Is it good or bad to adopt a child? And should intercountry adoption continue or not? Special professor Femmie Juffer and emeritus professor by special appointment René Hoksbergen, both specialized in adoption, discuss these issues. But they don't agree.

Update

On Monday 8 February 2021, Minister Sander Dekker will announce that the adoption of children from abroad will be suspended. He decides this following a report on the system of so-called intercountry adoption in the Netherlands. It is up to the next cabinet to take a position on the future of intercountry adoption. Read more about this decision here .

In the series ' I'm not from Sri Lanka ', we follow Dinja Pannebakker, a young woman of 32 who was adopted from Sri Lanka. She herself feels completely Dutch and has no need for connection with her native soil.

Pannebakker is one of more than 3,400 Sri Lankan children who have been adopted by Dutch parents since the 1970s. In 2018, adoption from Sri Lanka was definitively stopped. Adoption from a dozen other countries, or 'intercountry adoption', still exists, although the number of adoptees is decreasing every year. In 2018, a total of 156 children were brought to the Netherlands from abroad. Most of them come from China (28), Hungary (24) or the United States (23). Within the Netherlands, 21 children were adopted last year and placed with other Dutch families.

Sunday newspaper

September 30, 2019

"Intelligent, dynamic, warm, authentic, persuasive..." From the appointment of Jacques Chirac , just elected MP for Corrèze, as Pompidou's Secretary of State for Employment in April 1967, American diplomats posted in Paris never stopped no praise for this young 34-year-old "athletic-looking" enarque. According to them, he has a "taste for adventure", since he spent a summer as a waiter in Boston in 1953, before criss-crossing the United States as the driver of the widow of a Texan billionaire. Above all, he has to his credit "close ties with the Prime Minister which enabled him to be elected to the Assembly and the aura of success that surrounds him".

Invited with other Gaullist leaders to the United States Embassy on October 16, 1967, Jacques Chirac impresses his interlocutors because he evokes his trips across the Atlantic and his short aborted romance with a fiancée from South Carolina: "He seems to be as American – and not just pro-American – as many Americans,” enthuses Ambassador Charles Bohlen. Chirac was "the revelation of lunch"!

Chirac, an "Americanophile" Gaullist

By Priyanka Sharma

New Delhi [India], Sept 29 (ANI): Scores of medicos

practising at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (/search?query=All India

Institute of Medical Sciences) (AIIMS), Delhi (/search?query=Delhi) are

demanding stricter surrogacy laws after a 42-year-old surrogate mother, who

Court comes down heavily on WCD over adoption exercise Usha Rani Das29 Sep 2019 10:53 PM New Delhi: A Delhi court came down heavily on the Ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD) for making adoptive parents travel from distant places to the national capital to complete the adoption exercise. Compelling proposed adoptive parents to travel to Delhi from distant places "militates" against the basic philosophy that it is the duty of the state to ensure every parentless child gets parent, the court said. District Judge Girish Kathpalia directed the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) to submit an action taken report on whether petitions for adoption can be filed in the court within whose territorial jurisdiction the adoptive parents and the child, who is in foster care, reside so that they did not have to travel to Delhi. Also Read - SC says large number of cases filed before it due to 'insufficient or wrong sentencing' The court, in its order, noted that there were cases where the child was physically challenged or the adoptive parent was a single mother but they had to travel to the national capital from distant places to testify. The court directed the director of CARA to submit the report within a month and put the matter for further hearing on October 10. It also said that previously CARA opted not to assist the court despite the seriousness of the issue and hence asked the secretary of the Ministry of Women and Child development to take necessary actions. Also Read - Naga talks continue for second day The court, however, took note of the fact that it would be financially onerous on the adoption agencies to file petitions in the court within the territorial jurisdiction concerned. "Under the pretext that proceeding with adoption matters in the courts within whose territorial jurisdiction proposed adoptive parents reside would be expensive for adoption agencies, the basic philosophy underlying the concept of adoption under the Act (to provide parent to every parentless child) cannot be abrogated. "But the court has to adopt a positivist approach of law and has to ensure strict adherence to the laid down law.... At the same time, I also find it opportune to express disappointment that despite such seriousness of the issue, CARA opted not to respond and assist this court," the judge said. The court said that since the regulations have been framed and can be amended only by CARA (unless suitable amendments in the enactment are contemplated by the legislature), it was necessary that the issue be brought to the notice of higher authorities. "Situations were found where the proposed adoptive parents and the child under pre -adoption foster care, who are residing in far away places, have to come to Delhi to testify in order to obtain adoption orders, and in some such cases the proposed adoptive child is even physically challenged and the proposed adoptive parent is a single mother.... "There are number of cases where the child concerned is a special needs child (who was given in pre adoption foster care), is made to travel from far away places of country to Delhi (or whichever place where the adoption petitions are filed) because the proposed adoptive parents at the nascent stage of emotional bonding with the child do not want to leave the child alone at home and travel to Delhi. "There are also cases where single women opt to come forward for adoption but have to travel from far away distant places," it said. Adoption Regulations, 2017, provided that the Specialized Adoption Agency shall file an application for adoption order in the court having jurisdiction over the place where it was located, said the court. "Hence, the crux of the legal position is that an application for the adoption order has to be filed only in that court within whose territorial jurisdiction the adoption agency was located. "The compulsion for the proposed adoptive parents to travel to Delhi from far away places militates against the basic philosophy that it is the duty of the State to ensure that every parentless child gets parent," it said. As it is the duty of the State "to ensure that every orphaned and/or abandoned and/or surrendered child must get a family", it is the State which has to ensure, irrespective of financial considerations, that people are encouraged to take a child in adoption. It added the court has to adopt a positivist approach of law and has to ensure strict adherence to the laid down law. PTI

The Department of Social Welfare (DSW), has introduced new reforms on adoption processes to safeguard the interest of orphans as well as children who cannot live with their parents.

