'Retain adoption options from certain countries'

June 7, 2021-

Retain adoption opportunities from certain countries. COC Nederland and Meer dan Gewenst make that appeal in a letter to the House of Representatives, which will discuss the adoption policy on Wednesday 9 June.

UPDATE June 10:

The adoption ban for children from abroad may end in the autumn for certain countries. That is what Minister Dekker (Legal Protection) said on 9 June during the adoption debate in the House of Representatives. More than Desired, COC, other organizations and MPs had insisted on this.

The possibility for adoptive parents to have their child's parentage data removed from the Basic Registration Persons (BRP) must be ended. That is the view of the Christian Union (CU). The party will submit a proposal on Wednesday to remove this possibility from the law.

The adoptive parents can still choose, if their adopted child is younger than 16, to delete, for example, the name of one or both biological parents or the nationality of the child. According to the ChristenUnie, if this happens, an extra barrier will be raised for adopted children who want to know where they come from.

In addition, this authority for the parents is at odds with the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, the party states.

“Everyone has the right to know where he or she comes from,” says ChristenUnie MP Don Ceder. “When an adopted child embarks on that quest, there should be no unnecessary obstacles. The interests of the (adopted) child must be paramount during this process.”

The House of Representatives will debate the BRP on Thursday. The CU's proposal is also discussed.

ASSIGNMENT REVIEW · Rumors of stolen children. An investigation into crimes against humanity. The story of the stolen adopted children from Chile spans several decades and affects hundreds of divided families. Assignment review is now publishing a new series about what happened when the children were taken to Sweden.

The rumor

There have long been suspicions and rumors that children were stolen from Chile in the 1970s and 80s. In the early 2000s, Chilean journalism student Ana Maria Olivares decides to investigate the rumor and travels around the country to meet mothers who testify that their children disappeared during the dictatorship. In 2003, she publishes her essay in which she describes a network of people who in various ways have taken children from their mothers and then taken the children out of Chile - and that it is not about individual cases, but a pattern.

• New revelations

In 2018, SVT will, together with Chilean journalists, present new revelations about how adopted children in the 1970s and 80s may have been taken without the consent of mothers. Networks of adoptees are created and several Chilean parents get in touch with children whom they say have long believed to be dead or missing. Demands for a Swedish, state investigation are beginning to be made.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Bringing her camera to a home for unwed mothers on South Korea’s Jeju island, Sun Hee Engelstoft anticipated an empowering story about young women keeping their babies.

Instead, she ended up with a raw and unsettling documentary about how a deeply conservative sexual culture, loose birth registration laws and a largely privatized adoption system continue to pressure and shame single mothers into relinquishing their children for adoption.

The shock and grief of mother-child separations and intense fear of social stigma captured in “Forget Me Not” offer insight into what’s preventing thousands of Korean adoptees from reconnecting with their silenced birth mothers, decades after they were flown to the West.

Adoptees, including Engelstoft, have also blamed these disconnections on limited access to records, falsified documents that hide their true origins and a lack of accountability shown by adoption agencies and South Korea’s government.

“Every time I started following a woman (at the home), they strongly told me that they wanted to keep their child, and that’s just not what happened,” Engelstoft said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “I was completely horrified at the result.”

The adoption of children from the United States, and more specifically from New York State, becomes possible. The Flemish Center for Adoption (VCA) has approved the collaboration between adoption service Het Kleine Mirakel and New York. Kind & Gezin, Flemish Minister of Welfare Jo Vandeurzen and Federal Minister of Justice Koen Geens report this in a press release.

Editorial 15-01-16, 18:04 Last update: 16-01-16, 17:01 Source: BELGA

In New York, one adoption service will mediate for children who are given up by their biological parents shortly after birth. It will usually involve parents in very precarious situations.

You can now start with five test files. Candidate adoptive parents who have a suitability judgment can contact the adoption service. More information about the conditions that the candidates must meet and the working method can be found on the Kind & Gezin website. All costs incurred in the course of the process will be borne by the candidates.

Ministers Vandeurzen and Geens are satisfied with the new adoption channel. "This is good news for prospective adoptive parents, including same-sex couples," says Vandeurzen. "With this we also show that adoption has a future. Geens is positive about the guarantees that have been built in.

