Wouter Beke argues for a general adoption break, but immediately receives criticism from Flemish coalition partners: "This is rash and ill-considered"

Minister of the Family Wouter Beke (CD&V) thinks an adoption break of two years is necessary. This is apparent from a memorandum that Beke will present to the Flemish government next week and which could view Het Laatste Nieuws. Beke assists a number of experts who have completed a report on intercountry adoption after two years and for whom such an adoption break is necessary. Bad idea, say coalition partners N-VA and Open Vld.

It took a lot of work, but the report was finally delivered. And just like in the Netherlands, the experts here immediately throw a bomb on the table. The current system of intercountry adoption is not good, according to them, and urgently needs to be adapted. According to the experts, adoption agencies have become dependent on subsidies that came with the adoptions. The more adoptions, the more money it raised. And that, they say, has led to “mistakes and malpractice” that many children have become victims of.

So it must be different. Starting with putting the best interests of the child first instead of that of the parents. According to the experts, intercountry adoption, where the child is removed from its cultural and religious environment, is not one of them. It should therefore only be possible if no alternative can be found in your own country.

“Immediate Shutdown”

Inter-Country Adoptions: Delhi High Court Asks Centre To Submit its Report On A Permanent Mechanism To Deal With Inter-Country Adoptions

The Delhi High Court has directed the Secretary, Ministry of Women and Child Development,

Government of India to file a report before it regarding the manner and mode of creating a

permanent mechanism to deal with inter-country adoptions under Hindu Adoptions &

Maintenance Act, both direct and indirect, within a period of two months.

Figures from Statistic Finland show that the pandemic did not affect international adoption in Finland in 2020 and 82 children born abroad were adopted last year which is an increase of 3 children compared to the year before.

Out of the 82 children, Thailand remains a popular choice for Finnish families looking to adopt and a total of 23 children from Thailand were adopted in 2020. 12 Russian children and 11 children born in the Philippines were also amongst the 82 children adopted in Finland last year. Thailand has also been the most common adoption country in previous years. The number of children adopted from Russia increased significantly from previous years.

Domestic adoptions, on the other hand, declined steadily in 2020. A total of 211 children born in Finland were adopted last year which is 80 fewer than in 2019. According to Laura Lipasti, chief actuary at Statistics Finland, this is partly explained by the new Maternity Act which makes it possible to recognize two mothers for a child born through assisted reproduction even before the child is born and this has reduced the need for adoptions within families.

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In recent years, more and more intercountry adoptees have had questions about their adoption history and the adoption procedure.

These questions came to the surface both through stories in the press and through direct reporting to the Flemish Center for Adoption. In order to respond to the various questions and concerns of adoptees, the then Flemish Minister for Welfare, Public Health and the Family, Jo Vandeurzen, decided in 2019 to appoint an independent research panel of experts . The expert panel was commissioned to conduct a study into intercountry adoption practice in the past with the aim of revising the current procedure and thus providing adopted children with more guarantees.

In August and September 2021, the expert panel shared its final findings and recommendations with the competent Minister of Welfare, Family, Public Health and Poverty Reduction, Wouter Beke, and with the Flemish Government.

You can also view the reports yourself.

Final report

In recent years, more and more intercountry adoptees have had questions about their adoption history and the adoption procedure.

These questions came to the surface both through stories in the press and through direct reporting to the Flemish Center for Adoption. In order to respond to the various questions and concerns of adoptees, the then Flemish Minister for Welfare, Public Health and the Family, Jo Vandeurzen, decided in 2019 to appoint an independent research panel of experts . The expert panel was commissioned to conduct a study into intercountry adoption practice in the past with the aim of revising the current procedure and thus providing adopted children with more guarantees.

In August and September 2021, the expert panel shared its final findings and recommendations with the competent Minister of Welfare, Family, Public Health and Poverty Reduction, Wouter Beke, and with the Flemish Government.

You can also view the reports yourself.

Final report

Here is some career advice by Alex Yuster, for our non-retired readers, based on experience! For those of us who are retired: Does it ring a bell?

Early career: make note of how your supervisors and other colleagues further along in their careers treat others. You’ll surely notice this anyway, and discuss it with your friends over coffee or a beer from time to time. Remember what you like, and what you don’t, about how these colleagues treat others – so you can apply these lessons when the time comes for you to lead others.

I’ve had mentors to whom I’m forever grateful; I’ve seen generosity and openness, and colleagues who have encouraged everyone to contribute. There have also been moments of humiliation or worse. You can learn a lot about leadership from all these experiences.

Mid career: I may have joined a long time ago, but some things about UNICEF culture do seem to remain the same. You often have room to innovate, to create your job, to convince others of a good idea. If you feel there is something that needs to be done within your area of professional responsibility, you should do all you can to make it happen. Yes, flexibility is important, but so is tenacity and the power of our convictions. My proudest accomplishment over my entire career [1] came from acting on such a conviction, finding and working with allies, often in other organizations, and keeping my focus to make it happen – often despite naysayers. A few others were the result of bold, quick actions. My few regrets involve instances when I did not act, was dissuaded, or gave up on an idea I knew mattered.

Mid/late career: As we advance up the career ladder in UNICEF, whether in management or technical areas (I did both), it becomes more and more important to focus on empowering others. This starts early on – from the first time you supervise even one person, and the responsibility just grows. While I find it personally rewarding, it is also the way to achieve the most. I guess this is obvious, but I wanted to state it here, since I would say that during my two final postings – as a Rep and then a PD section chief, most of my most significant professional contributions were a result of supporting the ideas and ambitions of my colleagues.