The reforms were developed to formalise alternative care system and formal gatekeeping structures to prevent the unnecessary admission and readmission of children into residential care to stem abuses.

The DSW, disclosed this at a day’s sensitization workshop on adopting and foster care regulations in Ghana, organised by the Department in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Cape Coast for stakeholders in Central Region.

The Acting Regional Director of DSW, Monica Siaw, encouraged stakeholders to educate the public on the new reforms which would be implemented by the Department.

She said couples who were willing to adopt should provide a suitable, secure and loving family home for a child and visit any Regional office of the DSW to go through the various processes before the child could be adopted to avoid child trading and trafficking to a foreign country only to be maltreatment.

Around 275 adopted children were “returned” to the system over the past two years in India. What went wrong?

Data indicates that gaps in pre- and post-adoption counselling, which arose after the digitisation of the adoption process, could be one of the major factors for these disruptions.

Over the past three years, a group of social workers and counsellors from Karnataka, all working with non-government organizations (NGOs) in the field of child welfare and adoption scrutiny, started noticing a disturbing trend in the adoption cases they were handling. They realized that a fairly large number of adoptions were failing—the children were being “returned" by parents to the Specialised Adoption Agency (SAA) that had handled their case. Finally, with a sense of growing unease, a few of these social workers submitted an RTI application seeking information about the number of failed adoptions to the Central Adoption Resource Authority (Cara)—the main government body handling all inter- and intra-country adoptions in India.

When the responses to the RTI application came in earlier this year, their apprehensions proved to be overwhelmingly correct. It turned out that in the two years between April 2017 and March 2019, the period for which the data had been sought, 275 children had been returned to the system across states—almost 5% of the number of children adopted in India in the same period.

Though hard data on the number of disruptions that happened before 2017 is not yet available, after talking to several child welfare activists and former Cara office-bearers for this story, it seems clear, anecdotally, that the number of children being returned are on the rise. Social workers who have worked in this field for decades maintain that the number of children being given up by adoptive parents either during the foster-care period or even after the adoption has been finalized in a court of law is seeing an alarming rise.

Inside the horrifying trade exploiting Vietnamese women for their bodies

By Samantha Dick

Abandoned by her husband with a young son to feed on her own, Linh* was desperate.

Her family in a remote Vietnamese village had never had much money, and after a "very difficult" marriage to a local man ended in divorce, Linh fell deeper into poverty.

She needed a way out.

In the final days of the Vietnam war, Operation Babylift evacuated 3,000 children and took them to the West to be adopted.

Not all were orphans; many of them, now middle-aged adults, are still searching for their roots.

When David Matthew Redmon met his birth mother at Saigon airport, it was as if his own ghost were being laid to rest.

“For more than 40 years, my mother lived with the thought that she had killed her son,” says David, 47, as he recalls finally meeting the woman from his faded childhood dreams.

On that day in August 2015, David had flown to Ho Chi Minh City from Boston, where he was brought up by adoptive parents. He spent most of the 20 or so hours in the air rehearsing every possible scenario, yet still it was not enough to prepare him. As he passed immigration at Tan Son Nhat International he saw an elderly lady dressed in a purple ao ba ba , a traditional South Vietnamese garment, and suddenly it was as if those childhood dreams had come to life. “When that moment came, my emotions simply took over and I cried like a child.”

Distance and adoption in the Netherlands between 1956-1984

Many women renounced their child for adoption between 1956 and 1984 under pressure. The government is therefore conducting research into the situations of distance parents, distance children and adoptive parents in that period until the end of 2020. And the role of the organizations involved and the social environment such as family and social workers.

Do you want to share your story and experiences for the distance and adoption study 1956-1984?

Distance and adoption by pressure

In 2017, Radboud University conducted research into women who renounced their child for adoption between 1956 and 1984. According to this research, this happened under pressure. Often because the women were not married. Distance mothers felt pressured by their immediate environment and care providers. Such as family, doctors, social workers and the church. The distance between the mother, father and child was broken. This caused a lot of lasting sadness and shame for parents and children.

Europol smashes a gang that dealt with babies

A gang of criminals is accused of bringing pregnant Bulgarian women to Greece for their birth. According to Interpol, the babies were adopted for around 25,000 euros. The suspects are also said to have acted with egg cells.

Greek investigators have teamed with Europol dug up a gang of criminals who are said to have traded with newborn babies and with egg cells. Twelve people were arrested, Europol said on Thursday in The Hague.

As a result, since 2016, the gang has been soliciting young pregnant Bulgarian women and brought them to Thessaloniki, Greece. There, women in private clinics gave birth to their children.

According to Europol, the babies were then illegally adopted for around 25,000 euros each. More details on this did not mention Europol. Some of the young women were brought to Thessaloniki as surrogate mothers.