As a child, the adopted Joedi already watched 'Spoorloos' and hoped that Derk would go to Colombia for her too. And it worked. In Colombia, Derk not only finds the mother, but also the father of Joedi. The DNA test provides certainty, but Joedi also looks very much like her biological mother.

Before the broadcast, Derk Bolt tells where participants with doubts can report . He finds it particularly painful that not all matches have gone well in the past. Derk guarantees that this can no longer happen with DNA testing.

YUDI

The 36-year-old Joedi was adopted from Colombia. She has known for a long time how to track down her biological family. “When I thought about my biological family, I naturally thought 'I want to meet them, so I want to go find them'. Spoorloos always passed by in the same stream of thoughts, she says. “After that, Derk always came. That whole train of thought is one.”

When Derk was kidnapped in Colombia in 2017 , while making the program, Joedi was equally afraid that he would never go there again. “Then I thought 'well there goes my dream'. Quite a selfish thought when I think about it now," admits Joedi with a laugh. “Because I think it is quite traumatic and intense to experience that, but I actually thought first of myself and then of Derk.”

IPOH: After paying RM9,000 to an unregistered agent to adopt a child, Cheah Yoon Moy is now worried about the future of her daughter.

The 53-year-old trader paid an agent whom she had met through a friend in Johor to adopt her daughter 14 years ago.

“I was working in Kuala Lumpur and unmarried. My mother was concerned that when I get older, no one would be there to look after me so she asked me to consider adopting a child.

“After asking around, a friend of a friend told me that an agent could help me out. I drove all the way from Ipoh to Johor Baru to adopt my daughter, who was four months old at the time, with a payment of RM8,500,” she told reporters during a press conference held by Ipoh Barat MCA coordinator Low Guo Nan.

Cheah said upon adopting her daughter, the agent also provided her with a birth certificate with her name registered as the biological mother.

More than 50 years after her newborn baby was taken from her in a Brisbane hospital, Lily Arthur is still fighting for justice on forced adoption. Hear how she was reunited with her son.

Adopted as a baby, denied any information about her natural parents, Lohan has spent years fighting for the church and state to reveal what they know – about her and the thousands of others in the same position

A “destroyer of lives”. That is what a nun called adoption rights activist Susan Lohan when she sought answers from the religious order that brokered her adoption. Instead of being given the truth, Lohan was told not to ask questions. She was born in 1964 to one of thousands of unmarried mothers forcibly separated from their children – usually women who had no choice but adoption due to their circumstances. In the mid-60s in Ireland, up to 97% of all children born to unmarried mothers, like Lohan, were taken for adoption, mainly by the religious institutions and agencies that controlled social services and opposed reproductive choice.

On our drive to her home in Malahide, a coastal suburb of Dublin where she lives with her husband and son, Lohan reels off the heritage of her dog, Flynn, happily sprawled on the back seat. She laughs at the fact that her dog had documents to prove his ancestry but, as an adopted person, Lohan had to fight for decades to access her own birth information.

The married couple who adopted Lohan were loving parents, unlike some families in the past who took in children to use as free labour. A housewife and a shoe salesman, they were the rosary-reciting ideal of Catholic Ireland and their religious devotion would have been necessary to adopt a child. Couples needed a priest’s approval to adopt and sometimes even proof that they couldn’t have children biologically. Lohan’s adoptive parents were told that her mother had died in childbirth but they were sceptical. Lohan always had an image in her mind of her mother as an unmarried girl, too young to keep her. She later found out that her mother had been in her 30s at the time, a civil servant who became president of a trade union. “She was not a woman who was easily intimidated,” Lohan says. “And even she felt unable to resist.”

While studying at University College Dublin in the early 80s, Lohan’s “eyes were opened on a lot of issues”. Contraception was difficult to get in Ireland, for example, and the anti-choice eighth amendment, which made the foetus’s life of equal value to the mother’s, was introduced in 1983. But systemic abuse within the Catholic church in Ireland was also being exposed and many, like Lohan, were beginning to understand how religious-run agencies had used adoption “as a mechanism to separate families” who didn’t meet the Catholic ideal.

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.