Aa Tiko’ Rujux-Xicay and mom Laurie Stern explore issues of belonging, privilege, race and class in the podcast series “All Relative: Defining Diego.”

Laura Yuen Laura Yuen @LAURA_YUEN

Whether Aa Tiko' Rujux-Xicay would ever meet his birth mother was never a question.

Since he was a toddler, his white adoptive parents in St. Paul brought him back to his home village in Guatemala every two or three years so he could bond with his birth family and stay close to his roots.

His mom and dad, Laurie Stern and Dan Luke, named their child Diego. They made sure he learned Spanish. They bought him traditional clothing from his homeland. Laurie, a veteran journalist, felt conflicted about international adoption, but believed by arming her family with information and awareness, she could address it.

In 2012, the Wallonia-Brussels Federation entered into a partnership with the non-profit organization Tumaini to organize the adoption of Congolese children. The outlook was promising. The fiasco is complete. Excessive fees, false documents, abuse, theft of children: this is the worst part of adoption.

" I am called Anna. It was written that I am 5 years old but it is not true. I am 4 years old and I was woken up. We got off the plane. A long clean hallway. This metallic gray airport with lots of white people. I have never seen so many. We are eleven children to have boarded the plane, to have left the Tumaini house, in Kinshasa. Without even saying goodbye to Uncle Kitambo.

We are then all gathered in a room, black children and white parents. There are games, presentations. A lady wears, like me, a flower on a sign attached around her neck. She talks to me. I do not understand. I'm playing. Then everyone leaves. Big whites with little blacks. The lady with the sign wants to go with me. I am the only one crying. So the big brother who had accompanied us so that we wouldn't be afraid of the plane said not to cry, he said that they would come and get me.

I believed him. For a week, every morning, I hit the lady. I got dressed, I put on my panties, my socks, my shoes, my pants, my T-shirt, my jacket. I tied my hair in a rubber band and put on my backpack. I positioned myself in front of the window. From the second floor of this lady's house, we could clearly see the crossroads. I waited. No one came to pick me up. It wasn't true.

When I could speak French. I told the lady. "You're not my mom. I have one in the village.” While painting my dolls, I told her about Gemena, my sisters, my parents. She said to me: “I think you are confusing my darling. She is a lady who behaved like a mother.” But it's not true. My parents live in Congo. My anger was to survive. She left. A little. With time. The lady became my adoptive mother.

He was 6. They called him The Worm. He had had polio and couldn't use his arms or legs. When Kathy Sreedhar met him in one of Mother Teresa's foundling homes in India, she was told he might be able to manage a wheelchair some day, but no more.

That was two years ago. Sreedhar, who is Mother Teresa's agent for adoptions in this country, found a home for the boy with a California family.

Last summer she stopped off at the Los Angeles airport, and the family drove 100 miles to spend an hour with her because they had never met her.

"Sam had braces on his legs," she said, "and when he saw me he dropped his crutches and ran to me . . . "

That's what it's all about, Kathy Sreedhar says.

WASHINGTON — “Adoption agencies,” the single parent said bitterly, “play God, and would rather give babies to a couple even though one?third of present marriages end in divorce. My situation is stable and known, which is not true for a divorced parent, often living on $120 a week.”

The speaker, who prefers to be anonymous, is a 50?year old unmarried woman, a Government economist who adopted her daughter, now 2½ years old, privately when agencies did not respond to her requests.

According to Karen Mitchell, head of the Council on Adoptable Children, which lists children available for adoption from agencies, there are 50 single men and women in the Washington area who, seeing matrimony pass them by, decided not to be deprived of parenthood as well (Estimates of single parents nationally and in such areas as New York are not available; one problem is that most figures include stepfather' adoptions of children of women they marry.)

Mrs. Mitchell characterizes single parents as “strong psychologically,” able to overcome the social pressures against single parent adoption (including such suspicions as that the adopted child “is really their own, born out of wedlock”).

Generally, the single parent is female, in her late thirties, has several brothers and sisters, and is a professional earning at least $12,000 a year. She adopts not out of loneliness but, as a male professor said, “out of a sense of fullness,” a desire to love. She sometimes rejects male suitors who feel put out that she chose a child rather than them.

BY

HILARY GOODFRIEND

The Salvadoran civil war didn’t just see US-trained-and-financed far-right forces commit endless war crimes — it also ripped children from families, an unknown number of whom never found their way back to their parents.

Review of Reunion: Finding the Disappeared Children of El Salvador by Elizabeth Barnert (University of California Press, February 2023)

Between 1980 and 1992, the United States financed, armed, trained, and advised the Salvadoran military dictatorship’s war against a leftist insurgency. The conflict’s toll is usually accounted for in over seventy-five thousand deaths and ten thousand forced disappearances, the guerrilla forces responsible for only 5 percent of that violence. Lesser known are the traumas borne by hundreds, perhaps thousands of families who were torn apart during the violence, mostly by the US-backed military, through abductions of the children of peasants targeted in their scorched-earth campaigns across the Salvadoran countryside.

OPPOSITION TDS ROUNDLY criticised the Government’s planned redress scheme for survivors of mother and baby homes and related institutions in the Dáil today.

The Social Democrats put forward a motion calling for the scheme to be extended, saying the current plan fails to consider human rights violations experienced by thousands of women and children who passed through the system.

