Ihe question of access to knowledge of personal origins entered social and political debates a few decades ago in many countries of Europe and North America, concerning adoptive family situations, which became transnational at the end of the XX th century, then families resulting from assisted procreation involving a third party donor. Carried by the claims of movements militant for the rights of people born in secret or abandoned, then by the demands expressed by people conceived by gamete donation, it called upon knowledge in psychology, the opinions of lawyers and the lighting of social sciences while leading to lively societal exchanges and several parliamentary debates. The legislative changes that have occurred in recent decades bear witness to the growing importance recognized in origins in conceptions of identity, but they also lead to new questions about the limits of kinship.

2Based on the case of France, we propose, in this article, to return to the way in which the question of origins was first manifested by issues relating to fundamental rights, linking protection of children and construction of personal identities. , then to consider its effects on the transformations of kinship and its borders, seen from the angle of anthropology. What forms of links can it give rise to, and to what extent do these transform the relational environment of the people concerned?

(Dis)placed children, adoption and origins

The 2002 law and the CNAOP

3In France, as in the United States a little earlier, claims for access to personal origins emerged in the field of abandoned childhood and adoption during the last decades of the 20th century . They echo old situations: the history of Public Assistance traces the secrets and silences imposed on foster children

Network meeting 17 June 2023

Meet & Greet for Haitian adoptees (17+)

Meeting, connecting and sharing Haitian roots

Date : June 17, 2023

Room open : 3:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Lost between two continents, Priyangika starts a quest to uncover the truth about her adoption.

Adopted from Sri Lanka to Norway at only seven weeks old, Priyangika has always longed for her biological family.

She travels to Sri Lanka to fill in the missing pieces of her identification papers, her family history and her broken heart. But finding her birth mother does not bring her the peace of mind she is searching for. Instead, a need to uncover the secrets of her past leads her to an investigation of the complexity of the international adoption process.

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The first violence that affects a newborn baby is the name that he or she or them never chose themselves. There will be much more after that: potty training, learning to walk, talk, compulsory schooling, et cetera. It is best to change a first name later in life. My sister did, but it only helped a little. I run into her every year, just this week at the Javaplein in Amsterdam. She sits there forever being 29 years old, I walk up to her expectantly, it's now or never, and as I hear myself talk I know it's in vain.

Me: "Do you know me. We know each other, don't we?” and I know the answer the moment I ask the question. No. A pretty young woman, ethnically mixed, with a head of curly hair and some freckles on her nose. Elsie. My sister. Already 30 years dead. Later in life she called herself Tilasmi, a name given to her by the Baghwan. Still later I was allowed to say Elsje again, and I still do that in my mind.

Sister was also adopted, she was Surinamese/Curacaos/Indonesian and Dutch. A moksi, a mix. Was calling her 'Elsje' necessarily a colonial act of my parents? I do not believe it. I know a very Surinamese lady called Els. 'Kwame' is not for everyone. Parents appropriate a child, especially culturally, and I wouldn't know how else to do it.

Now I read Trouw columnist Babah Trawally, and I do so more often, usually with pleasure. This week he wrote: “You cannot adopt a black African child and then call her Wietske or Tjitske. This is like writing a scientific book without citing the source.”

Would it? Raising a child has nothing to do with writing a science book. 'Cultural appropriation', to put it in good Dutch, is even a necessity in education. “Cling, bonding,” my therapist used to yell.

The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 sought to keep Native children in tribal communities. The Supreme Court may change that this spring.

Childhood photos of Chris Stearns, who was born a Navajo, but was raised by white parents in New Jersey. One photograph of him, at about age 3, shows him wearing red overalls. The other shows him with his adoptive parents.

Childhood photos of Chris Stearns, who was born a Navajo, but was raised by white Evangelical parents in New Jersey. Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

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The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 sought to keep Native children in tribal communities. The Supreme Court may change that this spring.

Childhood photos of Chris Stearns, who was born a Navajo, but was raised by white parents in New Jersey. One photograph of him, at about age 3, shows him wearing red overalls. The other shows him with his adoptive parents.

Childhood photos of Chris Stearns, who was born a Navajo, but was raised by white Evangelical parents in New Jersey. Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

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On May 13, BCNN issued a call in Trouw on behalf of 36 organizations to give children with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries a home, instead of a home.

