WARANGAL (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/WARANGAL) RURAL:

It’s a curse they live with. The girl child in Warangal

Rural — where only 870 females are born per 1,000 males — is so unwanted that selling her is an accepted norm here, if a tribal

woman fails to abort the foetus. Apart from selling the baby girl, infanticide is also a harsh reality in this part of the world —

largely made of thandas and inhabited by Lambadas.

Most adult adopters are satisfied with their lives

Intercountry adoption evokes both positive and negative responses and the discussion penetrates far into policy. Distance and adoption are major interventions in people's lives. Negative reports about adoption often dominate the media. But does this picture reflect how most of the 40,000 intercountry adopters think about their adoption? To clarify this, a questionnaire study was conducted in 2016 into the satisfaction of a large, varied group of intercountry adoptees in the Netherlands.

Because adoptive organizations, adoptive parents and organizations for adopted persons cooperated, a varied group of adopted persons could be heard: those who are critical of adoption, those who are positive about it and those who do not usually appear in the media. A scientific article about the results of this research has now been published in the magazine "Adoption and Fostering".

Satisfied with their lives

A large group, 1155 intercountry adopters, adopted from 32 countries between 1961 and 1998, responded. And guess what? Despite the often difficult start, the vast majority of adult adopters can build a life that they are happy with. They were even slightly more satisfied with their lives than the average Dutch population.

HUGER, South Carolina — The U.S. Department of Justice says a South Carolina couple tried to get around overseas adoption rules by telling immigration officials a baby they adopted in the Philippines was their biological child.

The State reports federal prosecutors indicted 24-year-old Stephanie Jean Locker and 46-year-old Gerald Vincent Locker Jr. on charges of conspiracy and making false statements in a passport application.

The two were living in Japan in 2014 while Gerald Locker served in the Marines.

A Justice Department release accuses Stephanie Locker of saying she’d learned she was pregnant while on vacation in the Philippines, five days before the baby’s birth.

Records allege the two tried to circumvent adoption processes by passing off the Filipino child as their biological baby.

Responding to a question in Lok Sabha, WCD Minister Smriti Irani gave data according to which the highest number of deaths of children have been reported from Uttar Pradesh. These deaths occurred across 19 specialised adoption agencies in the state.

As many as 776 children, including 124 in Uttar Pradesh, have died at specialised adoption agencies in the last three years, the Women and Child Development (WCD)Ministry said Friday.

Responding to a question in Lok Sabha, WCD Minister Smriti Irani gave data according to which the highest number of deaths of children have been reported from Uttar Pradesh. These deaths occurred across 19 specialised adoption agencies in the state.

Children legally free for adoption are provided residential care at specialised adoption agency(SAA), which are run by both state governments and NGOs.

"As per the Child Adoption Resource Information and Guideline System (CARINGS), 776 children have reported to have died in SAAs during the period from 2016-2017 to 2019-2020 (up to July 8, 2019)," Irani said.

Kazakhstan: Suspension of Intercountry Adoptions Continues

Last Updated: July 12, 2019

The Kazakhstan Adoption Authority, the Ministry of Education and Science (MOES), confirmed to the U.S. Central Authority that the suspension on intercountry adoption between the United States and Kazakhstan remains in place pending submission of all outstanding post-adoption reports (PARs). While the MOES has continued to issue certificates of authorization to Adoption Service Providers (ASPs), the suspension applies to all U.S. ASPs.

Timely submission of PARs is critical to our ongoing efforts to resume intercountry adoptions between the United States and Kazakhstan. Compliance with Kazakhstan’s PAR requirements will contribute to an understanding of the positive impact that intercountry adoption has for children from Kazakhstan who are living in the United States.

Adoptive parents of Kazakh children are requested to submit outstanding PARs as soon as possible. The MOES requires that PARs include adoptive parents’ names, each adopted child’s name and date of birth, and the region from which the child was adopted, as well as recent photos of the child, including family photographs. PARs should also include information about each of the following:

Taking note of the big racket of illegal sale of children for adoption existing in many parts of the country, a court here has urged the authorities to make it an offence punishable under the Indian Penal Code.

Noting that no steps have taken by the government on the 20-year-old recommendations of the Law Commission for making a legal provision to cover the cases where a woman and child is sold, the court said that there exists an urgent need and a valid justification to extend the scope of legal provisions.

Additional Sessions Judge Kamini Lau observed that childrens are sold in adoption market, terming it as "Baccha Baazar" for children like for potatoes, tomatoes and onions and a "big racket of illegal sale of children for adoption exists in many states".

"I am pained to observe that even after 20 years of the above recommendations of the Law Commission of India the recommended amendments are yet to be deliberated upon by those who have been entrusted with the responsibility of framing the laws in this country," she said.

"In this background, I reaffirm the recommendations of the Law Commission of India (Supra) and hold that there exists an urgent need and a valid justification to extend the scope of legal provisions so to cover the cases where a woman or a child is sold whatever be the immediate or ultimate objective of the transaction," the court held.

Imagine for a minute that you don’t know who your mother is. Now imagine that you are that mother, and you don’t know what became of your daughter.

