Recently, the Supreme Court recognized the right of children at home to know who their parents are. Why the longing for the real parents? 'It's the trivial questions you want answers to. Who gave me those sweaty feet?'

Daphne van Rossum

May 18, 1994 – published in no. 20

THE FIRST TIME I saw my father I was twenty. Tall and gray, he was waiting at a table at the Americain Hotel. We were strangers to each other. I was barely three when he left. How was I supposed to greet him? In the film, people would have flown around each other's necks. I shook his hand. The meeting was inevitable.

For years I tormented myself and those around me with questions about this man. According to my mother, he didn't even deserve the designation father. She invariably called him 'your begetter'. My aunts told terrible stories about him, they knew no one more impossible than him. So over the years I have developed a strong desire to meet him. There must be something wrong with him, right? After all, I was also a sweet child, and who gave me that cap nose?

Mis en ligne le 6 janvier 2011, par Mecanopolis. 3 Commentaires

Les relations franco-américaines ? L’un des vecteurs de la globalisation et, pire que tout, l’un de ses verrous. En effet, la construction européenne, Cheval de Troie de la gouvernance mondiale, n’aurait pas pu arriver là où elle en est sans la collaboration de la France. Dur à admettre, mais c’est ainsi…

L’histoire de la France et les possibles alliances stratégiques qu’elle pourrait initier sur la scène internationale sont telles que sa neutralisation a de longue date été prioritaire. Cette mise en quarantaine, nécessaire pour le processus globalisant, est exponentielle depuis son intégration dans l’Europe. Les États-Unis, quant à eux, ont incorporé une dimension humanitaire à toute entreprise expansionniste depuis la fin de la Seconde guerre mondiale avec le Plan Marshall. Cette stratégie leur a permis de compenser les « dégâts collatéraux » de leurs expéditions militaires par des bénéfices médiatiques et politiques. Ce qui explique que les relations franco-américaines d’après-guerre révèlent un flagrant ajustement de certaines ONG avec les volontés expansionnistes des États-Unis.

Dans le cadre du Plan Marshall, outre la contribution financière à la reconstruction de l’Europe, une ONG est alors créée : CARE(1), qui devient plus tard CARE International. Des colis alimentaires sont gracieusement distribués par l’ONG dans les pays européens dévastés par la guerre. En France, les fonds du Plan Marshall sont administrés par le Commissariat général au Plan, où officie Jean Guyot. Puis ce dernier occupe le poste de Directeur financier de la CECA (Communauté européenne du Charbon et de l’Acier) – l’ancêtre de l’actuelle Union européenne – sous la direction de Jean Monnet. Ce dernier en démissionne en 1954 pour prendre la tête du Comité d’action pour les États-Unis d’Europe. Jean Guyot entre ensuite chez Lazard dont il est associé-gérant pendant près de cinquante ans et où il participe à la renommée internationale de la banque. En 1983, il crée le bureau français de l’ONG Care, qui est actuellement présidée par Arielle de Rothschild.

Les États-Unis affirment donc, dès la fin de la Seconde guerre mondiale, le besoin de camoufler leurs ambitions impériales en employant des moyens subversifs. Cette nécessité se fait de plus en plus grande durant la Guerre froide : jusqu’en 1969, Charles de Gaulle est au pouvoir et résiste aux pressions américaines en refusant tant qu’il peut la construction d’une Europe inféodée aux intérêts américains. Il ira même jusqu’à proposer à Willy Brandt le développement d’un projet européen alternatif à celui de la Maison Blanche. Au lendemain de la chute du Général, la France est alors à la fois dans l’orbite des États-Unis et dans l’incapacité de répondre à leurs tentatives de cooptation.

Thousands of people are being promised new rights to information, a potentially momentous step in a country where unmarried mothers were pressured for decades to give up their babies.

DUBLIN — For tens of thousands of people who were adopted in Ireland — or gave up children for adoption there, often under heavy pressure — knowledge that for decades was shrouded in secrecy and shame may now be a mouse-click away.

The Irish government introduced an online service this week that for the first time promises adopted people born in Ireland, wherever they now live, the right to see any information the state holds about them — including the names of their birth mothers. It also offers a free tracing service for anyone, including birth mothers, trying to find relatives lost to them through Ireland’s adoption system.

The authorities are permitted up to 30 days to respond to requests, and adoption rights activists are waiting to see how well the service works. But they say it has the potential to be a significant step in reckoning with a painful national legacy of mistreatment of unmarried mothers and their children.

Over decades, ending as recently as 1998, thousands of pregnant and unmarried women and girls in Ireland were confined to church-run “mother and baby homes,” where they were expected and often pressured to give up their babies after birth. An official inquiry published last year acknowledged poor conditions, high death rates and abuses at the institutions.

Kirk Kellerhals was adopted when he was a toddler and grew up thinking his biological parents were dead

For almost all of his life, Kirk Kellerhals struggled with his identity.

