The Surrogacy Act and the Assisted Reproduction Technology Act miss out on addressing some crucial aspects. The SC and Delhi HC now have the opportunity to assess the Acts through the framework of reproductive rights and justice, and extend recent constitutional jurisprudence on the right to privacy, reproductive autonomy, and recognition of non-traditional families

The Surrogacy (Regulation) Act 2021 and the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act 2021 (ART Act) came into force early this year. The Acts aim to regulate the multimillion-dollar industry of reproductive medicine, stipulate who can access assisted reproductive technologies and procedures such as in vitro fertilisation and surrogacy, the conditions under which gamete donation and surrogacy can take place, and specify requirements for clinics to operate.

The Acts allow only married infertile couples and certain categories of women to avail of ARTs and surrogacy. Sale of gametes and any payment to the surrogate mother, other than insurance coverage and medical expenses, has been prohibited. Clinics and banks offering ART procedures have to be registered.

Reproductive technologies allow people who are unable to conceive or achieve pregnancy, for medical and non-medical reasons, to have biological children. Inequities in access to healthcare, including infertility care, are pervasive and disproportionately impact persons from marginalised contexts. Equitable access to infertility care, including reproductive technologies, is part of the full spectrum of reproductive rights, including the right to make decisions about one’s reproductive life, to health, and to equality and non-discrimination. In India, ARTs are offered by an expensive privatised medical industry that was unregulated for decades. The technologies can be used to transform traditional notions of family and strengthen the status of same-sex and other queer couples by expanding the ability to reproduce beyond heterosexual marital unions. Use of ARTs can also entrench notions of genetic parenthood as the “true” form of parenthood. ARTs provoke complex legal, ethical and social dilemmas, and their regulation requires consideration and balancing of conflicting interests and values.

Petitions against the Acts have now been filed before the Supreme Court and Delhi High Court by an IVF specialist and persons desiring to become parents, respectively. Both petitions challenge the Acts as being discriminatory and violative of reproductive autonomy and choice by denying access to ARTs to single persons and people in live-in and same-sex relationships. The petitions also oppose the ban on commercial surrogacy, arguing that it is unreasonable and deprives surrogate mothers of reproductive agency.

Children are continuing to be taken from battle zones in Ukraine for adoption in Russia - that's according to the US Institute of War, which cites confirmations from Russian media.

It says children have been transported from the devastated city of Mariupol to be processed by the office of the Commissioner for Children's Rights. The end goal is to be adopted into Russian families.

Its head, Maria Lvova-Belova, has herself taken in a teenager according to one of her posts on the Telegram messaging service. Meanwhile, in Kherson, people continue to be evacuated and moved into Russia proper, which Ukraine advised its citizens to resist.

According to an investigation by AP, Russia is conducting an open effort to adopt Ukrainian children and bring them up as Russian.

Moscow claims that these children don't have parents or guardians to look after them, or that they can't be reached. But AP alleges that officials have deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-held territories without consent and lied to them that they weren't wanted by their parents.

A farm labourer couple from Firozpur in Punjab gave away their newborn daughter in the hope that she would find a loving home away from poverty. Instead, she ended up in the hands of child traffickers and was almost sold for Rs 25 lakh in Gujarat. The girl, now 17-days-old, is fighting for her life with multiple health complications in hospital.

Gujarat police on Monday traced and brought to Vadodara the couple believed to be the biological parents of the newborn girl rescued by the SHE Team before she could be sold at the railway station in that city on September 4. The alleged birth parents, Mithun Singh and Shimla Rani, were named in the birth record found by the police.

Police said that the parents had ‘opted’ to give away the child for ‘adoption’ as she was their fifth daughter. The couple could not afford to raise one more child, especially a daughter. They have also allegedly given off another daughter, their fourth, to their relatives without going through the legal process since they are illiterate and appear to be unaware of the adoption laws.

Vadodara police had dispatched two teams to Delhi last week to apprehend the masterminds of the racket. One team visited Firozpur in Ludhiana and located the alleged biological parents.

An officer told Mirror, “The couple was brought to Vadodara on September 12. The wife was sent to SSG Hospital to be with the child. We have submitted blood samples of the couple and child for DNA testing and expect to get the results shortly.” However, police officials are confident that the couple are indeed the child’s parents.

According to the ministry, the ombudswoman also admitted to facilitating the illegal adoption in Russia of about 350 more children from the occupied regions of the Donbas.

“Transfer of Ukrainian children from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine to Russia and their subsequent adoption by Russian citizens grossly violate the legislation of Ukraine, as well as the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 1949, which provides for the obligation of the occupying state not to change the civil status of children, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989,” the ministry said in a comment.

Ukrainian diplomats have called on the international community to “strongly condemn the ongoing crimes committed by Russia and its officials against children in the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories.”

“Ukraine will continue to make every effort to ensure that Ukrainian children who were illegally taken and adopted in Russia are returned to their parents or legal guardians,” reads the report.

