A girl child is not property that can be donated, the Bombay High Court (Aurangabad

Bench) observed during a bail hearing after it noticed a 'danpatra' according to which the

rape victim's father had allegedly donated her to a self-proclaimed godman.

Justice Vibha Kankanwadi directed the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) to ascertain if

the teen was fit to be declared as a 'child in need of care and protection' as contemplated

The life paths of adopted children since the post-war period have been researched at the Technical University of Dresden. A conversation about roots and well-being.

Adelheid Müller-Lissner conducted the interview with the historian BettinaWärmer from the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism at the Technical University of Dresden. Heater heads the project “Belonging. The History of Child Adoption 1945-2000”. The team is still looking for parents who adopted children between 1955 and 2000 and people who were adopted during this period as study participants (contact: adoptionsstudie@tu-dresden.de ). Further information on the research project at: https://hait.tu-dresden.de/ext/forschung/forschungsprojekt-5149/

Ms.Wärmer, one focus of your project on the history of adoptions in post-war Germany is the evaluation of individual adoption stories. What makes these stories interesting for historians?

They give us an idea of ??how social ideas about family, identity, origin and foreignness changed in the second half of the 20th century. The story of Anneli Schinkel, who came to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1982 as Kim Kyong Jo and later wrote the book “Seidentochter”, shows this on the subject of “foreign adoption”.

She was adopted as a baby in the early 1980s, came to Korea for the first time in 2005 at the invitation of the local government, met her biological parents there and dealt with the tension between biological origin and cultural imprint.

Women who were historically forced into giving up their children for adoption are being asked to share their experiences. An estimated 60,000 mothers in Scotland had babies adopted simply because they were unmarried.

Lisa Rolland was living in Edinburgh in 1982 when she became pregnant at the age of 16.

Still a schoolgirl, she remembers her GP's reaction to her pregnancy was to say: "Who's been a silly girl then?"

"I felt so shamed," she said. "[I thought] I have obviously been bad, I have done something bad. I felt very isolated."

She was unmarried and says the pressure on her to give up her newborn son for adoption was so great, she could not stop it.

Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas' baby born through surrogacy has restarted debates about the practice. Why do we think there's only one way to be a mother?

“Motherhood is a state of being which has, from time immemorial, been defined by a set of cliched, internalized words that are as powerful as they are evocative. Woman, womb, mother…. In our minds, the creation, sustenance and nurturing of life hinges on the blending of these words into synonymity.” I wrote these words in in the preface to my 2014 book Baby Makers: The Story Of Indian Surrogacy, and went on to ask whether being a “mother” necessarily includes the whole gamut of actions like conceiving, carrying and bearing a child. What if one cannot conceive or bear a child for some biological reasons, or chooses not to for personal reasons? Does that make her less of a woman? Can she not still be a mother?

A 31-year-old woman accused of leaving her baby in an underground waste container in Amsterdam-Slotermeer in 2014 should be convicted and sent to a prison cell for four years, the Public Prosecution Service (OM) said in court on Thursday. The prosecutor said that Todisoa R. deliberately tried to kill her one-month old daughter when the child was abandoned in an underground dumpster.

On Sunday, 26 October 2014, the child was found around 4:15 a.m. by a passerby who heard crying noises coming from within the waste bin on Fritz Conijnstraat. The police and fire brigade together managed to rescue the baby girl.

Nothing was known about the child’s birth parents, or how she ended up in the garbage, until nearly seven years later. During that time, she was adopted into another family. The police identified the mother, R., thanks to a fingerprint left on the bag in which the baby was found in 2014. Last May, Germany extradited the woman to the Netherlands.

Her attorney said that the R has an intellectual disability. Originally from Madagascar, R. moved to the Netherlands as an undocumented immigrant in 2014. She denied leaving her child in the dumpster later that year. She alleged an alternative scenario claiming that the father absconded with the child while R. was sleeping, and then came back to say that the girl was dead.

R said in court that she, "didn't throw Nomena in the trash." When explaining further, she added, "But I didn't do it. I did not do it. I only want a future for my children.” Her attorney said that there was not enough evidence to convict her and called for an acquittal.

There's some confusion, especially for two married women having a child. Does the non-birthing parent have to adopt to make it legal? And how a new law could fix it.

