The possibility for adoptive parents to have their child's parentage data removed from the Basic Registration Persons (BRP) must be ended. That is the view of the Christian Union (CU). The party will submit a proposal on Wednesday to remove this possibility from the law.

The adoptive parents can still choose, if their adopted child is younger than 16, to delete, for example, the name of one or both biological parents or the nationality of the child. According to the ChristenUnie, if this happens, an extra barrier will be raised for adopted children who want to know where they come from.

In addition, this authority for the parents is at odds with the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, the party states.

“Everyone has the right to know where he or she comes from,” says ChristenUnie MP Don Ceder. “When an adopted child embarks on that quest, there should be no unnecessary obstacles. The interests of the (adopted) child must be paramount during this process.”

The House of Representatives will debate the BRP on Thursday. The CU's proposal is also discussed.

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On Tuesday, Jaap Jonkers from Joure presented a petition to the permanent parliamentary committee for Justice and Security, for the preservation of international adoptions. The signatories do not agree with the decision of outgoing minister Sander Dekker to temporarily suspend international adoptions because of previous abuses.

Photo: ANP Photo

With the decision of Minister Dekker, adopted children are victims, say Jonkers and 13,500 other signatories. Jonkers himself was adopted from Bolivia as a little boy.

"The MPs were impressed. It is now up to them to make sure that the minister reconsiders his decision," says Jonkers. "Good questions were asked and compliments given."

Report

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On May 28, 2021, NCFA met via video conference with several African country adoption authority representatives to discuss transparent and ethical intercounty adoptions. I am currently a NCFA intern focused on communications and intercountry adoption policy, so I was very grateful to be invited to join the meeting to observe and learn, and to share a little bit about my family’s experience with intercountry adoption from an African country.

Meridian International Center arranged the meeting with representatives from Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Madagascar, Republic of Congo, Senegal, South Africa, Togo, and Zambia. The virtual meeting centered around the emotional, physical, and psychological benefits of family permanency, misconceptions about intercountry adoption, and the foundations for an ethical adoption program.

NCFA’s Director of Strategic Initiatives and Communications, Kristen Hamilton, began by reviewing the trends in intercountry adoption and why a strong adoption program is vital. Unfortunately, in recent years, intercountry adoption has significantly declined worldwide, while millions of children remain vulnerable or institutionalized globally. Adoption provides children and youth with the opportunity to achieve family permanency so that they can become healthy, thriving members of society.

NCFA President Chuck Johnson provided an overview of the Child Welfare Continuum, explaining that the continuum of care for a child does not begin with intercountry adoption. Ideally, the child could be reunified with a birthparent or a biological family member. If neither of those options are available, domestic adoption becomes an option. Finally, a child can be adopted by a family outside their country of birth. This range of care works best when there is common recognition that family permanency is always in the child’s best interest and should be the driving goal for all decisions.

Research has consistently shown myriad detrimental effects on children, who live in institutions and group care, including negatives impacts on their physical growth, emotional developments, and language acquisition. Inadequate caregiver attention delays or weakens children’s behavioral and social competencies. While group homes and orphanages can supply a child’s basic needs, they lack the resources to provide the type of nurture and attachment that only a permanency family unit can provide. Even with the best intentions, the majority of children living outside permanent, parental care experience a cycle of neglect and impaired development. Conversely, a permanent family, properly trained and supported, allows children the stability and care to thrive and grow.

Although the ministry recently announced that more than 36 million euros will be

made available for a national expertise center, but there is still no money being

made available for individual searches and DNA research, there is still some

progress in the possibilities to give the mothers in Indonesia and adoptees in the

Netherlands.

Expressing concerns about the illegal adoption of children orphaned by COVID-19, the Supreme

Court has directed State Governments and Union Territories to act against NGOs which are

indulging in illegal adoption."No adoption of affected children should be permitted contrary to

the provisions of the JJ Act, 2015.Invitation to persons for adoption of orphans...

