Ricki Mudd was born in 1993 in China during the one-child policy era. She remembers her early childhood only in fragments, but has been told she had spent some of it hidden in a bag.

At age 5, she was adopted from a Chinese orphanage, one of the more than 150,000 children China sent overseas. Most were girls. In the West, they were one of the most visible consequences of the one-child policy, which ended in 2016. This month, Beijing put an end to foreign adoptions. 

China is grappling with a demographic crisis, with dropping birthrates and a rapidly aging population. The policies to control the population have given way to new ones in the opposite direction. But a legacy of the one-child policy is a dearth of women of childbearing age.

Because of a government decree that led to forced abortions and sterilizations, millions of girls were never born or were hidden from authorities. In the process, China’s gender ratio became increasingly skewed, with 117 boys born for every 100 girls in 2004, compared with 106 in 1980, United Nations data showed. 

A U.N. Population Fund study based on China’s 2010 census estimates the country’s “missing girls,” or females who in regular circumstances would have been born but who were absent from the population, at 24 million.

Intercountry adoption often appears to be the ultimate humanitarian deed —offering parentless children the chance for a better life in a safe and loving home. However, the reality is more complex. Dr. Elvira Loibl, assistant professor at the Department of Criminal Law at Maastricht University’s Law Faculty, uncovered significant weaknesses in the Dutch intercountry adoption system. Her research played a pivotal role in the decision to suspend all intercountry adoptions in the Netherlands as of May 2024. In recognition of her work and its far-reaching impact, the Edmond Hustinx Foundation awarded her this year’s prestigious prize.

It was ten years ago that Loibl encountered the topic of illegal intercountry adoption. “It was a coincidence, actually. I knew I wanted to pursue  a criminological study for my PhD, and while exploring potential topics, I read about illegal intercountry adoptions,” she starts off. “When I was working on my dissertation, I never imagined my research would have so much impact. In the same month my dissertation took place, the Joustra Commission was established.” Another coincidence that led to a chain of events that reshaped the intercountry adoption system in the Netherlands.

Edmond Hustinx Prize

The Edmond Hustinx Prize for Science has been awarded annually since 2011 by the Edmond Hustinx Foundation to highlight the impact of scientific research in South Limburg. The Edmond Hustinx Prize for Science is worth 15,000 euros and is awarded during the opening of the academic year of Maastricht University.

Romania and the United States, through the head of the prime minister’s chancellery Alexandru-Mihai Ghigiu, and the US ambassador to Romania, Kathleen Kavalec, have signed a five-year Child Protection Framework Partnership valued at USD 10 million.

The purpose of the partnership is to create a victim-centered prevention strategy and protect child victims of trafficking, according to the US ambassador.

“Many adult human trafficking victims around the world, including in the United States, were first exploited as children,” Kathleen Kavalec said.

Kavalec also stated that the US State Department will contribute up to USD 10 million over a five-year period to implement activities in Romania under the CPC partnership. She also mentioned that several NGOs will contribute to the implementation of this partnership.

Also present at the signing, Romanian interior minister Cătălin Predoiu noted that globally, abuse phenomena, including online, against children have increased alarmingly.

Siri and his guesthouse provide a good base for a search of the biological parents of adopted children. Siri has already gained much experience in this type of search. He works cautiously with feeling for the situation. He has a lot of contacts in Sri Lanka and if necessary travels all over the island in search of information. He also provides a service for Tros, a Dutch broadcasting company for programs about reuniting parents and children. He has been very successful and has already reunited many biological families.

Korea's domestic adoption system bars international couples from becoming adoptive parents

By Lee Hyo-jin

This July marks a significant milestone for British national Thomas Pallett and his Korean wife surnamed Kang: seven years of unsuccessful attempts to adopt a child in Korea.

The couple, who live in the southeastern port city of Busan, have faced persistent rejections from local adoption agencies, which primarily cite Pallett's British nationality as the obstacle. They got married in Korea in May 2019, with Pallett obtaining an F-6 marriage visa that grants him permanent residency.

“Our discussions on adoption began in July 2018 even before we were married. When we first met, I was 35 and my wife was 40. We knew having our own child could be difficult,” Pallett said in a recent interview with The Korea Times.