Opposition TDs from every party, as well as independents, sharply criticised many elements of the scheme – in particular the exclusion of people who spent less than six month in an institution as a child.

Many TDs also hit out at the low levels of compensation due to be paid and the fact the scheme doesn’t adequately address the impact of issues such forced family separation, forced and illegal adoption, vaccine trials and racism.

Proposing the private members’ bill, Soc Dems TD Holly Cairns said that, alongside the Church, every Irish Government from the 1930s to the 1990s played a role in keeping the mother and baby home system up and running.

DELFT - According to Jody Bernal, the television program Spoorloos should have put on the robes, after it became clear that adopted children were linked to the wrong parents in the program. The singer and DJ himself came to Delft from Colombia when he was six months old, the country where there is now much to do. He has seen for some time that things are going wrong in the search for biological parents of adopted children: 'It has been rumbling for years.'

In recent days there has been much to do about the Spoorloos program of the KRO-NCRV. The program is said to have used a rogue 'fixer' who often led the children to the wrong parents. Jody Bernal, herself an adopted child, tells in the radio program Menno in de Afternoon of Omroep West that there have been rumors about errors in the television program for some time.

The program is said to have knowingly used a rogue intermediary in Colombia, who linked children to the wrong parents. Bernal is also originally from Colombia and reacts shocked. 'If you are adopted, I myself was three months old then, you are looking for your roots. It must be terrible to be told years later that it's not right.'

Stories have been going on for a long time

The singer, known for his hit 'Que Si, Que No' from 2000, finds it intense that last night's program Spoorloos declared to Khalid and Sophie that they still have faith in their 'fixer', even after it appears that mistakes have been made. Something that according to Bernal is not possible. 'It has been rumbling among adoptees for some time. The bell has been ringing for some time and we often heard that certain stories would not be correct and the matches would not be correct.'

The Bombay High court has granted bail to a man accused of raping a

woman and abandoning her, on the condition that he would marry her within

a year.

Justice Bharti Dangre observed that the prosecutrix and accused were in a

consensual relationship, and the man refused to marry her when she was six

If poverty, racism, and health care inequities were properly redressed, adoption would be a last resort.

Adoption has taken a front-row seat in US political discourse since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Remarks from the Supreme Court, most notably from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, position adoption as a viable alternative to abortion. Even some progressives sing the praises of adoption in cases where abortion is not accessible or desired. However, framing the tragedy of losing reproductive freedoms as a problem easily solved by the relinquishment of a child obfuscates the reality of adoption as an institution that is steeped in systemic injustice. Moreover, such a framing underscores the way adopted people—the ones purportedly “saved” by adoption—are overlooked. Finally, the overarching social narrative that places adoption on a pedestal and views adoption as an alternative to abortion completely misses the point that it is not a reproductive choice at all. It’s a parenting choice—and one that should be a last resort, instead of being lauded as a great act of charity or a cure for a world where abortion is all but outlawed. In an ideal world, where poverty, racism, and health care inequities were properly redressed, the need for adoption would be practically eradicated.

In the conservative adoption fairy tale, a pregnant person who does not feel that they are capable of adequately parenting hands off these duties to people who have been desperately hoping to become parents. The child, it is assumed, will fare better, escaping a life most assuredly filled with poverty or neglect. Above all, this child “could have been aborted,” so adoption rescues them from annihilation.

While it is true that many parents who relinquish children for adoption cite financial concerns as a chief obstacle to parenting, it does not follow that adoption is the solution. Positing adoption as a solution to impoverished parenting ignores the fact that another solution exists: supporting struggling families. The sociologist Gretchen Sisson has found that even the smallest financial assistance would have empowered many birth mothers to keep their babies rather than relinquish them. Instead, parents are punished for their poverty, which is conflated with neglect in the child welfare system, as Dorothy Roberts’s scholarship shows. Roberts has demonstrated how Black families in particular are targeted by what she calls the “family policing” system for the crime of being poor while being Black. In other words, Child Welfare Services are far more likely to remove Black children than others, even in cases where no eminent threat to the safety and well-being of the child is present.

Furthermore, the idea that a birth parent selflessly “chooses” to relinquish a child for adoption is not supported by research or by the testimonials of birth parents. Sisson’s interviews with birth mothers overwhelmingly indicate that adoption agencies engage in manipulation and coercion. Ann Fessler’s book The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade chronicles similar predatory practices. In short, the idea that parents freely decide to relinquish their children is an oversimplification at best.

KRO-NCRV and the Spoorloos program will conduct an external investigation into the intermediary who has linked Dutch candidates in Colombia to the wrong biological parents in the past. The broadcaster confirmed this on Monday after reporting from the AD .

By our entertainment editors

The broadcaster does not want to give any further explanation about the investigation. RTL crime journalist Kees van der Spek revealed last week that participants of Spoorloos in Colombia have been linked to the wrong biological parents. The fraudulent Colombian intermediary allegedly responsible for the mismatches is said to have cooperated in 16 cases.

KRO-NCRV has meanwhile admitted two 'mismatches'. Two other matches went well and were confirmed by DNA testing. The other 12 cases are still under investigation.

Presenter Derk Bolt previously defended the fixer in the Khalid & Sophie program . The presenter did this after he had previously said he did not want to say anything about the case.