Just 3,559 children were placed for adoption with families living in India and abroad in 2020-21

In the summer of 2019, Vinay Raj* and his wife Kanika gathered their family and friends to announce the most important decision they had made in their eight years of marriage: they were going to adopt a baby girl. They had registered on the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) website in April that year, and the home survey report was approved in a month. The couple, based in New Delhi , was told they could take the baby home in a year. The prospect of adopting a baby allayed the trauma of the miscarriage Kanika had just suffered. The couple pulled out all the stops: “We bought little blankets and baby clothes, soft toys and books,” says Vinay.

And then began the wait. It’s been three years now, and CARA has not yet referred a child to the couple. “We have almost given up hope,” says Vinay. “It has been emotionally exhausting.” To make matters worse, there has been no word from the adoption authority either. “No one picks up the phone, and when we meet them they blame the pandemic for the delay. But now they have no excuse,” he says. So interminable has been the process and so great the emotional toll that Vinay and Kanika have changed their mind about adopting a second child.

For Bhuwaneshwari Chandrashekharan, a lecturer in Kuwait, the endless wait for adoption meant putting the brakes on a promising career shift. She had registered with CARA in February 2019, and expected to wait months, not years. Two years ago, Bhuwaneshwari, who specialises in organic chemistry, applied for a Ph.D in Canada, and made plans to eventually move to that country. “But I’ve had no choice but to stay on in Kuwait; this is the address with which I have registered with CARA,” she says. The wait has been tough. “I don’t know who to turn to. I feel blindfolded,” says Bhuwaneshwari, who continues to attend pre-adoption workshops in anticipation of bringing a baby home.

Behind the numbers

Children steal to do good? The Swedish adoptions from the time of the military dictatorship in Chile are finally examined in more detail

From 1970 to 1990 around 2000 babies and toddlers were adopted from Chile to Sweden. In hundreds of cases, the children may have been stolen or taken under duress from their biological mothers. But in Sweden, the responsible institutions hesitate to deal seriously with the injustice.

David Henningson actually has a different name. And no, this is not about the usual phrase that journalists use to protect their sources on sensitive issues. Henningson actually had a different name: he was born Manuel Jesús Gonzales in July 1973 in a provincial Chilean town. Three years later he lived with his then eleven-month-old brother Gabriel in a children's home. The father was an alcoholic, the mother missing and possibly pregnant by another man. Social services managed to arrange for the brothers to be adopted to Sweden. The boys came to Gudrun and Bo Henningson in Halmstad. That's what the adoption papers say.

It is one of the African countries where traffickers compete with tricks to obtain "children to adopt" illegally. Congolese children sometimes find themselves thousands of kilometers from their native country, at the mercy of families who exploit them without scruple as “domestic or sexual slaves”. The fight is engaged in Kinshasa to try to put an end to it.

Individuals presenting themselves as members of a charitable organization do not hesitate to trap poor Congolese parents. They promise to send their young children to school. Often, it is already too late when the families discover the deception.

Sequestered in clandestine accommodation centers in Kinshasa, some of these young Congolese were able to find their families who alerted relatives. The unluckiest begin a journey of no return. They land in unknown hands, in Lebanon, India, or in European countries. Subject to second adoptions, outside of any legal framework, they come completely off the radar and suffer the ordeal of their executioners who make them their slaves.

"Acts that hurt the conscience"

The Congolese government has denounced “ a number of acts that hurt the conscience ”. Adopted children were allegedly " abused" and " mistreated".

Information on the National Board of Appeal's four notes on a study of the Danish adoption agency from Colombia, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, from the Minister of Social Affairs and the Elderly

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The National Board of Appeal's four notes on a study of the Danish adoption agency from Colombia, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Sri Lanka from the Minister of Social Affairs and the Elderly

The National Board of Appeal has quietly given birth to their investigation, which does not surprisingly release Denmark from liability in relation to the illegalities they can not deny have occurred in adoptions from the 4 countries they have chosen to investigate.

It is sad to read that in all 4 statements they generally use terms such as "in most cases" or "In several cases". Nevertheless, it was concluded that no illegalities could be detected.

It is predictable that the responsibility is imposed on the donor countries' "unregulated" conditions and not the pressure the adoption agencies imposed on the donor countries, just as it is directly problematic that the economic conditions including the widespread use of donations (which the last revision of the Adoption Act reintroduced) are not proven to be the vast majority of illegalities.

The Adoption Policy Forum can conclude:

Mumbai, Mar 16 (PTI) The Maharashtra government has hiked the monthly allowance for orphans and homeless children in the state to Rs 2,500 each from the child welfare scheme, state Minister Yashomati Thakur told the legislative Assembly on Wednesday.

During the Question Hour in the Lower House, the state women and child development minister said the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has been conducting a survey of orphans and homeless children in the state since November 2021.

As per the ongoing survey, as of now 5,153 children are living on the streets with their families, 1,266 are on the streets but live in slums and 39 are orphans, Thakur said.

Street children are being kept in day-care centres for their daily needs, she said.

