I am a Chinese intercounty (International), transracial adoptee. I reunited with my biological family five years ago, going on six years soon. Some days it still feels surreal and other days it feels like I have always known them.

Six years ago, if you had asked me when my birthday was, I would have said December 5 with an uncomfortable feeling; a painful reminder of my unknown past. Now I answer the same question with a pause, wondering whether or not to share that my birthday is July 16. If you had asked me six years ago how many siblings I have, I would have said half the number I now know to be true.  

As a child, and even in my teenage years, I was told (and believed) that if I was still in China, I probably would not have made it through school. I would not have the same opportunities I have in America. I might have been hidden or, even yet, may not be alive. I would not have had access to some of the medical care I needed. I was told that being deaf, I would have been rejected by society. I would have been poor, simply because my family was assumed to be poor, and I would not have a “successful” or “happy” life. I wrestled with this supposed “truth” and “luck” I had over the years.

The questions I had and beliefs I held continuously changed through different seasons of life. I did not have the language to express the complexities of my thoughts, and I did best when all of my feelings were tucked away and hidden. Sometimes, I could only hold anger because there was no other identifiable feeling. I often became numb and would find myself conforming to the statements around me: “lucky”, “chosen”, “grateful”, “fortunate”, “blessed” and so on. I would agree with a smile, though internally I did not necessarily concur with these beliefs. In other seasons of life, I missed, grieved, and carried the weight of these many ambiguous losses alone. 

  The experience of the unknown often leaves uncertainty, anxiousness, fear, and confusion. As a child, the unknown and undisclosed were not concrete thoughts or information. The inconsistent answers about my birth parents and my past were all I had to make sense of why I was here. My understanding of my past was based on many different theoretical situations, intentional/ unintentional assumptions, and imaginary scenarios of what might have possibly happened. There were a few documents containing almost no helpful information. Not even my birthday was known to be correct.

Former social worker Thea Ramirez has developed an artificial intelligence-powered tool that she says helps social service agencies find the best adoptive parents for some of the nation’s most vulnerable kids

Some are orphans, others seized from their parents. Many are older and have overwhelming needs or disabilities. Most bear the scars of trauma from being hauled between foster homes, torn from siblings or sexually and physically abused.

Child protective services agencies have wrestled for decades with how to find lasting homes for such vulnerable children and teens –- a challenge so enormous that social workers can never guarantee a perfect fit.

Into this morass stepped Thea Ramirez with what she touted as a technological solution – an artificial intelligence-powered tool that ultimately can predict which adoptive families will stay together. Ramirez claimed this algorithm, designed by former researchers at an online dating service, could boost successful adoptions across the U.S. and promote efficiency at cash-strapped child welfare agencies.

“We’re using science – not merely preferences – to establish a score capable of predicting long-term success,” Ramirez said in an April 2021 YouTube video about her ambitions to flip “the script on the way America matches children and families” using the Family-Match algorithm.

After 70 years of more than 200,000 cases of overseas adoption, Korea is still grappling with the question of whether a person’s right to know the truth about their beginnings overrides their parents’ wishes to remain forgotten.
 
“Confidential, that is what everybody keeps telling me,” says Fanny, a French adoptee who asked to be identified only by her first name. “This is about my story, yet no one can give me the right information.”
 
Fanny, adopted by a family in France when she was only a few months old in 1982, has returned to Korea multiple times in search of her birth family.

She is joined by at least 3,000 others who did the same between 2019 and 2021.
 
But more than half of them were given the same answer in their search: The records of their biological parents were either lost or confidential.
 
In Korea, privacy laws give the parents the right to remain confidential, even after adoptees file an official request to the government for information about their birthparents, hoping to learn more about their beginnings.
 
And despite years of work by some adoptees and local advocates to convince lawmakers otherwise, Korea is about to pass another law allowing parents to remain anonymous when registering the birth of their child. 

 
“Every single person should know exactly where they came from,” said Ami Nafzger, founder of G.O.A.L., an NGO based in Seoul that has assisted adoptees in their search since 1997, and Adoptee Hub in the United States.
 
“It wasn’t our choice to leave the country,” she said, speaking from her experience of being adopted to the United States when she was four. “It wasn’t our choice to lose the language. It wasn’t our choice to lose our identity and our entire family history. The people passing these laws are not thinking about what it would be like if it were them.”
 
 
 

Our Leadership

Recognized for its leadership and expertise in child welfare—especially adoption from foster care—NACAC’s board of directors includes adoptive, foster, and kinship care parents, child welfare professionals, adoptees and people who were in foster care, researchers, and other advocates who have a wealth of experience.