The full opinion article:

'On May 15, the international day of the family, worldwide attention is drawn to the importance of a family and family for the upbringing of children. Worldwide, an estimated six million children grow up in children's homes and not with their own families. A substantial part of this group of children has a disability: physical, mental or both.

Children with a disability are much better off if they can grow up in a family or with relatives. We therefore call on everyone to no longer maintain homes, but to support organizations that offer help to children with disabilities and their families.

Why is taking care of children with a disability in a home not a good idea? Children are disadvantaged and damaged by living in a home. The United Nations, renowned scientists and many development organizations are unanimous: even if there is good care, children in homes are damaged. Children suffer further delays in physical growth and cognitive development, they develop separation anxiety, develop attachment problems and develop low self-confidence. This is due to the lack of individual attention from permanent caregivers who are always there for a child.

Another 237 cases will be looked into by the commission, which had already begun a probe into 34 cases in December 2022

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Korea plans to investigate the adoption process in 237 cases between the 1960s and 1990s involving South Korean children suspected of having been adopted overseas under false pretenses.

This second decision to initiate an investigation comes after a prior one made in December of last year. Among those whose adoptions are being investigated is the US citizen William Vorhees, whose story was shared in a recent Hankyoreh report on fraudulent adoptions.

According to the Hankyoreh’s investigation on Tuesday, the commission plans to make a decision as early as June on initiating a second investigation for possible human rights violations and abuses of public authority in the overseas adoptions of 237 South Korean children.

Between August and December 2022, 372 applicants and the organization Danish Korean Rights Group (DKRG), which is the world’s largest Korean adoptee community, submitted investigation requests to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which made an initial decision in December to investigate 34 of those cases.

On Sunday, VG revealed illegal adoptions from South Korea. On Monday, adoptee Uma Feed (40) reported the state and the adoption broker Verdens barn for human trafficking and knowledge of document forgery.

On Monday afternoon, adoptee Uma Feed reported the Norwegian state for illegal adoption practices.

The report follows VG's revelations about illegal adoptions from South Korea to Norway.

After several years of searching, Feed (40) has recently found his biological parents in South Korea. The answer came when she got a hit in a DNA database .

The parents in South Korea have said that they did not know that their daughter had been adopted away, and that they had been looking for her since she was ten days old.

When Eun Ae Koh was 8 months old, she was adopted from her birthplace in Korea by two white Americans. Overnight, she gained two loving parents, three older brothers, and an older sister and spent her childhood and teen years growing up in rural Illinois, about three and a half hours south of Chicago, not far off from fields of soybeans and corn. With her parents’ older biological children already grown up and moved out, it wasn’t until the pair adopted a second child, from China, a decade later, that Koh saw anyone who looked like her at home.

“Growing up, I was really only ever around white people,” says Koh, now a 30-something Washington, D.C.-based artist. “That’s what my town looked like, that’s what my school looked like, that’s what my family looked like. There was no exposure to anything Korean at all. I always felt different.”

Koh is far from alone. After a rise in Asian adoptees in the US in the 1990s, many of these children are now in their 20s and 30s and dealing with the mental health impacts of growing up in white families who didn’t resemble them, and were unable to guide them through the unique experience of growing up a person of color in America. Today, they’re finding solace in their own communities and are working to create new systems that can help future cross-cultural adoptees walk an easier path.

The vast majority of Asian adoptees in the US born in China can be attributed to 1991, when China launched its international adoption program, through which adoptive parents were led to believe that adoptees had been found abandoned – whether at orphanages, or on the streets. In reality, China’s one-child policy and a preference for boys led to a mass of abandoned infant girls. Since, roughly 110,000 children have been adopted from China globally, according to Kerry O'Halloran’s 2015 book The Politics of Adoption, with the majority coming to the US. And in 1981, the Korean government made inter-country adoption more accessible in hopes of raising emigration rates, leading to a wave of Korean adoptees from the mid-’80s to ‘90s.

While Koh adores her parents for providing a better life, it doesn’t erase the many and often invisible hardships she went through while growing up in America. She recalls being bullied for looking different and being called slurs, and because her parents and educators weren’t equipped to discuss how this might feel and what it might mean (with few resources provided through her adoption agency or at her school), she eventually learned to “fly under the radar,” to stop standing up for herself, to be small, to be quiet, she shares. What’s worse is her family and friends would insist they didn’t see her any differently than themselves. To Koh, that felt as good as being told they didn’t see color.