Adoption & Samfund has sent the following to the Folketing Social Committee.The future remains uncertain and unhappy for international adoption in Denmark

Adoption & Society can state that, despite promises of a quick clarification, nothing has been done to correct the inadequate handling of international adoption in Denmark!

On 16 January this year, all international adoptions were urgently suspended by the direct intervention of the then Social Affairs Minister Pernille Rosenkrantz-Theil. The promises to the many waiting applicants for adoption were not fulfilled from this date. This also applies to the promises to secure a solution for the many adoptees in Denmark who would like to apply back and have information about their own case. Promises that were made over half a year ago!

In other words, nothing has happened since Danish International Adoption (DIA) announced in mid-January that it would carry out a controlled closure of the organisation.

Adoption & Samfund bears a great responsibility as an interest organization, as we have taken on the important task of fully supporting and helping both individuals and families who want to adopt or have adopted. It necessarily also reaches back in time, because as an organization we look both forward and backward in time.

Seoul, South KoreaCNN — 

South Korea has for decades been known as the world’s largest “baby exporter” – sending hundreds of thousands of children overseas after the country was ravaged by war and many mothers left destitute.

Many of those adopted children, now adults scattered across the globe and trying to trace their origins, have accused agencies of corruption and malpractice, including in some cases forcibly removing them from their mothers.

A report released earlier this week by a Korean government commission supports those claims and uncovers new evidence on the coercive methods used to force mothers to give up their children.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A South Korean commission found evidence that women were pressured into giving away their infants for foreign adoptions after giving birth at government-funded facilities where thousands of people were confined and enslaved from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Monday came years after The Associated Press revealed adoptions from the biggest facility for so-called vagrants, Brothers Home, which shipped children abroad as part of a huge, profit-seeking enterprise that exploited thousands of people trapped within the compound in the port city of Busan. Thousands of children and adults — many of them grabbed off the streets — were enslaved in such facilities and often raped, beaten or killed in the 1970s and 1980s.

The commission was launched in December 2020 to review human rights violations linked to the country’s past military governments. It had previously found the country’s past military governments responsible for atrocities committed at Brothers. Its latest report is focused on four similar facilities in the cities of Seoul and Daegu and the provinces of South Chungcheong and Gyeonggi. Like Brothers, these facilities were operated to accommodate government roundups aimed at beautifying the streets.

Ha Kum Chul, one of the commission’s investigators, said inmate records show at least 20 adoptions occurred from Daegu’s Huimangwon and South Chungcheong province’s Cheonseongwon in 1985 and 1986. South Korea sent more than 17,500 children abroad in those two years as its foreign adoption program peaked.

Ha said children taken from inmates at Huimangwon and Cheonseongwon were mostly newborns, who were transferred to two adoption agencies, Holt Children’s Services and Eastern Social Welfare Society, which placed them with families in the United States, Denmark, Norway and Australia. Most of the infants were transferred to the agencies on the day of their birth or the day after, Ha said, indicating that their adoptions were determined pre-birth.

There has never been, nor will there ever be, anything quite so special as the love between the mother and a son, so the proverb goes.

But this fundamental bond has been tested in a landmark legal battle in London where a surrogate mother had to fight her child's same-sex parents through the courts to see him regularly, MailOnline can reveal today.

KUSHINAGAR: A man in Uttar Pradesh was reportedly forced to "sell" his three-year-old son to cover hospital fees and secure the release of his wife and newborn child, according to officials. The incident, which caused widespread outrage, led to the arrest of five individuals, including a couple who took the child.

Harish Patel, a daily wage worker from Barwa Patti, sought medical care at a private hospital for his wife's delivery. When he was unable to pay the hospital bill, the hospital staff refused to allow his wife and newborn to leave.

Desperate for funds, Patel agreed to a fraudulent adoption arrangement for his three-year-old son in exchange for a few thousand rupees on Friday. Once the police were informed, they promptly launched an investigation and arrested five people: middleman Amresh Yadav, adoptive parents Bhola Yadav and his wife Kalawati, a fake doctor named Tara Kushwaha, and a hospital helper, Suganti.

Additionally, a police constable who allegedly neglected to act on the case has been removed from active duty and reassigned to police lines. Fortunately, the child was safely rescued and has been reunited with his parents, according to Superintendent of Police Santosh Kumar Mishra.