Imagine the questions that the daughter would live with on a daily basis. Why did my mom give me up? And imagine that mother, possibly plagued by regret, and very likely thinking of her lost daughter.

For Janine Vance and her sister, Jenette, these are not imaginings, but everyday life. Adopted into the United States from Korea when they were very young, the two women have next to no information about their original family, and very little detail about the circumstances of their adoption. In order to answer her own questions, and those of other adoptees not only from Korea but around the world, Janine has spent years researching the questionable practices of adoption agencies. She has written books on the topic, and formed a support network for those in similar situations. She calls her research and the collection of resulting books that also includes her memoirs, The rEvolutionary Orphan Collective.

Doubtless there are legitimate providers of children from other countries to the United States for adoption by U.S. parents. Yet what Janine suspects, is what her research points to: an adoption machine that hints at human trafficking, evangelical agendas, and, at the very least, taking children from those less advantaged to give to the more advantaged—for a profit.

“The primary concern I have about the current adoption procedure for children, whether from Asia or Africa, or anywhere in the world, is that it is based on secrecy in order for it to be effective and profitable,” explained Janine. “It has been created by various churches and based on shame. It has exploded into a network known as the Evangelical Orphan Movement and used as an effort to proselytize to other people’s children. It generates massive amounts of money for profiteers or adoptioneers. It ignores the rights of children as enshrined in the original intent of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child…Korean children are not the only children exploited by the industry, but…there are several mass child migration schemes that have plagued communities, particularly organized by various religious entities, starting as early as 1618. It continues today because no one knows the crisis exists.”

Four-member committee to conduct spot verification of family applying for adoption

KOCHI: In a move aimed at preventing fraudulent practices in the adoption process, Kerala government has brought in an additional layer of screening and approval process for childless couples to adopt children in the state. This process is in addition to the existing tight procedures put in place by the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development through its statutory body Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) in 2017.

As per the new screening process, a four-member committee that includes a local anganwadi worker will conduct a detailed probe into the whereabouts of the family based on the home study report prepared by an approved adoption agency.

“Earlier, approval for adoption process was given based on the home study report prepared by the approved agency. Kerala government has introduced another level of verification process wherein a four-member committee has to conduct a detailed inquiry based on the home study report and approval is given only if they find the details mentioned in the report correct,” said a senior officer of state Social Justice Department.

District Child Protection Officer Shina said the additional level of verification was introduced by the state government to prevent fraud committed by a few unregulated orphanages under the cover of adoption.

Inés Madrigal, who was taken from her birth mother in 1969, has located a second cousin thanks to a US company, and says that she has “completed the puzzle that is my life”

The first woman to be recognized by the Spanish courts as one of the country’s so-called “stolen babies” revealed today that she has managed to locate her biological family after 32 years of searching. Thanks to a DNA database in the United States, Inés Madrigal has been put in touch with a second cousin, who informed her that her biological siblings were also searching for her.

Over the last decade or so, it has emerged that during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, a network of nuns and doctors at certain hospitals had taken babies from poor families or single mothers and given them to wealthy parents unable to conceive. The irregular scheme is thought to have been in operation until 1990, well after the death of Franco in 1975 and the return of democracy to Spain in the late 1970s.

In October last year, the Madrid Provincial Court found that Eduardo Vela, a retired doctor who is now 86, was the perpetrator of the three crimes of which he had been accused in Spain’s first “stolen baby” trial: child abduction, faking a birth, and falsifying childbirth records and other official documents relating to Madrigal. However, he was not given a prison sentence or any other kind of punishment on the basis that the statute of limitations on the offenses had expired.

At a press conference in Madrid today, Madrigal described finding her “true family” as a “triumph,” although the news for her is bittersweet as she has since discovered that her biological mother died in 2013 at the age of 73.

CARRIZO SPRINGS, Tex. — As he stood before reporters in a newly opened emergency shelter for unaccompanied migrant children, the chief executive of the contracting firm that could be paid up to $300 million to run the facility was far from thrilled about the task before him.

“I hate this mission,” Kevin Dinnin, head of the San Antonio-based nonprofit BCFS Health and Human Services, said on Wednesday in this remote Texas town. “The only reason we do it is to keep the kids out of the Border Patrol jail cells.”

The Carrizo Springs shelter opened on June 30 to help alleviate cramped conditions in Border Patrol processing facilities, where people were recently seen sleeping head to toe on concrete floors, often lacking access to hot meals, showers and proper medical care. The shelter will be able to hold up to 1,300 teenage children, though it currently has just over 200.

Although reporters who visited the shelter Wednesday saw the children only briefly during a tightly controlled tour, conditions in Carrizo Springs appear far better than those in the Border Patrol stations. Children could be seen playing soccer outside, attending classes in groups of around 30 to 40 and making phone calls to their families.

The facility is a scattering of dormitory buildings, trailers and tents that were once housing for oil field workers. Children’s artwork — drawings of cartoon characters, flags and paper flowers — decorated the walls of their sleeping quarters. Lighted soccer fields allow children to play at night and avoid the harsh summer heat.