Iwas dressed in a clown costume: brightly colored baby-doll dress, bloomers, big shoes, red nose—the works—preparing to run the annual Fourth of July 5k race in Skagway, Alaska. As I stretched at the starting line, playing up to the crowd, my husband strode up, grabbed my arm, and tried to pull me toward a side street. Distressed at his forcefulness, I yanked away, ready to demand he explain himself, when his face seemed to melt.

"Michael died."

His gray complexion and the way he reached for me slammed the reality home. Like in a movie scene, my body crumbled to the ground, and as if in a lucid dream, I hovered above: my body was slumped in the middle of the city's Third Street, smack in the center of the hoop-bottomed dress like a bullseye. The sound that escaped my lips still echoes down that empty street—and in my skull.

In the days and weeks to follow, people expressed their condolences. They placed gentle hands on my forearm and nodded wordlessly or, more often, uttered the phrase "I'm so sorry for your loss." Emails filled my inbox, and messages popped up on social media feeds with broken hearts and sad face emojis.

These sympathetic offerings were welcome, if painful, reminders that I was a mother who'd lost her child. But their kindness marked a clear delineation from the last time I'd grieved the loss of this same child: after I'd relinquished my parental rights 23 years earlier.

This week, the Court of Appeal in The Hague ruled in favor of Dilani Butink in the case she had brought against the Dutch state and the Stichting Kind en Toekomst. The case had previously been time-barred, according to the court. She was proven right on appeal.

The case in brief

Dilani Butink was born in Sri Lanka in 1992 and adopted shortly afterwards by her Dutch adoptive parents. She has not been able to find her biological parents on the basis of her adoption papers. After Zembla television broadcasts in 2017 about abuses during adoption from Sri Lanka, she held the State and the Foundation liable. Dilani states that her adoption was made carelessly, leaving her in uncertainty about her origin and the circumstances under which she was given up. According to her, this is a violation of her fundamental rights and the State and the Foundation have acted unlawfully because of the role they played in the realization of the adoption.

Invocation of prescription expired/unacceptable

The court upheld the appeal of the State and the Foundation to the statute of limitations in 2020 and rejected Dilani Butink's claims. In the appeal, the State dropped the limitation defence. The Court finds the Foundation's appeal to prescription to be unacceptable. This allowed the case to be dealt with substantively.

Times have changed since Aotearoa's adoption system was written into law in 1955. Where once they removed all records of biological parents, there are now calls for the Ministry of Justice to give adopted children greater access to information about their birth family and culture, and support in reconnecting.

When Erica Newman's mother was growing up, the other kids at school had questions.

They wanted to know why she was brown when her parents were white.

She was seven years old when she found out she was adopted – but Newman says it wasn't until her mother was older, with children of her own, that she was driven to find answers.

"She always had a questioning and wondering about her taha M?ori, understanding that side of her family and her identity," says Newman, who is now the coordinator for the indigenous development programme at the University of Otago.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WTVG) - After the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the topic of adoption has taken the spotlight.

So at what point does a biological father lose the right to contest an adoption? That’s the question before the Ohio Supreme Court.

At the end of the day, the case before the Ohio Supreme Court is all about deadlines and the rights of a biological father.

It involves a girl who was 17-years-old at the time she got pregnant and her then 18-year-old boyfriend. She told him early on she wanted to put the child up for adoption but he disagreed. Eventually they ended their relationship. He tried to keep in touch but her family cut off communication.

The baby was born about a week early and was almost immediately placed with a couple looking to adopt that child. 17 days after the baby was born, the biological father found out. He immediately filed with Ohio’s putative father registry, which gives unmarried men the chance to get parental rights. The only problem is that the deadline to do that is 15 days after the child is born.

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.