“NACAC is an introduction to innovation, progressive thinking, and forward-moving by people who are always looking for ways to do what we do better, faster, and smarter.”
–Claudia, adoptive parent and professional

Denise Goodman, PhD, ACSW, Ohio, President

Denise is an independent trainer and consultant from Ohio. Her areas of expertise are the topics of foster care and adoption. She has been a foster parent and has worked in child welfare as a childcare worker, ongoing protective worker, and coordinator of residential treatment.

Since childhood, Ruth Y. van de Vrede (53) has had two small tattoos, which were probably done by her family of origin in South Korea. She is looking for other adoptees from the country with similar tattoos, and wants answers about her adoption. "Maybe things didn't go so smoothly after all?"

Are you internationally oriented and do you like to easily make contact with people on the other side of the world? Are you interested in family relationships and want to help reunite relatives around the world? And are you also great at organizing and keeping an overview? Then this position as International Search Case Manager is made for you!

What does the job involve?

You conduct international searches for family members in both adoption-related and non-adoption-related contexts. You do this from a multidisciplinary team of colleagues, including care providers, policy officers and the national search team. You are approached by international correspondents who refer a search case to the Netherlands, or you refer cases to international correspondents to carry out searches all over the world. Below is a selection of your work:

• When a new case comes in, you determine how you can best help the searcher in his or her search
• You conduct intake interviews with new clients (searchers) to collect all available information about the wanted family member and to explain the search process in the country in question.
• Together with the care provider involved and a colleague from the national search team, you discuss the developments and challenges in one of your current cases. Together you will find ways to move forward, taking into account what is best for the seeker and the person sought.
• You investigate search options in different countries. This means that you contact organizations in countries of origin to discuss their working methods and search options, for example via a virtual meeting.

Who are you? 

The picture book of the K family.

The youth welfare office takes a family's children into care. The parents defend themselves, saying there is no reason for this. Your file shows: There are many reasons. But are they enough to separate parents and children from each other?

By Franziska Wunderlich

On October 23, 2021, the Frankfurter Rundschau published an article with the headline: “Children taken by the police in the morning – family fights for custody”. In one picture, a couple of parents hold a photo of their children up to the camera. Five smiling faces, next to a self-made snowman. 37-year-old Yvonne K. and 44-year-old Waheed K. look deeply affected. According to the article, the youth welfare office had taken their children Arian (15), Mattheo (13), Leon (12), Noemi (7) and Grace (6) away from them about three months earlier. The parents' lawyer is quoted as saying that the authorities' actions were completely excessive and disproportionate.

Given away

Christian Strand was adopted from Indonesia as a baby, and he has never looked back - until now. He fears the truth about his own background.

We meet a different and more vulnerable Christian Strand than the presenter we know him as. In this series, he enters his own adoption story for the very first time: Is what he has been told about himself true?

Digging into his own life story turns out to be a much tougher process than Christian had imagined. Over the course of the series, he goes through a major change.

- I go from joking about being adopted and thinking that it doesn't matter, to wanting to find out who I really am, says Christian.

Didn't want to ask about the adoption

The 'Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo' have been campaigning in Argentina for years. The reason? Their grandchildren were stolen forty years ago during a military dictatorship in the country. There are now indications that several stolen babies have ended up in the Netherlands. That is why Fiom, the institute for descent issues, has started a campaign.

During the military dictatorship in Argentina, which lasted from 1976 to 1983, around 500 children were stolen from their biological parents. Currently only 137 have been traced. Due to indications that some predatory babies may be staying in the Netherlands, a Fiom campaign has recently been launched. The institute wants to guide predatory babies to their biological families.

Early doubts

One of those Argentinian predators is Guillermo Amarilla Morfino. He lives in Argentina, but is temporarily in the Netherlands for his work as a representative of the ESMA Memory Site Museum. Morfino's doubts about his origins started early. "From an early age I doubted whether the people who raised me were my real parents."

A US couple has been fined ($28,000; £23,000) by a Ugandan court after they pleaded guilty to child cruelty and "inhumane treatment" of their 10-year-old foster child.

Nicholas and Mackenzie Spencer accepted the charges under a deal which saw far more serious charges dropped.

They had been charged with child trafficking and torture, for which they could have faced life in prison.

The pair made the boy sleep on a wooden platform and fed him cold food.

Their nanny reported the "repeated unbecoming inhumane treatment" of the boy, who has special needs, to local police last December.