According to court, the state is not liable for the suffering of 'remote mothers'

The Child Protection Board has not acted unlawfully towards a group of 'remote mothers' in the last century. That is what the court in The Hague ruled in a case that women's rights organization Bureau Clara Wichmann and 75-year-old mother-in-law Trudy Scheele had brought against the Dutch state.

The women they represent had to give up their newborn child between 1956 and 1984, often against their will. This concerns approximately 13,000 to 14,000 women who often became pregnant without being married.

Not well informed

Scheele herself became pregnant in the sixties, while she was not married. She was sent by her family to the Catholic Paul Foundation in Oosterbeek, where she gave birth to a son in 1968. After she gave birth, she had to give her son up for adoption, although she didn't want to.

The District Court of The Hague has today rendered a decision in a case concerning the question of whether the Child Protection Board has acted unlawfully towards mothers in the Netherlands who, in the period 1956-1984, gave up their child against their will (remote mothers). . The case had been brought by the collective interest group Clara Wichmann, which stood up for a group of give-away mothers, and by one individual give-away mother. The court dismisses the claims.

Background

In the period between 1956 and 1984, it is estimated that between thirteen and fourteen thousand women in the Netherlands gave up one or more children for adoption. At the time, unmarried pregnant women were stigmatized as 'fallen women' because they had had sexual intercourse outside of marriage. Social attitudes have since changed significantly. It is difficult to comprehend with 'nowadays' how people thought about relinquishing a child in those days. The renunciation of adoption has deeply grieved the distance mothers. Many of them are still struggling with it. They want recognition for this suffering and that is why the claimants have started this procedure.

statute of limitations

It has been a long time since the women involved gave up their children. The State has therefore invoked limitation. The court is of the opinion that there are good reasons that the claims of the claimants are time-barred. But because it has not been established that the Council made errors that are legally culpable at the time, the court rejected the claims for that reason.

The DNA database for missing persons is a success. The National Institute of Criminology and Criminalistics (NICC) reported this on Wednesday. Since the database was founded four years ago, 273 new profiles have been added and in 21 cases the database has contributed to the identification of unknown bodies or body parts.

The DNA database was established on July 1, 2018 with the aim of identifying unknown bodies or finding traces of missing persons. There are three types of DNA profiles, explains Bieke Vanhooydonck of the NICC. "First, there are the unidentified bodies. In addition, traces of missing persons, such as teeth, are also added to the database. Finally, the DNA of relatives of missing persons is added."

So far, the database has been able to contribute to the identification of an unknown body in 21 cases. It concerns five profiles of relatives and thirteen trace profiles of a missing person.

The database also works together with the Missing Persons Cell. "The database is relatively small, but very effective, as it turns out," says Vanhooydonck. For example, the database would also have led to a breakthrough in files with few indications.

Operation Graveyard

The couple has named their youngest daughter Naina Hope Mylius.

It is said that not all families are based on blood relations. Nothing embodies this more than Johonna Jo Mylius and her husband Shane Michael Mylius. The Texas couple faced lengthy paperwork, visa issues, and pandemic restrictions for more than two years to finish their daughter’s adoption process.

The Mylius’s wanted to adopt a second child after the birth of their daughter Kaila. Their search brought them to India where they matched with Naina in October 2019 when she was just 18 months old. Naina was a premature baby and was hearing-impaired. She was abandoned in a newborn intensive care unit. However, her medical complications did not stop Mylius from going ahead with the adoption.

They were set to obtain Naina’s custody in March 2020 but then the whole world went under a lockdown due to Covid-19 and all operations were put on hold. After anxiously waiting for many months, they got Naina’s custody in December 2020 and were set to travel to India in February 2021 to receive their daughter.

Unfortunately, a week before they were set to leave for India, it snowed too much in Texas that put all operations at a halt. The couple was yet to receive their visa from the Indian consulate. Explaining the precarious situation, Johonna Mylius wrote in an essay published on Love What Matters, “We were set to fly out of Houston on Wednesday. Saturday and Sunday, it snowed and no mail was delivered. Monday was President’s Day so, no mail was running. Tuesday, roads still icy, we were out of electricity at home, phone lines were down, and the Indian consulate wasn’t answering.”