The 50-year-old from Norfolk, Virginia was adopted by an Army captain and his wife shortly after Kellerhals was born in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. At the time, both Kellerhals and his adoptive parents believed his biological mother and father had died.

“My mother was listed as a Vietnamese national and was deceased, and my father was also listed as deceased,” Kellerhals tells PEOPLE for National Adoption Awareness Month. “I’ve grown up my whole life thinking my parents were dead, that both my parents were dead.”

Kellerhals — who has dark hair and tanned skin — says he was mistaken for a variety of ethnicities and called “every derogatory term you can think of” while growing up. Though he knew he was half-Vietnamese, the complete picture of his background remained a mystery to him.

Nearly two years after the Commission of Investigation published its final report, survivors are still being ignored, Órla Ryan writes.

HOW MUCH REDRESS should a person who spent less than six months in a mother and baby home as a child get?

How many Commissioners will appear before the Oireachtas?

How many official reports with disputed findings should be repudiated?

How many independent reviews will take place?

Alex Lipe

Part One: The Adoption Industry

The adoption industry commodifies children as well as parenthood. In the U.S., in 2015, the adoption industry had an approximate revenue of $14 billion. (Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy 2015; IBISWorld).

In this piece I will be asking pressing questions: How can the so-called child welfare industry truly have welfare as its top priority when it so clearly is based on profit? Does the U.S. domestic adoption industry place more value on profit than on child welfare? How have various activist organizations historically challenged legislation in order to secure equal rights for adoptees? What is the history of the modern U.S. adoption industry?

As a jumping-off point, it is important to acknowledge that adoption has roots in colonialism and white saviorhood. Adoption is a tactic of social control that has historically primarily affected working class people, sex workers, women and families of color, and ways of organizing families and childcare that are deemed “nontraditional” or “unconventional” or that are non-U.S.-ian. As we will see, adoption is also closely connected to feminized, informal forms of labor.

The VPRO documentary prize 2022 was awarded to the Filho crew on Friday 7 October. The documentary tells the personal story of filmmaker Tomas Ponsteen, who was adopted from Brazil as a baby in 1994. The prize was awarded for the fifteenth time by the VPRO to the best graduation documentary of the Dutch Film Academy.

In Filho , Tomas Ponsteen focuses on the question: is it a duty of every adoptee to find his or her biological mother? Even if you don't feel that need at all?

Tomas was adopted as a baby from Brazil. He is satisfied with his life as it is now and does not feel the need to look for his biological mother. But there is much to be done about adoption, and the abuses are great.

With every news item the question arises: what if I have not been surrendered voluntarily? And above all: shouldn't I investigate why I don't feel the need to search? These questions are the starting point for a series of impressive encounters.

verdict of the jury

According to the National Institutes of Health, in 2013, five doctors conducted a study at the University of Minnesota on the suicide rate of adopted children versus non-adopted children. The study showed that adoptees were almost four times more likely to commit suicide.

And the number of suicides by adopted Korean children is four times the national average, says Manchester resident Moses Farrow, a licensed marriage and family therapist who practices in Glastonbury.

Farrow, a Korean American who was adopted in 1980 at the age of 2, recently joined the Gide Foundation as leader of its mental health task force. The Gide Foundation is a nonprofit organization started in May that focuses on adoptee education and the mental health of Korean American adoptees. Gide’s founders are Derek Fisher of Durham, North Carolina, and Jodi Gill of Oregon City, Oregon

The Gide’s first project is a mental health guide for people who will reunite with their birth families. For future mental health projects, Farrow will lead the mental health task force.

Farrow received his master’s degree in human development and family studies at the University of Connecticut with a concentration in marriage and family therapy.

MUMBAI: Bombay HC recently declined relief to the adoptive parents of a one-year-old child who had sought its intervention so that they continue to keep him with them.

The couple and the child’s biological parents are battling each other over the boy’s custody in the city civil court. The couple had moved HC to direct the Centre to amend the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, 1956 (HAMA) “with respect to situations where custody is already handed over but consent is withdrawn”. They urged HC to issue norms in such cases to lower courts and pending framing of guidelines to direct the parties to maintain a status quo.

Justices Sanjay Gangapurwala and RM Laddha on September 20, though, said they “may seek appropriate relief before the court where proceedings are filed and pending”. The couple’s petition said they were desirous of a second child and wished to adopt. They had registered with the Central Adoption Resources Authority in November 2019 but there was no progress. In June 2021, they registered with NGO Aham Foundation. On July 16, 2021, its owner Julia Fernandes told them a newborn was up for adoption. While they were apprehensive about it, the child’s mother insisted on immediate adoption. After a small “give and take ceremony”, the adoption deed was executed with the biological parents and they were given custody of the child.