Bucharest Daily News - 02-feb-06 - Denisa Maruntoiu

While parents and the Romanian authorities are struggling over the 1,100 orphans still caught in the middle of the convoluted international adoptions conflict, high ranking European officials including the Council of Europe's Deputy Secretary Maud de Boer-Buquicchio and European Parliament Member Baroness Emma Nicholson, are gathering in Bucharest for the annual International Conference on Children's Rights. The two-day conference starting today, organized under the patronage of the Council of Europe's Ministers' Committee, aims to find viable solutions for all the problems and challenges affecting the world's children, including the thorny international adoption issue. However, the stories of several Romanian adoptees, some happy, some tragic, illustrate how difficult it might be to find a balanced solution when it comes to children and their future.

Every night when Kathleen Richards reads her six-year-old son Alexandru his favorite bedtime story, she thinks about a little girl whom she will never get to kiss good-night.

Larisa, 4, is more than 5,000 kilometers away, in Romania, and Kathleen doesn't really know how to tell her son that the girl who should have been his sister will never come home to Keene, New Hampshire. That the toys and presents brought by Santa are all for him. That Larisa will get none. The Richards' mission is almost impossible, as Alexandru has been waiting for Larisa more than four years already. Kathleen and her husband David do not know how they can make a six year old understand why Romania, which is Alexandru's native country too, rejected their request to adopt Larisa.

Kathleen, a lifelong Keene resident, and David, a city councilor, have been married for 12 years. Immediately after their wedding, when they were both 30 years old, Kathleen found out she could not have a pregnancy because of infertility. Because they desperately wanted a child, they started working on the process of trying to adopt. "The laws required that we wait until we had been married two years before actually starting to look for a child, so in August 1996 we were officially granted the right to adopt from the U.S. or abroad," says Kathleen.

The proper procedure entails that these children enter the legal adoption pool, which is critical not only for their well-being but also for the legal protection of the family unit formed through adoption

The second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India has created unprecedented chaos, upended health systems, and claimed an inordinate number of lives. The trajectory of new infections may be ebbing, but it has taken a severe toll on the most vulnerable cohort — children.

All children have the right to protection, to survive, to belong, be heard and receive care in a safe and healthy environment. Their parents are their first line of protection. Today, thousands of children have been orphaned with the virus claiming the lives of their parents. Many of them have no family and, therefore, no protection.

According to figures given out by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, 3,621 children were orphaned and 274 abandoned between April 1, 2021 to June 5, 2021. Many among them may not have close relatives or their extended families may be unwilling or incapable of taking them in.

Almost anyone who has a smartphone has received WhatsApp messages, describing horror stories of young children orphaned by Covid-19, seeking their “adoption”. Such messages, howsoever well-intentioned, are both irresponsible and illegal. These orphaned children are more susceptible than ever and vulnerable to traffickers or criminals, thanks to people trying to help without following due process.

The possibility for adoptive parents to have their child's parentage data removed from the Basic Registration Persons (BRP) must be ended.

That is what the Christian Union thinks. The party will therefore submit a proposal on Wednesday to remove this possibility from the law.

PEDIGREE DATA

The adoptive parents can still choose, if their adopted child is younger than 16, to delete, for example, the name of one or both biological parents or the nationality of the child. According to the ChristenUnie, if this happens, an extra threshold will be raised for adoptees who (at a later age) want to know where they come from.

In addition, this authority for the parents is at odds with the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, the party states.

A report containing proposals for a redress scheme for the survivors of mother-and-baby homes is set to be completed next week.

The Interdepartmental Group report is expected to submit its findings to Minister for Children Roderic O'Gorman in the coming days.

It is understood that the redress scheme could provide payments to survivors based on the length of time they spent in the homes.

Survivors are also likely to receive what has been described as an "enhanced medical card".

Once the Interdepartmental Group has issued its report to Minister O'Gorman, the matter would then go to Cabinet in July when the minister would bring a memo to Government outlining the scheme in full.

The Mother & Baby Homes Commission of Inquiry returned to the public's attention as one of the Commissioners decided to speak about it for the first time at an invitation-only Oxford University zoom

The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Roderic O’Gorman started off looking like he might have a quiet fortnight. By the end of the first week, he found himself on air arguing that he might have to withhold redress from Mother & Baby Home survivors if they insisted on their experiences being officially recognised.

By the end of the second week, his Government was saying it planned to appoint another expert to do a new report into those testimonies to address the Commission report’s failures.

Apart from the continuing marvel of a Minister apparently eager to continue to put the torch to his own credibility in order to act as a spokesman for his Department’s unsustainable policy positions, the past two weeks have provided a kaleidoscope of views into how power in Ireland works now.

This is the Gist.