Kinjal V Shah started this petition

We are a Jain family from Gujarat living in Berlin, Germany where the father is posted on work as a software engineer. We are all Indian citizens, including our child.

Our child, a baby girl breast feeding child, has been in the custody of German authorities for the last 8 months (since September 2021). We need your help and support to help get our child to be repatriated to India under the care of her maternal family.

Our daughter was found with a serious injury which parents did not understand and took her to the doctor about. Parents' were being asked to explain the injury. Initially, parents themselves were confused & did not know what happened. Later the paternal grandmother informed that she had accidentally caused the injury while visiting us the child in Berlin.

The parents' immediately informed lawyer and the German authorities. The grandmother has submitted a detailed affidavit on what happened in the German Court.

Introduction

1Why has international adoption become a frequent recourse to allow couples or wealthy individuals in the countries of the North to satisfy their desire for a child? What does the transfer of children from poor countries teach us about the new international division of social reproduction? And what is the leeway mothers who decide to give up a child for adoption 1 ? Answering these questions involves knowing the experiences and feelings of mothers / parents who have separated from a child. With the exception of a few testimonies published in the North (among others Jones 2000; Kelly 2005; 2009), the lived stories of mothers living in the South have not attracted attention. Previous research conducted in India (Bos 2008) allowed - for the first time - to document the decision-making process of young pregnant women faced with the following alternative: raising their unborn child themselves or abandoning it for adoption. A two-year stay in the field and meticulous ethnographic work were necessary to identify these mothers and to create safe and confidential meeting conditions. Indeed, mothers who decide to abandon a child for adoption, in India and elsewhere, are often stigmatized and insist on secrecy. The difficulty of conducting research among mothers / parents who have abandoned a child for adoption and the taboo surrounding this "social group" (which is not one) explains the lack of research highlighting their perspective2 .

2In fact, given the difficulty of accessing mothers, most of the existing research is carried out among professionals and organizations that provide support to mothers in distress or children placed in institutions. The available knowledge consists above all of an institutional discourse onthe mothers. These surveys propagate the image of irresponsible or deviant mothers, unable to raise their children (Mykytyn-Gazziero 2006; 2010; Bos, Reysoo and Dambach 2013). This dominant discourse on an alleged “good motherhood” and a “responsible parentage” is the reflection of moral values ??conveyed by the professionals of social assistance or child protection from the middle classes. They generally defend bourgeois norms of marriage and conjugal sexuality. Any mother who, for a variety of reasons, does not correspond to the dominant norm of the “decent mother” is confronted with mechanisms of social exclusion and actions aimed at getting her back on the right path.

3Our contribution in this volume on the international transfer of social reproduction aims to present some of our ethnographic data, more particularly those that have been collected in Vietnam, in order to show how the construction of femininity and gender inequalities shape the field of international adoption. Indeed, the scope of international adoption includes the transfer of children from poor countries, born to certain categories of mothers, to rich countries and certain categories of couples / foster families. If, at the quantitative level, the number of children who migrate within the framework of intercountry adoption - 40,000 per year (United Nations Population Division 2009, 74) - is not significant in the global statistics of the migration,

4The questions underlying our contribution relate to the sociological profile of mothers who consent to abandon a child for adoption and the circumstances in which they make this decision. It is not uncommon to hear that children adopted by wealthy families in the West come from poor mothers without agency and unable to raise their children on their own. This image ignores complex social dynamics as well as hidden power relations.

This is an adoption story that might just stay with you for a very long time.

A woman has shared her heartbreaking story of adopting a baby girl only to lose her in a few days because her birth parents had a change of mind.

Sarah Howell, a registered nurse by profession, had already endured the biggest heartache of her life when doctors told her she had just a 1% chance of conceiving naturally. But the inability to bear a child did not deter her spirits of becoming a parent someday.

After having approached an adoption agency with her husband, Sarah was delighted to have matched a newborn. The joy for the family was overwhelming because Sarah had miraculously fallen pregnant at the same time.

But just five days after they did all the adopted the baby from the hospital and took her home, the child's birth parents came calling and said they had changed their mind.

Ayear back, a 2 year, 3-month-old baby was kidnapped and sold to a Hindu couple who did not have children. And now the baby is reunited with biological parents and it also has Hindu parents who took care of the baby for more than a year.

In November 2020, a Muslim child goes missing from the Byatarayanapura police limits of Bengaluru. A missing case was filed, but the police could not solve the case then. But recently police started reinvestigating the case and new evidence and facts surfaced. Based on a tip-off, police managed to arrest one Karthik, who allegedly kidnapped the baby and sold it for Rs 60,000.

Karthik had a girlfriend near the boy’s home in Byatarayanapura. Karthik was a habitual offender and earlier arrested in a bike theft case and sent to judicial custody. After being released on bail, Karthik started a vegetable shop in Hosur, on the outskirts of Bengaluru which is in Tamil Nadu.

One of his friends told him that a couple who doesn’t have a child is looking for adoption. Karthik had noticed a baby playing near his girlfriend’s house in Byatarayanapura. Then he met the childless couple and told them that, a baby is orphaned after both of its parents died due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The couple trusted him and agreed to get the child.

Later, he abducted the baby and took it to Hosur. The couple was so happy that they got the baby and they asked Karthik for documents for legal adoption. Karthik said he will get it the next day, but he never returned to the couple.