Rani, who runs a tea stall, has six children to raise. Three of them are her own. The other three are children of her friend Sujita, who succumbed to Covid-19 six months ago. Bound by an unspoken commitment, Rani took Sujita’s children under her wing.

With children orphaned in the second wave of Covid-19 gaining national attention, Sujita’s children appeared on the radar of the district authorities. Rani was directed to produce them before the district’s child welfare committee (CWC). To her horror, the children were sent to the local shelter home on the grounds that Rani is unable to provide for them. Since then, she has been knocking on every door she can in the hope of getting them back. Rani’s agony brings into focus the issue of foster care versus institutional care. Fostering has yet to gain currency as an established form of child protection in India. It is a temporary arrangement in which the foster parents have only guardianship rights and are responsible for nurturing the child in a secure and personalised family set-up. The foster family exercises no control over the child’s assets, nor is it bound to extend inheritance rights over its own assets to the foster child. By contrast, in the system of adoption, the adopted child becomes a legal member of the family, entitled to property rights.

There is currently a global push for non-institutionalised care solutions for orphaned children, in acknowledgment of every child’s right to be raised in a family. A growing corpus of research highlights delayed physical and mental development in the often overcrowded and under-resourced shelter homes, and increased likelihood of social and behavioural problems.

India is home to nearly 30 million orphaned and abandoned children. The legal adoption of these children presents a two-fold challenge. Long-winding adoption procedures result in just a fraction of them finding a home. The annual adoptions facilitated by the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) are as low as 3,000-4,000. Secondly, there is a reluctance to adopt because of the onerous life-long commitment and enforceable legal rights of the adopted children. Foster care, by comparison, offers a more flexible ecosystem. It has the added security of regular follow-ups on the well-being of the child, compared to legal adoption where there is little or no follow-up. Denying foster care to parents below a certain economic threshold, as in Rani’s case, is not only ethically revolting but also legally untenable. In most countries, foster parents are financially supported by the state for the child’s care. There is great merit in extending state support to foster parents of modest means, especially when they can provide a socio-cultural environment similar to the one the child comes from. In India, too, district agencies receive annual funds to support fostering, which largely languish unutilised.

A legal framework to promote foster care in India was introduced by the central government through the enactment of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act. However, the Act left it to the states “to make rules for purposes of carrying out the scheme of foster care of children,” resulting in a sporadic and uneven implementation. Even today, several CWCs are not aware of the relevant legal provisions. Many avoid the responsibility of selecting foster families, approving childcare plans, and conducting mandatory monthly inspections to help check misuse of the foster system for abuse and exploitation.

'Retain adoption options from certain countries'

June 7, 2021-

Retain adoption opportunities from certain countries. COC Nederland and Meer dan Gewenst make that appeal in a letter to the House of Representatives, which will discuss the adoption policy on Wednesday 9 June.

UPDATE June 10:

The adoption ban for children from abroad may end in the autumn for certain countries. That is what Minister Dekker (Legal Protection) said on 9 June during the adoption debate in the House of Representatives. More than Desired, COC, other organizations and MPs had insisted on this.

The letter delivered to Måns Clausen brought startling news. It advised the Swedish actor that his biological mother in Ethiopia, long presumed dead, was alive and searching for him.

After a few months of correspondence and phone calls with newfound relatives, the actor flew from Stockholm to Addis Ababa to see his birth mother for the first time since his adoption as a baby by a Swedish couple.

“That was a surrealistic experience! It was wonderful, of course,” Clausen said of their reunion three years ago, starting at the airport in Addis Ababa. Now 46, he recalled his mother “was a stranger to me. But for her, I was, of course, her child. She had been looking for me for years.”

Headshot of Swedish actor Mans Clausen standing, hands in pockets, on a street.

Måns Clausen, a Swedish actor, reconnected with his Ethiopian birth mother and brother via the search program Beteseb Felega. (Photo by Mikael Melanson)