Mumbai: It is important to hear the biological mother in a case dealing with the transfer of custody of a child to adoptive parents, the Bombay City Civil Court observed on Monday

Mumbai: It is important to hear the biological mother in a case dealing with the transfer of custody of a child to adoptive parents, the Bombay City Civil Court observed on Monday.

The court made this observation while asking a couple, booked in 2019 adoption racket case, to add the biological mother of the child that they seek to adopt, as a party to their plea for custody of the child.

In July 2019, Mumbai police busted a racket of alleged illegal adoption, wherein several couple are said to have bypassed the legal formalities and adopted children by merely paying money to their biological parents, who came from poor economic background. The police had rescued six such children from the “adoptive parents”.

One of the parents, Ramesh Sitap and his wife, had approached the city civil court last year to declare them as guardians of the boy they had purportedly “illegally adopted”. During a earlier hearing, the court had issued a notice to the child welfare committee, in whose custody the child is presently lodged, to respond to the plea.

HYDERABAD: In a heartening trend, Telangana is witnessing a growing demand for girl children among couples aspiring to become parents. According to official data, the state saw 1,430 children being adopted between 2014 and 2022. Of these, 1,069 were girls and 361 were boys.

Until a few years ago, the statistics were starkly different. Prospective adoptive parents (PAP) at that time were willing to wait for years - almost close to a decade in some cases - only to take home a baby boy. The little girls weren't so lucky.

"Now, things have certainly changed. In fact, there is such a demand that we are not being able to meet it," said an official of the Telangana Women and Child Welfare Department attributing this overwhelming preference for girls as a "personal choice" that PAPs are making these days.

"Slowly but surely people are becoming more accepting of girl children," said the official, an observation seconded by prospective parents and women activists. "For me, the priority is to get a child who will complete us. I do not care whether it is a girl or a boy," said a parent-to-be who applied for adoption in 2022 and is now waiting for clearance from Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA).

Activists agree that most PAPs are not gender specific any more. "So, since the wait time for adopting a girl is lesser, they are going for that," said activist and founder of Tharuni, Mamatha Raghuveer Achanta. While the waiting period for a boy, even now, is at least three to four years, for girls it's just about a year from the date of applying, Mamatha added.

You were adopted, but your adoption papers were tampered with in the past. Still, you want to know where you come from. And maybe also find biological relatives. “Searching using DNA also has a lot of potential for adoptees,” says Jeroen (38). We asked him about his experiences.

Jeroen was adopted from Indonesia. Together with his adoptive sister and brother, he used to live with his parents in the east of the Netherlands. I have fond childhood memories. When I lived abroad for a while for work in 2008, people sometimes thought it was strange that I looked Asian, but I came from the Netherlands. At that moment, Jeroen becomes curious about his roots. That was very broad back then. For example, I started listening to Indonesian music, was interested in the culture.

In that year Jeroen writes a letter to Spoorloos. It could take a while, they immediately said. So I didn't have high expectations. The papers showed that I had an Indonesian mother and a Chinese father. Furthermore, there were too many gaps in the file, so Spoorloos indicated that they could do nothing for me. Although I expected it, that message was not nice. In the meantime I had already made a roots trip to Indonesia in 2010. There people asked if I was from Japan, Korea or Vietnam. Anything but Indonesia or China. This was all painfully confusing. I thought I found my roots, but instead I felt like a foreigner there too.

In 2011 he reads an article in National Geographic about DNA research. You can not only demonstrate kinship with this, but also map out your ethnic background. I thought the chance of a match with a distant relative was quite small, but maybe that way I could get confirmation for my Chinese roots. I immersed myself in the matter and registered with FTDNA. I sent the swab with my saliva. An online account will then be created and you will be kept well informed. In the beginning I checked the website every day. I opted for an extensive test. It costs €700, but then you can also find your 'deep ancestry'. Then you see where your ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago come from. I find it very interesting and cool that this is possible. It's an ongoing journey

And those results are coming. I have ancestors in Southeast Asia, but that is still very wide. FTDNA mainly focuses on customers from Europe and the United States. That is why Jeroen contacts a professor who is mapping 70 subpopulations in Asia. She did this in response to the attack in Jakarta in 2004. This is how they hoped to find the perpetrators. At the same time, she had collected a lot of information about ethnic groups in Indonesia. I then sent her my raw data from FTDNA. Then Jeroen receives a special message: he is almost 100% Javanese. It was clear that my adoption papers had been tampered with. So my father was not Chinese. This gave peace. Indonesia is big, but I didn't have to go all over Southeast Asia.

Yung Fierens, on behalf of adoption interest groups Adoption Schakel Connecteert, CAFE, CAW, Racines Perdues Raìces Perdidas, Empreintes Vivantes.

YUNG FIERENSFebruary 1, 2023 , 03:00

In June last year, a resolution on intercountry adoptions was voted in the Chamber of Representatives.

With this, the submitter of the resolution Michel De Maegd (MR) was supported by the entire hemisphere in asking the Minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne (Open Vld) to investigate illegal adoptions that have taken place from various countries to Belgium.

Eight months later, Van Quickenborne seems to make little move to accede to this request, supported by his own party. The minister replied to questions about the lack of any initiative, including that he had been 'very busy'. He refused to answer the request to set a date for a first meeting. He also indicated that he did not know exactly what was expected of him.

