PORTLAND, Ore.—A Hillsboro, Oregon woman was sentenced to federal prison today for engaging in a multi-year scheme to defraud her employer, a non-profit adoption and surrogacy agency operating in Oregon and Washington, and her extended family.

Melodie Ann Eckland, 56, was sentenced to 54 months in federal prison and three years’ supervised release. She was also ordered to pay more than $1.6 million in restitution.

“Melodie Eckland used her position of trust within a local adoption agency to steal funds intended to help children across the world find loving families. She further stole thousands of dollars from a deceased family member’s estate in a failed attempt to keep her employer from discovering her scheme. Eckland’s selfishness and greed caused great loss and hardship for many people and pushed her employer agency to the brink of insolvency,” said Scott Erik Asphaug, U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon.

“Preying on the trust of her employers, her friends, and her family, Ms. Eckland stole from those who trusted her most. In doing so, Ms. Eckland irreparably hurt local families attempting to do just that – become families,” said Special Agent in Charge Bret Kressin, IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS:CI), Seattle Field Office. “Financial and tax crimes are not victimless, and today’s sentence is justice served for Ms. Eckland’s wanton disregard and theft from those around her.”

According to court documents, from at least 2011 and continuing until April 2018, Eckland was employed as a bookkeeper for a local adoption and surrogacy agency. Her duties included maintaining agency books and records, managing payroll, filing employment tax returns, and paying quarterly employment taxes to the IRS. Eckland also provided financial statements to the agency’s board of directors, but did not have signature authority over the organization’s business bank account.

Mothers must tell their children the birth father's name, even if the child was adopted. They owe each other support and consideration, according to the judges.

An adopted child has the right to obtain information about the father's identity from the birth mother. The fact that the woman is no longer the legal mother of the child does not preclude the right to information. This was decided by the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) in Karlsruhe (Az. XII ZB 183/21). The judges ruled that parents and children owe each other support and consideration. The right to information has "very significant constitutional importance".

The case is about a 30-year-old woman who was adopted as a little girl. The biological mother had stated that she could not remember any possible father. She was only 16 years old when her child was born, as the BGH explained. After the adoption, the two did not see each other again until 2003, mediated by the youth welfare office . The daughter sued the court for information about the biological father - initially unsuccessfully before the district court in Stuttgart. The Stuttgart Higher Regional Court then ordered the mother to name all the men with whom she had sexual intercourse at the time in question.

On the other hand, she lodged an appeal with the Federal Court of Justice, which has now rejected it. The state is also obliged to protect individuals from withholding available information about their origins. The BGH explained that this is not just about enforcing financial interests. Rather, the right to know one's own descent is strengthened.

It does not matter that the daughter has adoptive parents . The obligation to provide information had already arisen before the adoption. The mother also did not claim that her privacy could be violated.

GURUGRAM: Umesh Lohia's passengers were in for a surprise when the cabbie they had hired to go to Alwar stepped on the accelerator and screeched to a halt at the DLF-3 police station.

Without wasting even a second, he rushed inside the police station and came out with a group of cops.

The alacrity of the cab driver from the city led to the arrest of three persons - two women and a man - and lifted the veil off a gang that stole newborns from hospitals around Delhi-NCR and sold them to childless couples across the country since 2014.

On Saturday, the three persons had stopped Lohia's cab near Dhaula Kuan and asked him for a lift to IFFCO Chowk. Lohia, who was anyway returning home to Nathupur in the city, agreed as the two women had a newborn each in their arms and it was drizzling.

Just a few minutes into the ride, the two women - who were seated in the back - asked Lohia if he could drop them to Alwar in Rajasthan. The cabbie agreed, saying it could cost them Rs 3,000. A little later, one of the women asked him to drop them back to Delhi from Alwar and take Rs 4,000 for the round trip. As they headed towards Alwar, the women asked him to stop at a chemist shop to buy feeding bottles and at a sweet outlet to purchase milk.

What might become of pregnant people in states with little-to-no access to abortion and religious ties in many of their adoption agencies?

“I don’t think I had any real option. When you go into these homes you’re not going in with any options.”

My grandmother’s voice is shaky on the phone. It is the first time I’m asking her about how she relinquished her parental rights to her son, Joseph, in the early 1960s at a “home for unwed mothers.” She was not showing signs of her pregnancy until her last month, she tells me, which is another way of saying that she wasn’t ushered into the home earlier to be kept hidden.

“It was shortly after the child was born that you were in there signing papers. Within hours,” she says. “The biggest emotion was getting to hold him, and then after having to sign the paperwork, it was depression.” She describes stories she remembered of people getting an abortion and dying, of unsafe and unregulated pills, conditions, or practices. When I ask her if she would’ve gotten an abortion if they had been available and safer back then, she says, “Absolutely.”

Adoption rates have declined since the Baby Scoop Era, a period that began in the mid-1940s and concluded with the Roe v. Wade ruling issued 49 years ago this week. A time plagued by stigmas around single parenthood and premarital sex, and little-to-no access to contraception and abortion, the Baby Scoop Era ushered many birth-givers into wedlock, shame, fear, and danger. Many were sent to convents or homes for unwed mothers, where they were kept until they gave birth, an event that ultimately ended with a coerced or forced adoption.

