The Dutch state has not done enough to ensure that the adoption of Dilani Butink from Sri Lanka goes smoothly, the court ruled this week. Do other adoptees also benefit from that statement?

Adopted Dilani Butink could hardly believe it this week. After years of legal wrangling, the Court of Appeal in The Hague confirmed what it had suspected for much longer: that the Dutch state and the Child and Future Foundation acted unlawfully when Dilani was transferred to the Netherlands as a baby from Sri Lanka for adoption in 1992.

Butink is one of many foreign adoptees struggling with falsified or missing information in their adoption file. Without the right ancestry data, a search for biological family is often an impossible quest. This is the first time that a judge has expressed such a critical view of the state's responsibility in foreign adoptions. With the judgment of the court in hand, Butink can claim damages from the state and the foundation that arranged her adoption at the time – for example for all the costs of her efforts to find her family.

baby gangs

Can other adoptees also draw hope from this statement? It looks like that. Lawyer Dewi Deijle, himself adopted from Indonesia, represents more than a hundred adoptees and has already tried twice on their behalf to hold the state liable for damage suffered. The government has consistently rejected those requests. Deijle postponed a step to court until now. 'Cause it's all so hard to prove. During the period that I was adopted, there were already stories about baby gangs robbing and selling children. I may have been one of them, but how can I prove that?'

The Delhi High Court on Friday said it will not permit an unmarried woman to undergo medical termination of pregnancy at 23 weeks, observing it virtually amounts to killing the foetus.

The high court also said the law granted time to unmarried women to undergo the procedure of medical termination of pregnancy and the legislature has “purposefully excluded consensual relationship” from the category of cases where termination is permissible after 20 weeks and up to 24 weeks.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma, while dealing with the petition by the woman to undergo medical termination of pregnancy, suggested that the petitioner be kept “somewhere safe” until she delivers the child who can subsequently be given up for adoption.

“We will ensure that the girl is kept somewhere safe and she can deliver and go. There is a big queue for adoption,” observed the bench, also comprising Justice Subramonium Prasad.

“We will not permit you to kill that child. (We are) very sorry. This virtually amounts to killing (the foetus),” said the court orally as it noted that almost 24 out of 36 weeks of gestation were over.

Getasew Ferguson was going through his paces at a regular Bond University Bull Sharks AFL training session when one word stopped him in his tracks.

Teammate Abe Forward had approached him after learning they were both from the same East African country. They soon discovered their similarities ran much deeper.

“Abe said ‘hello’ to me in Ethiopian,” Ferguson said.

“I was like, what! I was surprised because I never knew he was from my country. We spoke for a while and figured out we were both from the same orphanage, which was pretty cool.”

The pair, both 23, were born only a few hours away from one another. Now they are close friends.

The West German youth welfare offices have recently had to devote themselves to a highly annoying sideline: they have to defend themselves against the accusation that by interpreting the legal provisions too narrowly they have contributed to the emergence of a "grey market" in which a commodity that is not commonplace is traded, namely small children.

The accusation was recently made by the Overseas Weekly, which informs Americans stationed in NATO Europe about the world. Overseas Weekly proclaimed in two bold front-page headlines: "Americans Bypass German Laws to Adopt Children."

Federal German municipal officials, the paper reported, had admitted that unborn babies traded briskly on a semi-legal "grey market."

will. "Even though orphanages are overflowing with unwanted children, American couples are forced to circumvent German law in order to find children for adoption."

Südwestdeutsche Gazetten took up the spectacular news. The Heidelberg Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung wrote: "'Overseas Weekly' rightly claims that in Germany thousands of babies are 'bought' by American families in addition to the normal adoption cases." The main transshipment point is the Kaiserslautern suburb of Vogelweh. 5,000 NATO Americans and their families live in Vogelweh.

In February 2021, the investigative report of the Joustra Committee exposed the abuses surrounding intercountry adoption. An immediate adoption stop was the result. Shanthy (30) is a victim of illegal adoption. “Who says my life in Bangladesh would have been less happy? Less wealthy, I'm sure, but I would have grown up in my country, with my family.”

This interview was previously published in Flair 27-2021.

Shanthy (30) is team leader in mental health care and single. She found out that someone was hired to play her biological mother at the time.

Adopted

“'Here's your biological mother,' I was told when I was seven years old during a visit to Sri Lanka. I looked at the woman who wanted to grab me and immediately felt that it wasn't right. She was not my mother, I felt that so very strongly. I later told my adoptive parents. They didn't know what to do with it. The man who had helped with my adoption at the time had actually told her that this woman was my biological mother. Why would he lie about that?”