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In America, popular narratives about adoption tend to focus on happy endings. Poor mothers who were predestined to give their children away for a “better life”; unwanted kids turned into chosen ones; made-for-television reunions years later. Since childhood, these story lines about the industry of infant adoptions had gradually seeped into my subconscious from movies, books, and the news.

Then, following the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the tropes proliferated. Photos of smiling white couples holding signs that read we will adopt your baby went viral this summer, quickly inspiring online mockery. Many U.S. adoption agencies prepared for a potential increase in adoption in states that have made abortion illegal, despite limited evidence that a need for these services will increase.

As I found while researching a book on identical twins raised in radically different circumstances, the reality of adoption is far more complicated than some might think—and, as many adoptees and scholars have argued, deserving of a more clear-eyed appraisal across American culture. I began reporting Somewhere Sisters in 2016. The identical twins Isabella and Hà were born in Vietnam in 1998, and their mother struggled to care for them. Isabella (born Loan) was adopted by a wealthy, white American family that gave her a new name and raised her in the suburbs of Chicago. Hà was adopted by a biological aunt and her partner, and grew up in a rural village in Vietnam with sporadic electricity and frequent monsoons.

Over several years, I interviewed the sisters, their first family, and their adoptive families. I also followed the twins’ anticipated yet fraught reunion at age 13 and the time that followed. Meanwhile, I delved into the archives of adoption history and scholarship. And I interviewed other adoptees from around the world. This all made clear to me that when reunions with birth families do happen, they aren’t always happy; they can be painful, confusing, or traumatic.

I also saw how scores of adoptees who are parents, lawyers, educators, or activists have been challenging the rosy image of adoption that stubbornly persists in our culture. One of them is Victoria DiMartile, a biracial Black and white adoptee raised by a white family, who is working toward her Ph.D. in anthropology at Indiana University at Bloomington. She studies the social and economic effects of the adoption business and is the founder of Wreckage and Wonder, which provides adoption education. Children are not offered up for adoption in a vacuum, she told me. Many of them “are available because of certain, very strategic political policies.”

In search of a better future, six-day-old girl given away by biological parents in Jalgaon to a couple, who forge papers and sell her to a transgender duo — one of whom is lodged in jail currently; two women agents found to be involved in the sale; police catch up with the culprits, arrest them & decide to take responsibility for child’s education; activist says such children are often forced into begging & state should look into matter

If one were to pause and weigh, illegal adoption of children would emerge as an equal menace in society as human trafficking — with both being related somewhere. When the crime branch of the city police rescued a toddler it was a veritable opening of the Pandora’s Box pointing unflinchingly towards both the evils.

The girl child was caught in a rigmarole of illegal adoption for one-and-a-half years after she was given away by her biological parents when she was just six days old. The child travelled to different cities and had three different pairs of parents, including one who is lodged in jail with murder charges at present. She is in safe hands now and the police have decided to educate her by collecting funds themselves.

The enormity of such cases can be gauged from the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) data which states that 6,533 human trafficking victims were rescued in India last year and 2,877 of them were children. Similarly, 4,709 victims were rescued in 2020 and 2,222 of them were children. The data suggests that such cases, especially of children, have increased by over 27 per cent last year as compared to 2020.

It may be noted that the six-day-old child was given up for adoption in January 2021 to a couple since the parents could not take care of her because of financial constraints. They already had four children. The parents, based in Jalgaon, hoped their child would have a better future if she lived with someone with financial stability. However, it was a case of illegal adoption. Taking advantage of this, the adoptive parents sold the toddler to a transgender couple in Pune by fraudulently making the adoption papers. They claimed it was their child and earned Rs 1.7 lakh through the change of hands.

LAW No. 47 of July 7, 1993

regarding the judicial declaration of child abandonment

ISSUER

parliament

Published in OFFICIAL GAZETTE NO. 153 of July 8, 1993

Moreover, without a legal framework there were numerous impediments to the creation of innovative projects for preventing child abandonment within the ‘old’ childcare institutions, as illustrated by Georgette Mulheir. She came to Romania through a program of ‘technical assistance’ run by the Romanian Orphanage Trust in 1993, and helped to set up a pilot mother-and-baby unit in a childcare institution for babies in Bucharest. She recalled in an interview that the project, although necessary for preventing the institutionalization of babies, was created ‘against all odds’. The difficulties came from several directions and particularly from not having a legal framework for childcare services:

Legally it was very limited what we were trying to do. There were no laws to run prevention services; (…) there was no legislative framework for this apart from something very old in a law, which allowed a mother to stay with her child in an institution. So we were able to set up this separate section inside the institution without there being a change in law (interview with Georgette Mulheir).

Thus transnational organizations

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A Camillus mother who is accused of abusing her 11-year-old child was a foster mom who adopted two children, CNY Central has learned.

44-year-old Susan Orendorf was arrested Tuesday morning and is accused of abusing her 11-year-old boy, possibly for years.

The Onondaga County Sheriff's Office said Orendorf handcuffed her adopted son to his bed, denied him food, forcibly touched him, and even strangled him.

Orendorf first fostered, then adopted the 11-year-old, as well as a 6-year-old girl, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

During the fostering process, a foster agency is involved in checking on the children.