The state government has increased the monthly allowance for orphans and homeless children from the child welfare scheme from Rs 425 to Rs 2,500 per child, the minister said.

NEW DELHI: Citing data shared by the ministry of women and child development that put the number of prospective adoptive parents waiting to adopt at around 26,000 whereas the children available in the pool at just about 2,400, a parliamentary panel has recommended that the adoption process in the country be simplified. They called for special focus on special children waiting to be adopted.

In its report tabled in Parliament on Wednesday, the 31 member parliamentary standing committee on education, women, children, youth and sports chaired by BJP member Vinay P Sahasrabuddhe has stressed upon the need for a close relook at the various regulations guiding the procedure of adoption.

According to the report, the WCD ministry at the time of deposition before the committee shared that the number of prospective adoptive parents registered was 26,000 but the number of children who were legally free for adoption was 2,400 and out of these 900 were children with special needs. It was also submitted that various steps have been taken to ease the mechanism of adoption including amendments in JJ Act to give the power to issue adoption order to district magistrates and also under Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, 1956.

Adoption provides a win-win situation to the child as well as the new parents. The government should adopt a simple but rigorous process to promote this socially progressive trend.

The ministry submitted that Hindu adoption (under HAMA) which happens directly between relatives does not get to CARA (Central Adoption Resource Authority) and thus data regarding such adoptions is not available. CARA is a statutory body which functions as the nodal body for adoption of Indian children and is mandated to monitor and regulate in-country and inter-country adoptions.

Former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea, the far-right Republican who was found by a House-commissioned investigation to have planned and participated in domestic terrorism, is in a small town in Poland with more than 60 Ukrainian children, trying to facilitate their adoption in America.

Shea has said his group helped rescue 62 children and their two adult caregivers from an orphanage in Mariupol, the city in southeastern Ukraine that has been bombarded by Russian forces.

But international agencies say, with the chaos and confusion of war, now is not an appropriate time for international adoptions from Ukraine. And Shea’s presence, and the lack of information surrounding the American group he’s with, has raised concerns among some residents of Kazimierz Dolny, the small Polish town where the children are staying at a hotel-guesthouse.

“I asked him many times, ‘What are you going to do with these children?’ and he told me that it’s not my business,'” Weronika Ziarnicka, an aide to the mayor of Kazimierz Dolny, said of Shea. “I got the feeling in my gut that something’s wrong with this guy; he didn’t want to tell me his last name.”

Shea, who rarely speaks to mainstream media, did not respond to requests for comment.

More than 14,000 girls and women went through the doors of mother and baby homes, Magdalene laundries and other institutions between 1922 and 1990.

Police in Northern Ireland are probing 29 allegations of criminal activity around mother and baby homes.

Officers have received reports from a number of people who were adopted from different named institutions and also from some who either worked there or were residents within these institutions.

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Summary: This is a response by Scottish mothers. We hope to corroborate evidence that the committee may receive from mothers of MAA who gave birth in England or Wales prior to 1976. We believe that a full public inquiry, such as that commissioned by the Australian Senate is necessary to assess the scale, nature and consequences of historic adoption practices in the UK. Our submission provides anecdotal evidence in response to key questions set by this JCHR inquiry, that is largely concordant with Australian findings. In short, we contend that the right to family life was not respected, nor was the right to freedom from degrading treatment.

This is a submission on behalf of Origins Scotland, which is affiliated with Origins International – an organisation which was founded in Australia in 1995 by Dian Wellfare. Origins International has branches in a number of countries including Australia, United States, Canada and New Zealand. Origins Scotland was set up in 2010 by Marion McMillan, who has now stepped back due to ill health. A number of our mothers, including Marion, have collaborated with the Movement for an Adoption Apology(MAA) over the years since it’s formation, and have made contributions to associated activism in Scotland and at Westminster. It is surprising and disappointing that our mothers are not included in this JHRC inquiry. In addition, our members had babies taken for adoption in the 60’s, late 70’s and early 80’s, with a significant proportion in the later period after 1976.

Accounts of forced adoption practices are difficult to obtain and verify. Women who were traumatised, humiliated and shamed are often reluctant to speak, and very reluctant to be identified. Prior to the advent of internet forums and facebook groups, it was difficult for those affected by adoption to find one another. For many, first contact with another mother was the first occasion on which they realised that many of their troubling experiences were far from unique. Following a recent BBC documentary, mothers and adoptees have contacted Origins, and while not all of those wished to join a campaign, all showed a strong desire to share their experiences.

A full public inquiry, as ordered by the Senate in Australia, would be the only way to determine the scale, nature and consequences of the policies and practices which facilitated historic forced adoption. The Senate report resulted in the commissioning of formal research - Past adoption experiences National Research Study on the Service Response to Past Adoption Practices Pauline Kenny, Daryl Higgins, Carol Soloff and Reem Sweid

We decided it was right for us to make a submission to the Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry to support our Movement for Adoption Apology friends. Our submission will be anecdotal, rather than quantitative. However, we are very confident that our evidence will corroborate the submissions made by those in England and Wales, as it is largely concordant with the findings of the Australian research.