No HC relief to adoptive couple in war with biological parents

TNN | Oct 9, 2022, 01.51 AM IST

Abstract

The origins and affinities of the ?1 billion people living on the subcontinent of India have long been contested. This is owing, in part, to the many different waves of immigrants that have influenced the genetic structure of India. In the most recent of these waves, Indo-European-speaking people from West Eurasia entered India from the Northwest and diffused throughout the subcontinent. They purportedly admixed with or displaced indigenous Dravidic-speaking populations. Subsequently they may have established the Hindu caste system and placed themselves primarily in castes of higher rank. To explore the impact of West Eurasians on contemporary Indian caste populations, we compared mtDNA (400 bp of hypervariable region 1 and 14 restriction site polymorphisms) and Y-chromosome (20 biallelic polymorphisms and 5 short tandem repeats) variation in ?265 males from eight castes of different rank to ?750 Africans, Asians, Europeans, and other Indians. For maternally inherited mtDNA, each caste is most similar to Asians. However, 20%–30% of Indian mtDNA haplotypes belong to West Eurasian haplogroups, and the frequency of these haplotypes is proportional to caste rank, the highest frequency of West Eurasian haplotypes being found in the upper castes. In contrast, for paternally inherited Y-chromosome variation each caste is more similar to Europeans than to Asians. Moreover, the affinity to Europeans is proportionate to caste rank, the upper castes being most similar to Europeans, particularly East Europeans. These findings are consistent with greater West Eurasian male admixture with castes of higher rank. Nevertheless, the mitochondrial genome and the Y chromosome each represents only a single haploid locus and is more susceptible to large stochastic variation, bottlenecks, and selective sweeps. Thus, to increase the power of our analysis, we assayed 40 independent, biparentally inherited autosomal loci (1 LINE-1 and 39 Alu elements) in all of the caste and continental populations (?600 individuals). Analysis of these data demonstrated that the upper castes have a higher affinity to Europeans than to Asians, and the upper castes are significantly more similar to Europeans than are the lower castes. Collectively, all five datasets show a trend toward upper castes being more similar to Europeans, whereas lower castes are more similar to Asians. We conclude that Indian castes are most likely to be of proto-Asian origin with West Eurasian admixture resulting in rank-related and sex-specific differences in the genetic affinities of castes to Asians and Europeans.

Shared Indo-European languages (i.e., Hindi and most European languages) suggested to linguists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that contemporary Hindu Indians are descendants of primarily West Eurasians who migrated from Europe, the Near East, Anatolia, and the Caucasus 3000–8000 years ago (Poliakov 1974; Renfrew 1989a,b). These nomadic migrants may have consolidated their power by admixing with native Dravidic-speaking (e.g., Telugu) proto-Asian populations who controlled regional access to land, labor, and resources (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994), and subsequently established the Hindu caste hierarchy to legitimize and maintain this power (Poliakov 1974; Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994). It is plausible that these West Eurasian immigrants also appointed themselves to predominantly castes of higher rank. However, archaeological evidence of the diffusion of material culture from Western Eurasia into India has been limited (Shaffer 1982). Therefore, information on the genetic relationships of Indians to Europeans and Asians could contribute substantially to understanding the origins of Indian populations.

Previous genetic studies of Indian castes have failed to achieve a consensus on Indian origins and affinities. Various results have supported closer affinity of Indian castes either with Europeans or with Asians, and several factors underlie this inconsistency. First, erratic or limited sampling of populations has limited inferences about the relationships between caste and continental populations (i.e., Africans, Asians, Europeans). These relationships are further confounded by the wide geographic dispersal of caste populations. Genetic affinities among caste populations are, in part, inversely correlated with the geographic distance between them (Malhotra and Vasulu 1993), and it is likely that affinities between caste and continental populations are also geographically dependent (e.g., different between North and South Indian caste populations). Second, it has been suggested that castes of different rank may have originated from or admixed with different continental groups (Majumder and Mukherjee 1993). Third, the size of caste populations varies widely, and the effects of genetic drift on some small, geographically isolated castes may have been substantial. Fourth, most of the polymorphisms assayed over the last 30 years are indirect measurements of genetic variation (e.g., ABO typing), have been sampled from only a few loci, and may not be selectively neutral. Finally, only rarely have systematic comparisons been made with continental populations using a large, uniform set of DNA polymorphisms (Majumder 1999).

To investigate the origin of contemporary castes, we compared the genetic affinities of caste populations of differing rank (i.e., upper, middle, and lower) to worldwide populations. We analyzed mtDNA (hypervariable region 1 [HVR1] sequence and 14 restriction-site polymorphisms [RSPs]), Y-chromosome (5 short-tandem repeats [STRs] and 20 biallelic polymorphisms), and autosomal (1 LINE-1 and 39 Alu inserts) variation in ?265 males from eight different Telugu-speaking caste populations from the state of Andhra Pradesh in South India (Bamshad et al. 1998). Comparisons were made to ?400 individuals from tribal and Hindi-speaking caste and populations distributed across the Indian subcontinent (Mountain et al. 1995; Kivisild et al. 1999) and to ?350 Africans, Asians, and Europeans (Jorde et al. 1995, 2000; Seielstad et al. 1999).