A woman gave her one-and-a-half-month-old child up for adoption for Tk 42,000 in Gazipur’s Sreepur Upazila. Police later returned the child to the mother as no legal process was followed.

She was forced to place her son for adoption due to poverty as ‘Tuhin’, the father of the child, refused to recognise it, the mother claimed.

Narail resident Saddam Hossain, a technician in a local cable factory who was also a tenant at Abdar village in Telihati, adopted the child, police said on Tuesday.

The child's mother, a resident of Mymensingh’s Fulbaria Upazila, lives in a rented house in the same village.

She gave her son to the childless Saddam for adoption in exchange for money by signing a stamp, said Abu Raihan, sub-inspector of Sreepur Police Station.

After the 1976 coup, the military brutally crushed its opponents. At least 500 babies were taken from their captured parents and given to military couples to raise. Many still live unaware of their true identity

One autumn afternoon in 1983, paediatrician Jorge Meijide was called to an apartment in the small town of Acassuso, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. His six-year-old patient turned out to have nothing more than a mild flu, but Meijide sensed that something else was wrong in the household.

The woman who claimed to be the child’s mother seemed to him too old to be his parent. On the walls hung photos of a man in military uniform: presumably the boy’s father.

In 1980s Argentina both details were more than suspect. The country was slowly returning to democracy after the “dirty war” waged by the military dictatorship under Jorge Videla, known as the “Hitler of the Pampa”. After the 1976 coup, Argentina’s military set about crushing any potential opposition and eventually 30,000 people were killed or disappeared, almost all of them civilians. Pregnant prisoners were kept alive until they gave birth and then murdered. At least 500 newborns were taken from their parents while in captivity and given to military couples to raise as their own.

Soldiers frisk a man at a checkpoint in Buenos Aires in 1977. The military dictatorship of 1976-1983 left about 30,000 people missing; Jorge Videla,, who led the military junta from 1976 until 1981. Photographs: Ali Burafi/AFP/Getty Images and Keystone/Getty Images

Amajor discrepancy between Nepal government and foreign records of the number of Nepali children adopted in North America and Europe has exposed a trafficking ring that involves various child welfare agencies in Kathmandu.

The Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizens has records of only 64 children from Nepal sent for adoption to ten western countries from 2010 to 2019. However, a list submitted to the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) by the US Department of State and the nine other countries reveals that 242 Nepali children were taken for adoption in those nine years.

The ten countries are the United States, Denmark, France, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Sweden. There are 178 more Nepali children adopted internationally than the government has records for. Why the discrepancy?

“The data we have is authentic,” maintains Ministry spokesperson Gyanendra Paudel. “We have no idea how the details in other countries showed more numbers.”

Read also: Baby bajar, Anagha Neelakantan

PUNE: The process of issuing final adoption orders to prospective adoptive parents has come to a standstill in Maharashtra since January 11, a day after Bombay high court stayed implementation of a notification authorizing district collectors to pass such orders.

Child adoption agencies said the move has further delayed issuance of the final adoption order to prospective parents in waiting since September last year, after the amended Juvenile Justice Rules were notified.

The notification of the 'Model Amendment Rules 2022' to implement the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Amendment Act 2021, which came into force on September 1 last year, empowered district collectors to issue adoption orders, which were till then the domain of the district courts.

However, after the HC order stayed the new rules' implementation in January this year, adoption agencies have been unable to obtain adoption orders for prospective adoptive parents.

Prajakta Kulkarni, founder of Snehankur Adoption Centre, told TOI, "We have 13 older children currently in foster care with their prospective parents, who have been waiting for the final adoption order since September 2022. The absence of an adoption order is affecting various processes, such as preventing the parents from getting the child's birth certificate required for admitting him/her into a school or get Aadhaar made."

License holders

Since 1989 in the Netherlands an organization that mediates in adoption has

been obliged to apply for a permit. Although there has been talk of a licensing

system since 1980, this was only introduced in 1989 with the “Wet Adoption of

Foreign Children for Adoption” (WOBKA). Only after 1989, therefore, there are

Bareilly: In 2019, she was found abandoned in an earthen pot, having survived the night, and got the name "miracle baby" (the court addressed her only as ‘S’). Later, in December 2022, some right-wing activists lodged an FIR against the orphanage in Bareilly and a Malta-based couple that adopted her, charging them with "wrongful conversion” and alleged that the orphanage staff had changed the baby’s faith and made her an Aadhaar card with a “new Christian name”. Thereafter, theDelhi HC in December directed the UP government "not to harass the orphanage staff and stop the proceedings under the unlawful conversion law in the FIR". It also directed the UP administration “not to create hurdles in the baby’s adoption process or her journey to Malta with her adoptive parents.” However, now the nephew of former BJP MLA Pappu Bhartaul aka Rajesh Mishra, Amit, has approached the Supreme Court seeking “cancellation of the adoption of the miracle baby” as he alleged “there are discrepancies in the adoption process”. He said, “The Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) doesn’t share complete information about the children on their website and special preference is given to parents from European countries.” Amit’s advocate Shraddha Saxena said, “My client wanted to adopt the girl in question but her details are not listed on the CARA website. As of now, the SC has held the adoption process and ordered that the girl shall remain at the place where she is residing.”The next date of hearing in the matter is February 6.