Shortly after June Smith gave birth, a nurse at the Royal Women’s Hospital gave her two white pills.

She asked what they were for.

“The nurse said: ‘To dry up your milk’," Ms Smith says. "I said: ‘But I’m keeping him’. Her words were: ‘You will not be allowed to keep him’.

Fifty-eight years later Ms Smith, 77, and Lynette Kinghorn, 73, are suing the Royal Women’s Hospital and adoption agencies in the Victorian County Court for damages.

Their legal counsel, Shine Lawyers, says the two women objected to their children being put up for adoption and the medical professionals entrusted with their care should have ensured their wishes were respected.

The life paths of adopted children since the post-war period have been researched at the Technical University of Dresden. A conversation about roots and well-being.

Adelheid Müller-Lissner conducted the interview with the historian BettinaWärmer from the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism at the Technical University of Dresden. Heater heads the project “Belonging. The History of Child Adoption 1945-2000”. The team is still looking for parents who adopted children between 1955 and 2000 and people who were adopted during this period as study participants (contact: adoptionsstudie@tu-dresden.de ). Further information on the research project at: https://hait.tu-dresden.de/ext/forschung/forschungsprojekt-5149/

Ms.Wärmer, one focus of your project on the history of adoptions in post-war Germany is the evaluation of individual adoption stories. What makes these stories interesting for historians?

They give us an idea of ??how social ideas about family, identity, origin and foreignness changed in the second half of the 20th century. The story of Anneli Schinkel, who came to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1982 as Kim Kyong Jo and later wrote the book “Seidentochter”, shows this on the subject of “foreign adoption”.

She was adopted as a baby in the early 1980s, came to Korea for the first time in 2005 at the invitation of the local government, met her biological parents there and dealt with the tension between biological origin and cultural imprint.

The European Commission has taken Hungary to the EU's top court for allegedly violating laws on media freedom and LGBTQ+ rights.

The Commission Friday announced it was sending Hungary to the Court of Justice of the European Union for refusing to renew a radio license for independent Hungarian media Klubradio. Hungary will also have to face European judges over an anti-LGBTQ+ law. The law seeks to prevent children and teenagers from accessing content and ads about LGBTQ+ issues.

Budapest's actions go against several European telecom, audiovisual and digital laws, including the Audiovisual Media Services Directive and the e-Commerce Directive, the Commission argues. The anti-LGBTQ+ rules also infringe on crucial foundational European texts — the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU and Treaty of the EU — and the EU Charter of fundamental rights.

Brussels' move comes after it said Hungary's explanations failed to assuage the Commission's concerns. The Commission had launched infringement procedures in June 2021.

My childhood fantasy, whenever there was an unexpected knock at the door, was that Charles and Diana had had a breakdown on the A road that ran outside our house and needed a bed for the night. Subsequently, I was always mortified when the door opened on a grinning friend of my parents or some pre-GPS driver lost in the black Oxfordshire countryside. This huge disparity between reality and the grandiose expectations I was able to conjure up in milliseconds has never left me.

The call that Wednesday afternoon was a rare exception. I had just finished teaching my weekly English class at the University of Potsdam and saw a missed call on my phone with a Berlin number. I am always waiting for the call, the one that is going to change my life, so it’s impossible for me to ignore an unidentified number. I always phone back.

“Frau Schw[mumble],” the voice said.

“It’s Ben Fergusson. I had a missed call from this number call.”

“Ah, Herr Fergusson. It’s Frau Schwenk.” Our social worker, I now understood. “Thank you for getting back to me. I’m calling because we have a little boy, four weeks old, who needs a family.”

THIRUVANANTHAPUR: Seven months have passed since a high-ranking IAS official submitted a report which contained adverse comments on the Kerala State Council for Child Welfare (KSCCW) for flouting adoption norms, but no action has been taken in the matter so far.

Many feel the reason no action has been initiated so far is because KSCCW's General Secretary, J.S. Shiju Khan, is a top youth leader of the ruling CPI-M.

Incidentally, the KSCCW along with the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) was in the news when it was alleged that it had allowed adoption of a child to an Andhra Pradesh couple last year.

Trouble began when a former student activist of the CPI-M, Anupama, and her now husband Ajith, also a local CPI-M leader, claimed that four days after she delivered her baby boy in October 2020, her parents forcibly took the child away and later the KSCCWC and CWC allowed the child to be adopted by an Andhra Pradesh couple.

Following media outcry, which began in September 2021, action begun on the distraught mother's pleas.