street using the sperm of two different anonymous men. George was not her biological father.

On Friday, September 24, 2021, the District Court of The Hague heard the proceedings on the merits of Trudy Scheele-Gertsen and Bureau Clara Wichmann against the State. During the at times emotional hearing, the Court offered several women the opportunity to tell their stories. The Court expects to rule in this case on December 15, 2021.

This case concerned the question of whether the State acted unlawfully towards Mrs Scheele-Gertsen and other mothers who renounced their child in the years 1956-1984. Distance mother Trudy Scheele-Gertsen held the Dutch State liable for the harm caused to her . Trudy says she was forced to give up her child for adoption in the 1960s, while she wanted to take care of him herself. Interest group Bureau Clara Wichmann supported the case by standing up for the interests of all women who have been separated from their child.

Invocation of statute of limitations

The State invokes the limitation period because this concerns a civil procedure.

The State says the case is time-barred because it happened so long ago. In addition, there is no evidence of wrongful conduct. In particular, the role of the Child Protection Board was often discussed. 'At the time, the Child Protection Board acted in good faith', says state lawyer Mette van Asperen. She refers to the existing renunciation and adoption files as objective evidence.

Parents forced to give up their babies for adoption in the 1950s, 60s and 70s are being asked to come forward to give evidence to a new investigation.

The Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights is to hold an inquiry into the forced adoption of babies of unmarried mothers during those years.

Committee chair Harriet Harman says it is a matter that affects the human rights of thousands of women.

One mother said she was told: "You won't be seeing this baby again."

The affected mothers said they were made to hand over their babies by doctors, nurses, social workers and churches.

Inquiry

The Joint Committee on Human Rights has launched a new inquiry to understand the experiences of unmarried women whose children were adopted between 1949 and 1976 in England and Wales. The inquiry will consider whether adoption processes respected the human rights, as we understand them now, of the mothers and children who experienced them, as well as the lasting consequences on their lives.

The inquiry will cover a range of practices that led to the children of unmarried mothers being adopted. The scope of the inquiry will specifically cover issues arising from cases that took place during the time period between the Adoption of Children Act 1949 and the Adoption Act 1976.

It will look at:

Whether the right to family life of unmarried mothers and their children, as we understand it now, respected at the time?

NAGPUR: A 16-year-old rape survivor’s two-month-old

daughter was allegedly sold off for Rs90,000 by a relative, on

the pretext of giving her in adoption. The baby, sold on

Tuesday, was traced by cops from Kotwali police station on

Thursday following day-long effort and much drama.

Trudy Scheele-Gertsen was forced to give up her son in 1968 because she was a single mother and is asking for recognition of what happened. About 15,000 Dutch women went through the same ordeal between 1956 and 1984

Ten days after giving birth to her son in February 1968, Trudy Scheele-Gertsen, a 22-year-old Dutch girl, left the foster home for single mothers run by Catholic nuns where she had kept him. Although she was without the baby, she was not going to abandon him. A nursing student, she wanted to pick him up as soon as she got a job and a house, but she didn't see him again for 48 years. Her parents did not want her back with the child, who she named Willem Jan, and despite their repeated protests she was forced to put him up for adoption. Trudy is 75 years old today and is one of about 15,000 women - called distant mothers.- who went through the same trance in the Netherlands between 1956 and 1984. This Friday she has sued the State in court for what happened: she wants it to be recognized that she was pressured by the authorities to give up her little one. The State Attorney argues that the case has prescribed and the pressure exerted could also be social and not only from the Administration.

"What happened is an indelible trauma, and the recognition that it was not our fault is a way to cope," said Trudy Scheele-Gertsen emotionally before the judges. “We were disqualified as people for not offering what was considered a stable family to the child, and there is a general feeling of guilt among those of us who go through this. Loneliness, because society separated us, and it is something that continues to happen today. For example, with women who are assaulted and blamed for what has happened to them. This should not prescribe ”, she added, already made a sea of ??tears. Years later, she had access to his complete file, where the Child Protection Service “tells a story that is not mine. It is assured that I did not go to see the child, and that I was in a meeting and signed the documents renouncing him from the beginning; and it is not true ”, he pointed out. He signed them years later, and to find out what happened to his son he had to ask his permission when he was of legal age to read thenotes corresponding to its adoption . She married and has three other children, and although she has been reunited with her firstborn, the pain is still alive.

Her lawyer, Lisa-Marie Klomp, has alleged that the State is responsible for this forced resignation because “it had an obligation to protect the mother, but she was excluded due to the fact that she was single. The mother and child were abandoned through the Protection of Minors, which prevented me from recovering the child with documents and a story that my client does not recognize as hers, ”he indicated. In 2017, the Dutch Radboud University published a study at the request of the Ministry of Justice, which estimated 15,000 Dutch children adopted in their own country between 1956 and 1984. Its conclusions indicated that “pressure from doctors, families of single mothers , social workers and other instances of the sector could be so strong that it prevented keeping them together ”.

Unheard stories

I give birth to myself through creation. (Amandine Gay)

Starting from an intimate testimony concerning her birth under X and her adoption, Amandine Gay draws the thread of a large, historical phenomenon with multiple challenges: transnational and transracial adoption. In A Chocolate Doll (La Découverte, 2021) , an essay crossed by Afro-feminist and decolonial theories, she addresses not only the historical context of international adoption but also its political context.

It is easier to get into political subjects that are sometimes very controversial by going first into the lived experience. (Amandine Gay)

Adoption cannot be considered a detailed subject over time. (Amandine Gay)

Looking back on her childhood and adolescence, Amandine Gay discusses the challenges that adoption poses to adopted people and their adopting families: dealing with uprooting, the search for identity that results from it, systemic racism and sometimes contradictory belonging. to two different communities.

An adoption break proposed by Minister of Welfare Wouter Beke , in which the intercountry adoption system had to be thoroughly revised, has not materialized. What will remain of the package of recommendations that should make adoption fraud-free remains to be seen.

Tens of thousands of foreign adopted children

What once started as an act of charity soon derailed into outright child trafficking.

Since the 1950s, tens of thousands of children have come to Belgium through international adoption. Their exact number is unknown. Until 2005, children with whom parents do not share a genetic link could be registered as 'own children'. Many adoptions also happened with the help of an uncle father in Verweggistan and were therefore not registered. How many adoptions took place will therefore always remain a mystery. What once started as an act of charity soon derailed into outright child trafficking.

In the 1970s, those first adopters were joined by pacifist hippies whose lifestyle suited them to save colored children. It was the backpackers who returned home with a load of didgeridoos under their arm after a trek through India.