Adoption is a very personal journey that influences numerous lives. 

In addition to juggling the complexities of her adoption narrative, Jillian Suh Kurovski-Legris, a first-year PhD student specializing in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, is a college adoptee facing the trials of young adulthood. Her story challenges the oversimplified narratives surrounding adoption and provides a window into the varied experiences of adoptees.

“Every adoption begins with loss,” Kurovski-Legris said. 

The process of understanding her adopted status and getting back in touch with her birth family is a very complicated and intimate journey for Kurovski-Legris. But Kurovski-Legris, like many adoptees, has had to deal with the difficulty of having people who might not completely understand the nuances of her experience, simplify her adoption story into simplistic tales. 

Kurovski-Legris encountered some difficulties adjusting to Korea when she visited, such as linguistic and cultural hurdles. She was adamant about finding her birth family in spite of these obstacles. 

To the outside world, it seems as if adopted child Betty lives in a children's paradise. In reality, her childhood is a living hell for fourteen years. She is insulted, humiliated, threatened and abused. "My mother really had traits of a psychopath."

“Glutton.”
“You're dumber than a donkey.”
“You filthy piece of shit, go back to Africa.”
“You fucking Ethiopian, I so regret that adoption.”

In the beautiful house with the large garden and the swimming pool, somewhere on the border between Brabant and Gelderland, just one thing has to happen and Betty's mother goes ballistic. She is a woman with two faces: to the outside world a model mother who the whole village is crazy about, inside a cruel shrew. "She never had an official diagnosis," says Betty. "But she really had traits of a psychopath."

Mother Bea doesn't stop at just scolding. She also hands out punishments. And they are extreme. A few minutes late home after a sports training? Betty - crazy about football - has to leave the club immediately. What are the tangles in her African hair? Mother grabs the clippers and shaves her daughter bald. "You sweep it up, fatlip", is the command the crying teenager then receives.

When she mumbles that she can't take it anymore, Betty is handed an axe. "If you want to die so badly, then do it," Bea screams. And to the rest of the family: "Everyone shout: Do it - do it - do it!"

A bench of justices BV Nagarathna and Augustine George Masih noted that a matter related to the Surrogacy Act is already pending in the top court.

The Supreme Court on Friday sought the response of the Centre on a petition challenging the bar under the Surrogacy Act that prevents married couples who already have a child from having a second child through surrogacy.

Issuing notice on a petition filed by a married couple, a bench of justices BV Nagarathna and Augustine George Masih noted that a matter related to the Surrogacy Act is already pending in the top court in a petition filed by IVF specialist Arun Muthuvel in which the amendments to the law barring single unmarried woman and homosexual couples are under challenge. The bench directed the matter to be heard on May 3.

Advocate Mohini Priya, who filed the latest petition, told the court that it challenges the constitutional validity of Section 4(iii)(C)(ii) of the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021, which makes an intending couple ineligible to avail of surrogacy if they have any healthy surviving child biologically or through adoption or surrogacy, thus excluding married couples suffering from secondary infertility.

“The choice of reproduction has been held to be a part of the right to life under Article 21 by the Supreme Court, and the said choices also fall within the right to privacy and that the Act severely regulates these rights, so much so, that the fundamental rights under Articles 14 and 21 stand defeated,” the petition said.

A bench of justices BV Nagarathna and Augustine George Masih noted that a matter related to the Surrogacy Act is already pending in the top court.

The Supreme Court on Friday sought the response of the Centre on a petition challenging the bar under the Surrogacy Act that prevents married couples who already have a child from having a second child through surrogacy.

Issuing notice on a petition filed by a married couple, a bench of justices BV Nagarathna and Augustine George Masih noted that a matter related to the Surrogacy Act is already pending in the top court in a petition filed by IVF specialist Arun Muthuvel in which the amendments to the law barring single unmarried woman and homosexual couples are under challenge. The bench directed the matter to be heard on May 3.

Advocate Mohini Priya, who filed the latest petition, told the court that it challenges the constitutional validity of Section 4(iii)(C)(ii) of the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021, which makes an intending couple ineligible to avail of surrogacy if they have any healthy surviving child biologically or through adoption or surrogacy, thus excluding married couples suffering from secondary infertility.

“The choice of reproduction has been held to be a part of the right to life under Article 21 by the Supreme Court, and the said choices also fall within the right to privacy and that the Act severely regulates these rights, so much so, that the fundamental rights under Articles 14 and 21 stand defeated,” the petition said.

