People who are adopted as babies do not forget their native language. Recent research by Radboud University, among others, shows that Korean adoptees learn Korean more easily at a later age. Even if they were only a few months old at adoption.

Language learning begins in the womb. In the last term of pregnancy, when hearing is fully developed, the fetus already hears its mother talking endlessly. The baby is especially sensitive to the rhythm of his mother tongue and recognizes it immediately after birth. A child only really starts experimenting with sound sequences such as dadadada when he is six months old, in the so-called babbling phase. Until then, listening is key.

This knowledge that a baby gains in the first months of its life is never lost. Mirjam Broersma of the Center for Language Studies in Nijmegen discovered this when she introduced 29 Korean adoptees in the Netherlands to their mother tongue. Together with colleagues from Australia and Korea, she published her results in Royal Society Open Science.

Subtle sound differences

With the exception of the control group, the participants in Broersma's study were born in Korea. They were adopted at a very young age by Dutch-speaking parents. Half of them were younger than six months at the time of adoption, the other half were older than seventeen months (but younger than six years). During the study, the participants were between 23 and 41 years old. The people in the control group were born and raised Dutch people of about the same age as the people in the adoption group. They were also comparable in other respects, such as educational level and number of times they had visited Korea.

Photo: Raising Malawi

Madonna in Malawi (file photo).

COLUMN

By Carmel Rickard

Perhaps you are a bit uneasy about high profile adoptions of African children by international celebrities? Perhaps you’ve read about their generous donations to special causes that seem to smooth the way for adoptions and wonder whether the welfare of the children involved is a serious consideration.

Malawi: Madonna Under Fire for Using Celebrity Status to Skirt Malawi Laws to Adopt Children

By Owen Khamula and Thom Chiumia

American pop diva Madonna has come under intense fire for using his celebrity status to skirt round the Malawi laws in her bid to adopt twin girls Esther and Stella Mwale.

The High Court in Lilongwe on Tuesday allowed Madonna to adopt twin four year girls from Mchinji even though the pop diva is not a resident of Malawi.

The laws strictly sas only residents of Malawi can adopt children in this impoverished southern African country.

Three Congo adoptions under scrutiny (3)

Govt committee says children may have been taken from families

(foto: ANSA)

© ANSA

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Transfer of EACI India and China adoption cases to IAN

Posted on Feb 6, 2017 9:39am PST

As many of you know, EACI adoption agency lost it's Hague status in December of 2016. As a result they had to move all their programs to other agencies. IAN was identified to take on India and China Cases. We have spent the last month or more working to make this transfer as smooth a possible and welcoming these families to IAN. It has been a difficult time for all those families involved, but we are happy that the transfer is completed and we can focus on serving our new families and their prospective adoption children!

The State Department issued more information for those transfer families on Friday, and we are posting that here so that our new families can stay informed! Please be sure to read this carefully, and follow up with our office as needed. Thanks to all our families' patience, current and new, as we have worked on this. We are so thankful to be serving our growing network of families and children.

Click here for the State Department Update Concerning EACI transfer cases

Uganda

February 2, 2017

Adoption Alert: Uganda’s Residency and Fostering Requirement

As reported in our June 2016 Adoption Notice, the Children Act Amendments of 2016 require non-Ugandan prospective adoptive parents to spend one year living in Uganda fostering the child(ren) they intend to adopt. It has come to the attention of the Department of State that in an effort to fulfill that requirement, some adoption service providers (ASPs) may be arranging for Ugandan residents to foster children on behalf of U.S. prospective adoptive parents. We urge prospective adoptive parents to carefully consider the following information before considering using “proxy fostering.”

Officials from Uganda’s Ministry of Gender, Labour, and Social Development (MGLSD), which has authority over Uganda’s adoption process, have told the State Department they are still in the process of drafting regulations to define how the Children Act amendments will be implemented. Therefore, there is limited information available about Uganda’s adoption requirements, and no assurance that the Ugandan government will accept proxy fostering as a way to fulfill the one-year residence and fostering requirement for adoption. Moreover, the MGLSD has verbally informed Embassy Kampala that its current intention is for the regulations to require prospective adoptive parents to physically reside in Uganda and foster their adoptive children there for a period of 12 months.

http://www.lgbt-ep.eu/press-releases/european-parliament-demands-action-on-eu-wide-recognition-of-adoptions/

European Parliament demands action on EU-wide recognition of adoptions

Today, the European Parliament adopted a report (533 +, 41 -) demanding the automatic recognition of domestic adoption orders across EU Member States. The report stipulates that the recognition should happen without discrimination, including on the basis of the parents’ sexual orientation.

<20160606PHT30695_width_6001-254x254.jpg>The report highlights that the lack of provisions for the recognition currently cause significant problems for families, which move from one Member State to another. The other Member State may not recognise parents’ parental rights, which exposes them and the children to all sorts of legal risks.

The report highlights that refusing to recognize an adoption order, as countries can do through a ‘public order’ argument, may never lead de facto to discrimination prohibited by Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. This article prohibits discrimination, including based on sexual orientation.

MEPs call for automatic cross-border recognition of adoptions

Press Releases PLENARY SESSION 02-02-2017 - 12:01

To protect adopted children’s best interests, MEPs have urged the EU Commission to require all EU countries to recognise each other’s adoption certificates automatically. Their resolution, voted on Thursday, proposes a European Certificate of Adoption to speed up the automatic recognition process.

The resolution asks the Commission to propose rules on automatic EU-wide recognition of “domestic” adoptions, i.e. in cases where the adopters and the adopted child are resident in the same country. While the Hague Convention requires automatic recognition of adoptions in all its signatory countries, including all EU member states, it applies only to cases in which the parents and the adopted child are from two different countries.

European certificate and best practice guidelines

Couple Claims Adoption Agency Embroiled Them in Child-Trafficking Scheme

February 1, 2017ELLEN ROBINSON

(CN) – A Greenville, South Carolina, couple claim they were duped by an adoption agency into believing the Ugandan children they planned to adopt had been relinquished by their mother, only to find themselves enmeshed in a human-trafficking scheme.

In a complaint filed in the Greenville County Court of Common Pleas on Jan. 27, Tyler and Allie Sloan say they contacted defendants European Adoption Consultants and Debra Parris, the director of its African adoption program, in December 2014, and after a preliminary meeting, were accepted to participate in the defendant’s program.

As recounted in the complaint, 14 months passed, and then, in February 2016, Parris told them two children were available for them to adopt: a 7-year-old girl and 2-year-old boy.