Will lengthening adoption wait and new surrogacy-artificial reproductive assistance laws push couples closer to black market adoption?

On a flight from Mumbai to Delhi last week, this writer happened to sit next to a young couple who became parents for the first time in the pandemic. During the small-talk that followed, they revealed that the baby wasn’t their biological offspring. After unsuccessfully trying to conceive for six years, they got “lucky” when their friend’s sister-in-law, who couldn’t afford to raise her third child, sought a home for her son. “After much consideration, we took her baby boy,” the mother shared. The couple hadn’t even given adoption or surrogacy a thought, because of how “tedious the process has become”.

With adoption in India being routed by the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) and the government recently notifying new laws to regulate surrogacy and assisted reproductive technology, several Indian couples are deferring their dreams to become parents. Experts, however, fear that many desperate couples might go the illegal way.

Infertility is at the heart of the problem. According to research conducted by Inito, a Bengaluru-based medical technology company, around 27.5 million couples who want to conceive, currently suffer from infertility. The World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision report estimated that the fertility rate of Indians (measured as the number of children born to a woman), had plummeted by more than half in the short span of 40 years—from 4.97 per cent during 1975-80 to 2.3 per cent in 2015-20. By 2025-30, the report projects that the rate would have nosedived further to 2.1. A fertility rate of about 2.2 is generally considered the replacement level—the rate at which the population would hold steady. When the fertility rate dips below this number, the population is expected to decline.

With lowering fertility, adoption and surrogacy seem to be the next best options for couples. But recent protocol and laws have complicated the state of affairs.

The former executive director of an Ohio-based international adoption agency pleaded guilty today in the Northern District of Ohio to defrauding the U.S. and Polish authorities in connection with the adoption of a Polish child.

According to court documents, Margaret Cole, 74, of Strongsville, Ohio, admitted to conspiring with Debra Parris and others to deceive authorities regarding the adoption of a child from Poland. When Cole learned that clients of the adoption agency determined they could not care for one of the two Polish children they were set to adopt, Cole and her co-conspirators took steps to transfer the Polish child to Parris’s relatives, who were not eligible for intercountry adoption.

Cole, Parris and others agreed to defraud U.S. authorities to conceal their improper transfer of the Polish child. Following the adoption, the child was injured and hospitalized while living with Parris’s relatives. Thereafter, Cole made a false statement to the Polish authority responsible for intercountry adoptions about the transfer of the child that, among other things, concealed the role of Cole and others in arranging the transfer of the child to Parris’s relatives.

Cole pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and making a false statement to a Polish authority. She is scheduled to be sentenced on May 27. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

Co-defendant Debra Parris previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States in connection with the Poland scheme, as well as conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and to commit visa fraud in connection with a scheme to corruptly and fraudulently procure adoptions of children from Uganda through bribes paid to Ugandan officials. Robin Longoria also previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the FCPA and to commit visa fraud and wire fraud in connection with the Ugandan scheme. Co-defendant Dorah Mirembe, who is charged in connection with the Ugandan scheme, remains at large.

In the absence of legal clarity, the Delhi high court has sought responses from the Union and Delhi governments in the matter, after a hospital in the national capital refused to return the frozen semen sample of a deceased cancer patient to his family.

The parents of the deceased had moved the high court in December last year after authorities of Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital refused to give them the frozen semen sample of their son, which they may use to continue the family line.

There is no law, policy or legal procedure in our country to decide as to who should be handed over the semen sample of an unmarried deceased man, the hospital told the high court while opposing a plea to handover the sperm samples to the family of a 30-year-old cancer patient who died in September 2020.

The hospital has said that the Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) Act, ICMR guidelines, Surrogacy Bill/Act are “silent” about the legal heirs of the unmarried deceased man to whom the frozen semen sample is to be released.

The hospital has said that in absence of any guidelines, regulation and direction on this issue of disposal and utilisation of semen samples of an unmarried person, they are unable to make final disposal of the frozen semen sample of the deceased. It sought that the court may pass appropriate orders considering the current scenario.

KUMAMOTO – In a nationwide first, a hospital in Kumamoto said Friday that it plans to submit a birth notification of a baby who was born under a confidentiality agreement in December without including the mother’s name.

The mother, who is under 20 years old, gave birth to the baby at Jikei Hospital but declined to publicly disclose her identity.

The woman, who had been unable to tell her family about her pregnancy, left the hospital a month ago saying that she cannot raise the baby by herself, hospital officials said.

She continues to seek a family that can adopt her baby, the officials said. She believes that the baby will be better off if cared for by adoptive parents who pass strict screenings, they said.

The woman wishes for her identity to be disclosed to the baby when the child becomes an adult, the hospital officials said. Earlier this month, the baby was transferred from the hospital to a nursery.

There is a need for more people to adopt Danish children, and new rules must do something about this.

From Tuesday, those who want to adopt a child can therefore both sign up for a list with children from abroad and one with children here from Denmark.

This has not been the case so far, where you could only sign up for one of the lists. The hope is that the change will make more people sign up to adopt Danish children.