A bench of justices BV Nagarathna and Augustine George Masih noted that a matter related to the Surrogacy Act is already pending in the top court.

The Supreme Court on Friday sought the response of the Centre on a petition challenging the bar under the Surrogacy Act that prevents married couples who already have a child from having a second child through surrogacy.

Issuing notice on a petition filed by a married couple, a bench of justices BV Nagarathna and Augustine George Masih noted that a matter related to the Surrogacy Act is already pending in the top court in a petition filed by IVF specialist Arun Muthuvel in which the amendments to the law barring single unmarried woman and homosexual couples are under challenge. The bench directed the matter to be heard on May 3.

Advocate Mohini Priya, who filed the latest petition, told the court that it challenges the constitutional validity of Section 4(iii)(C)(ii) of the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021, which makes an intending couple ineligible to avail of surrogacy if they have any healthy surviving child biologically or through adoption or surrogacy, thus excluding married couples suffering from secondary infertility.

“The choice of reproduction has been held to be a part of the right to life under Article 21 by the Supreme Court, and the said choices also fall within the right to privacy and that the Act severely regulates these rights, so much so, that the fundamental rights under Articles 14 and 21 stand defeated,” the petition said.

objection to Woo request for intercountry adoption from Indonesia

The hidden history of the Cold War adoption complex.

In 1986, when David Whelan was just a baby, his mother Joan had her first psychotic break. Throughout David’s childhood, Joan spent time in institutions and eventually was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. David always wondered whether something in her past had triggered it; all he knew was that his mother had been adopted from Greece when she was young, and that something tragic had happened to her parents.

As a kid, David never dared to broach the subject. But in 2013, when he was 26 and back home visiting from grad school, he worked up the nerve to talk to his father. “Did something happen to mom when she was young?”

“She said it’s OK for me to tell you,” his dad finally explained one evening after David had been asking for months. “Her father was executed in Greece by firing squad. He was something political.”

A few days later, David’s father passed him copies of his mother’s birth parents’ death certificates. David typed his grandfather’s name, Elias Argyriadis, into Google. He read that Joan’s father had been a communist leader who had been accused of espionage and sentenced to death in Athens in 1952.

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Victims who were matched to the wrong biological parents in Spoorloos , want to be heard under oath in court by the makers of the KRO-NCRV program and the departing presenter Derk Bolt. The mismatches were in the news about two years ago and according to the victims, the bottom stone in the case has still not been found.

'For clients, the book Spoorloos is not closed', their lawyers Annemiek van Spanje and Royce de Vries tell this site after reporting by RTL Boulevard . 'Not only because they still have to live with the consequences of the mismatches, but also because they have not reached a suitable solution with KRO-NCRV. A month ago, KRO-NCRV therefore announced that the court would be requested to hold a preliminary witness hearing, in which clients want to hear Derk Bolt as a witness, among others.'

Such an interrogation is a preliminary stage of a civil procedure, in which the victims may claim compensation. But first it must be clear who exactly was to blame for the course of events. According to the victims, the news about the departure of presenter Bolt came shortly after the lawyers had informed the makers that they wanted to hear him under oath. 'Clients do not know whether this upcoming legal process was the reason for Derk Bolt's departure. They do find the timing remarkable', according to Van Spanje and De Vries.

'Incorrect and unfortunate'

Mariela Neagu’s Voices from the Silent Cradles: Life Histories of Romania’s Looked-After Children was first published by Policy Press in the UK. 

Neagu, a research associate at the University of Oxford, describes her book as follows: 

“In 1990, disturbing television footage emerged showing the inhumane conditions in which children in Romanian institutions were living, and viewers were surprised that the babies were silent. The so-called ‘Romanian orphans’ became subjects of several international research studies. In parallel, Romania had to reform its child protection system in order to become a member of the European Union.

This book sheds light on the lived experiences of these children, who had become adults by the time the country joined the EU. Uniquely, the book brings together the accounts of those who stayed in institutions, those who grew up in foster care and those who were adopted, both in Romania and internationally. Their narratives challenge stereotypes about these types of care.”

Now, Neagu’s book has been translated into Romanian and published with Cluj University Press. She says this was very important to her given that most of the forty people she interviewed were Romanian speakers, and therefore one of her most important target audiences will now be able to read the book in their native language. 

Minister Lahbib refers to the Hague Adoption Convention, not the UNCRC