The teenager, now aged 17, was sold at birth via a middleman to adoptive parents who died when he was 4, leaving him orphaned

After an online search he traced his birth parents, but shortly after meeting them they told him to cease contact as they had new families

A young man in China who was sold by his parents at birth tracked them down last month, only to be abandoned by them again.

Liu Xuezhou, a 17-year-old college student in Hebei province, northern China, reunited with his birth parents a few weeks ago after he launched an online search, but was told they did not wish to maintain contact shortly after their reunion, the teenager said on social media.

Liu was sold by his birth parents in 2005 to his adoptive parents via a middleman and was subsequently orphaned at age four when his new parents were killed in an accident. He said neither his birth father nor mother would accept him as they had divorced after selling him and each had a new family.

Parents who have adopted children from India have appealed for compassion, understanding and support after the tragic story of a Maltese man who contracted COVID-19 as he went to pick up his newly-adopted daughter from New Delhi and died just before he was medically evacuated to Malta.

“What people don’t understand is that we go to pick up our children. The pandemic will not stop us. If anything, it will make you want to get your child home safely. They say you will go to hell and back for your children. A pandemic won’t stop a parent,” Nicolette Borg Vassallo says.

India is facing a human catastrophe as COVID-19 spirals out of control, leaving hospitals unable to cope amid a shortage of oxygen concentrators. The country remains a popular country for child adoption.

Borg Vassallo and her family made the headlines in May last year when their trip to India to pick up their second adoptive daughter turned into a nightmare as the pandemic forced them into lockdown in a hotel room for six interminable weeks. They eventually returned to Malta where they have settled down, a different fate to the Barbara family.

She understands the urgency that Ivan Barbara and his wife felt to pick up their child and attributes critical comments from the public – claiming the couple should have stayed in Malta – to ignorance about the realities faced by adoptive parents.

A French forty-year-old from Fréjus (Var) was sentenced by the Draguignan prosecutor's office to 10 months suspended imprisonment on Thursday, December 17 for neglect of a minor. She had abandoned an orphan child after adopting him in the Congo.

A Frenchwoman was given a 10-month suspended prison sentence for neglecting a minor by the Draguignan prosecutor's office. According to Var Matin , this forty-year-old from Fréjus (Var) had abandoned a child she had just adopted in the Congo.

After launching the process in 2015, Ingrid L. obtained the full adoption of Michel in 2017, taken in at only 8 months by an orphanage. He obtained French nationality in 2017. However, after meeting him in 2018, the Frenchwoman abandoned him in Brazzaville (Republic of Congo). The child, now 8 years old, was then found on the steps of a church.

"During the week I spent with him, he was unmanageable. He had to be watched constantly. All the time, every minute. I felt that he would finally be better at the orphanage than with me" , tried to justify herself Ingrid L. Arguments which did not convince the correctional court of Draguignan which also pronounced with regard to this social worker in an educational action service in an open environment, a ban on exercising a professional activity in contact with minors, thus depriving her of her job. La Fréjusienne also said that she did not realize that the adoption procedure she had launched was final.

“He experienced a trauma”

NAVI MUMBAI: The Raigad district women and child development officer has lodged a complaint at the Kharghar police station against those running a children's orphanage in Kharghar for allegedly illegally adopting nine minor girls and providing them foster care, without obtaining the mandatory certificate from the concerned government department.

Subsequently, the Kharghar Police on Thursday registered an FIR against the authorised person, of the orphanage, who has been booked under Section 41 (adoption) and 42 (foster care) of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000.

As per the FIR by complainant Vinit Mhatre, Raigad District Women and Child Development officer at Alibaug office, in October last year, the child welfare committee had submitted a report on the Kharghar based orphanage stating that it was illegally accommodating orphan children.

Hence, on October 29, 2021, Mhatre along with officials of the child welfare committee and a lady constable of Kharghar police station reached the orphanage for inspection.

The team found 24 girls were accommodated and taken care of at the orphanage premises. They were also being sent to the school.

Hundreds of Danish orphans were subjected to examination in a secret experiment supported by the CIA to establish the link between heredity and environment in the development of schizophrenia, a new documentary revealed.

According to "The Search for Myself" released by Radio Denmark, some 311 children from various orphanages were brought to the basement of the City Hospital in the Danish capital of Copenhagen for examinations in the early 1960s.

Through access to documents from those years as well as the old register, a participator of the experiment and current filmmaker Per Wennick was able to find out that the project had links to the CIA. In the first year alone, the project was supported with 3.4 million Danish kroner, corresponding to approximately 4.6 million Danish kroner today. The research project also received $21,000, the equivalent of approximately 1.2 million Danish kroner to date, from the U.S. health agency, the Human Ecology Foundation, which acted on behalf of the CIA, the report said.

The Danish-American research project began in the early 1960s and was focused on the development of schizophrenia. Many of the orphans who were taken to City Hospital were living in nearby areas.

The studies included various association and intelligence tests as well as tests of a physiological and psychological nature. In one of the many tests, the experimental children had to agree or disagree with about 600 different statements. Wennick also discovered that the purpose of the experiments was deliberately hidden from the children.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/654176/EPRS_STU(2020)654176_EN.pdf