In recent years, the number of applicants to adopt a Danish child has decreased, at the same time as there has been an increase in the number of children released for adoption in Denmark.

The lack of adoptive parents for Danish children has become a challenge, says chairman of the Adoption Board Thomas Lohse.

Why did we choose this campaign?

We launched our Safe, Secure and Thriving Campaign to highlight the need for more robust post-placement support for children placed with carers overseas. Currently, we do not know the total number of children being placed overseas, which countries they are being placed in, what orders are being used or how many are successful or eventually breakdown.

There is a huge lack of large scale data about the outcomes of children placed overseas. Without it, we don’t know if support for overseas kinship placements is on par with what a child would experience in the UK. Location, borders or nationality should never be a barrier to adequate post-placement support.

Without proper governmental monitoring and guidance in place, children who are already vulnerable can be put at further risk of neglect, abuse, exploitation, or forced to take dangerous journeys back to the UK. Even in these cases, a local authority can refuse responsibility for a child because of the cross-border nature of their placement.

This campaign is calling for more accountability and transparency within the care system. We are working with the Department for Education, encouraging them to publish and analyse the numbers of children being placed across borders and ensure post-placement planning and support. At a local government level, CFAB are offering our services and raising awareness of their statutory duties to children placed across borders. International placements are hugely positive, often resulting in family reunification and preventing a child going into foster care – but the right support systems must be in place to prevent a placement breakdown that can leave a child even more vulnerable. We want to ensure that no child is put at risk, either here in the UK or overseas.

When Tom Romano, an Air Force veteran who was incapacitated by an injury he initially suffered during the Vietnam War, was reunited with his son who had been deported in an adoption snafu, they wouldn’t let go of each other.

The drive north from JFK in New York seemed to take forever.

Robert Romano sat in the passenger seat as his lawyer, Ann Elise McCaffrey, did the driving. By the time they got to Tom Romano’s place in Manchester, N.H., it was dark and freezing.

A family friend, Bryan Clark, let them in, and father and son embraced for the first time in five years.

“I got my boy back,” Tom Romano said, his voice somewhat muffled, as his face was buried in his son’s shoulder.

The true story of an Italian girl with a terrifying past who knew how to get out of hell and who today is a volunteer in Africa among street children. "In their eyes I see the same nightmares I experienced when I was little"

by Marco Trovat

"Street children have invisible scars, their gaze is a mask that hides terrible suffering ... I know that pain all too well." Melissa has caramel skin, a cascade of black hair on her shoulders, a sparkling smile, two eyes as deep as the abyss they have seen.

Born in Colombia 25 years ago, she grew up on the streets of Girardot and Bogotá. "My father, disabled from a stroke, died too soon," she confides. "My mother used to drink and prostitute herself."

Talk like you're telling a movie plot. Instead it is her life and that of her four brothers. “We were left alone, the street was the place of freedom. We had no rules or schedules. Social services opened the doors of the orphanage for us. Then we ended up in a foster family that took care of us with insults and belts ».

Dear friends, when Florin Müller's therapist Hanne Kloth contacted us to introduce us to this very special young man, we pricked our ears. Because Florin wrote a children's book as an autistic child: " The Brave Little Fireman ". It's a book about his own story. And that's pretty moving.

" The Brave Little Fireman ".

In 1998 he was adopted by a German couple after living in dire circumstances in a Romanian children's home for four years. Florin uses sign language and uses assisted communication to write things he cannot express with them. He only needs a touch on his knee to be able to write.

In 2014 he graduated from a distance learning school. In the same year his first book was published, followed by two more. He took part in poetry competitions, where he was repeatedly among the prizewinners. Today, Florin is also a frequent speaker at training courses, readings and congresses because he loves to discuss his problems with people.

Florin, you were adopted by a German couple in 1998...

For 15 years, Isabella dos Santos lived a "true soap opera", as she says: as a girl, raised by an adoptive family in Paris with the name of Charlotte, she began to suspect that there was something wrong with her adoption, investigated her past, confronted his mother, with whom he had a troubled relationship, and discovered that he had been a victim of human trafficking when he was still a baby.

Ten years ago, he came to Brazil, his native country, even though he spoke little Portuguese and practically without documents. He followed his search for a few more years until he found more pieces of the puzzle. She found her biological sister and discovered that she was sent to France in a criminal scheme to sell children

Today, at age 35, Isabella has adopted a Brazilian name and surname, given by her biological mother, and is working on a documentary that will tell her story and that of other people trafficked for adoption in Europe, like her. Childhood Isabella in France, raised as Charlotte Image: Personal archive In an interview with Universa , she tells her story. "I heard so many stories that none of them seemed true" "I always knew I was adopted. I didn't physically resemble my adoptive parents and they were much older than the other parents. I also knew that I was born in Brazil and that I had been taken to this family in France - which, in fact, was not it was quite a family, because it was a very troubled couple, my adoptive father had problems with drinking and drugs, and I

had no other relatives.

But at the same time, my adoptive mother didn't talk about it much, didn't give details, it was taboo. She always told