Sisters allegedly forced to give birth by their killers so offspring could be sold to clients in Greece

By

Yannis-Orestis Papadimitriou

IN ATHENS

17 January 2021 • 5:48pm

A woman who won a legal battle to adopt a boy in Uganda has brought him to the UK for the first time.

Emilie Larter, 29, from Worcestershire, was volunteering for a children's charity in the African country in 2014 when she took care of a baby whose mother had died.

Five years later, after raising thousands through crowdfunding, she was allowed to adopt Adam, now six.

However, she now has to go through the legal process all over again in the UK.

Being in England is "surreal", she said, "but he's loving the attention".

SURVIVORS AND CAMPAIGNERS have criticised how the final report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes deals with the issue of adoption.

The long-awaited report – which was published on Tuesday and can be read here - said the commission found “little evidence” of forced adoption.

The document, spanning 2,865 pages, details the experiences of women and children who lived in 14 mother and baby homes and four county homes between 1922 and 1998.

It acknowledges that mothers often had little choice in terms of adopting their children, but also states that women and girls had “time after the initial placement for adoption to reassess the situation”.

The report notes that private adoption placements were not illegal in Ireland until the late 1990s but such practices “facilitated illegal registrations of birth”. In many cases, a person’s adopted parents were listed as their birth parents on the cert.

Prosecutors raise charges to murder for mother suspected of abuse

A photograph of Jeong-in is displayed outside a Seoul court on Wednesday. Her adoptive mother is now on trial for murder over allegations that abuse of the infant led to death. (Photo by Grace Moon)

GRACE MOON, Contributing writerJanuary 17, 2021 03:30 JST

The letter, which has a baby photograph attached, recounts her physical appearance and details of her health. “A very nice baby with beautiful fair skin, blue eyes and sandy hair . . . not breast fed at any time . . . is 100 per cent free from TB.”

“It was like they were selling a doll,” says Sheila Shelton, now 63, who is talking about the letter an unnamed nun at the Seán Ross mother and baby home wrote to her then prospective parents in St Louis, Missouri in 1958.

“When I saw that piece of paper first, what really jumped out at me was the part about my mother. That she was a ‘highly educated’ lady. I was happy to know something about her, but it really upset me too at the same time.

“Why would an educated lady give up a child? If she was poor, it would have made more sense to me. I was confused,” says Shelton, speaking from Hawaii, where she now lives with her wife, Sarah. She first saw the letter when her adoptive mother gave it to her when she was 21.

Her mother is described as: “a trained nurse . . . a very well-mannered girl and highly educated.” Her “said father is a local farmer (of this we can never be sure).”

A total of 1,949 children were adopted in the last six months, the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) said on Friday. In a statement, the CARA said in the second and third quarter of 2019-20, the adoption figure was 849 and 885 respectively, while in 2020-21 it increased to 966 and 983 in the second and third quarter. Ram Mohan Mishra, Secretary, Ministry of Women and Child Development and Chairperson, Steering Committee of CARA virtually addressed the officers and staff of the authority on its sixth annual day here on Friday. According to CARA, it has also conducted a series of virtual programmes on the diverse aspects of adoption, and trained more than 2,500 social workers and stakeholders from all states and union territories during the year.

The Mother and Baby Homes Commission Report demonstrates the state’s continuing failure to communicate with survivors and recognise their experience. To illustrate this point, I want to discuss one of the Report’s most important conclusions; that there was “very little evidence” of “forced adoption” in Ireland in the period 1922-1998. This conclusion is based on an analysis that divorces law from its social and political context, assuming that if conduct was ‘lawful’ then it cannot have been abusive.

“Forced adoption” was one possible, partial, name for the ways in which some single mothers and their children experienced adoption law. As part of the process of holding the state accountable for past abuse, survivors wanted and expected the Commission to evaluate how the law was applied to them. Instead, however, the Report focuses on explaining the old adoption laws and on assessing whether adoptions were generally legal or illegal at various points in Irish history.

The Report emphasises that mothers in Ireland “had time after the initial placement for adoption” to understand the consequences of their decision, assess it, and perhaps change their minds. It is true that the Adoption Act 1952 provided that the baby must be at least 6 months’ old before an adoption could be finalised. Even if a woman decided to place the baby for adoption while still days or weeks old, in theory she had a months-long “cooling off” period in which to change her mind. If she did not object during that period, the law assumed that her decision was not forced.

The Commission contrasts Irish law with the law in Australia which, in the Commission’s opinion did enable forced adoption. In Australia, a legal adoption could take place within days of birth. This analysis is weak. Ireland’s mandatory six-month waiting period only applied between 1952 and 1974. Before 1952, Ireland had no adoption legislation and therefore no statutory cooling-off period. From 1974, the mandatory waiting period was reduced to six weeks. In any event, we know that prescribing this period in law did not ensure that women had meaningful opportunities for free choice. If a woman spent that period in a “Home”, for example, the Commission accepts that she was often subject to “emotional abuse”. This inevitably undermined her freedom of choice.

Ronan Mullen calls for national voluntary collection for mother and baby home survivors

SUSAN LOHAN HAS been campaigning for the rights of adopted people for 20 years.

She co-founded the Adoption Rights Alliance in 2009 and more recently was appointed to the Mother and Baby Home Collaborative Forum.

The forum was set up in 2018 by then-Minister Katherine Zappone to help inform the Department of Children of survivors’ wishes on legacy issues related to the homes as the commission carried out its work.

The forum was separate to the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation and submitted its own 84-page report in December 2018, six months after it first met.

The forum’s recommendations were published in April 2019 but the report itself was not, with the department citing advice from the attorney general as the reason.

The Dutch government has stepped down after thousands of families were wrongly accused of child welfare fraud and told to pay money back.

Families suffered an "unparalleled wrong", MPs decided, with tax officials, politicians, judges and civil servants leaving them powerless.

Many of those affected were from an immigrant background and hundreds were plunged into financial difficulty.

PM Mark Rutte submitted the cabinet's resignation to the king.

"Innocent people have been criminalised and their lives ruined," he then told reporters, adding that responsibility for what had gone wrong lay with the cabinet. "The buck stops here."

The Adoption Rights Alliance has welcomed confirmation that a referendum will not be required to give survivors of Mother and Baby Homes access to their records.

The Government will now proceed in bringing forward legislation on information and tracing.

At present, survivors of mother and baby homes have not been able to access documents which they say contain crucial information about their identity.

These files may hold details around medical treatment in their early days or how they came to be separated from their birth mothers.

Efforts by the last Government to change the law were stalled after the then Attorney General advised that unrestricted access would be unconstitutional.