In Hawaii, like much of the world during the COVID-19 Pandemic, people hoping to grow or start a family are finding themselves stunted.

For the longest time, solutions were found overseas, but people wanting to adopt are now waiting longer and looking locally for answers.

Each year, CEO Kristine Altwies says her adoption agency Hawaii International Child (now called A Family Tree) finds homes for about 75 children from countries like China, the Philippines and Japan. But during the pandemic, that number has fallen to 20.

"There's the issue of the orphans not being able to leave the orphanage to come home. There's the issue of American citizens not being able to travel abroad to pick up the children. And then there's the issue of the US immigration authority not issuing the travel visas for the orphans to come here to their families," Altwies said.

Some of the big challenges says Altwies are clients having to wait at least another year to be together, if not longer.

The movement for an adoption apology for women forced to give up their babies because they were unmarried is gathering pace.

Whenever a government is asked to apologise for historical injustice, there are sceptics. It was a different era; it was a long time ago; it won’t make any difference…The comments sections of last night’s news stories are full of views like this.

But listen to the words of Judy Baker, forced to give up her baby girl after she fell pregnant at 18: ‘It would be very good if somebody said: I’m sorry. It would be so powerful, to show people that what happened to us was wrong.’

When the Australian government apologised for similar practices in 2013, it was met with a standing ovation. In January this year the Irish Prime Minister apologised for a "…dark, difficult and shameful chapter" of Irish history, in which many babies died in homes for unmarried mothers, and others were forcibly adopted.

In this situation, a government apology is, simply, the right thing to do, for the women and for the children they lost.

This article is the first in a series about Koreans adopted abroad. Apparently, many Koreans never expected that the children it had sent away via adoption would return as adults with questions demanding to be answered. However, thousands of adoptees visit Korea each year. Once they rediscover this country, it becomes a turning point in their lives. We should embrace the dialogue with adoptees to discover the path to recovering our collective humanity. ? ED.

By Lee Kyung-eun

If you are from South Korea and have had the opportunity to live and work in either the U.S. or in a Western European country, you may have come across a situation where someone says to you, "Oh, I have a friend whose brother/sister was adopted from Korea", or alternatively, "Do you know that our boss/friend has adopted a child from Korea?" Or you may have approached a person whom you thought was a native Korean, but after starting a conversation, discovered that this person has a very western family name and has said to you, "Oh, I am adopted.

In English-language literature, there are many books written on the subject of adoption, encompassing such diverse topics as: individual memoirs by adoptees or adoptive parents, investigative reports on unlawful and unethical adoption practices, birth family search stories, and so on. Many of the authors of such books are of Korean ethnicity.

In Western countries, there are many stories that connect Korea to the narrative of transnational adoption. Why? Because Korea is the country that has sent the largest number of children out of the country for adoption. The length of the period in which Korea has been involved in transnational adoption is more than 68 years and the total number of adoptees is estimated to be over 200,000. It is a singular record in the world history of adoption.

A UK-based adoption agency, Literacy Integration and Formal Education (LIFE) Foundation has reacted to the statement made by the UK Department for Education that banned child adoptions from Nigeria and other countries.

By virtue of the order, adoptions from Nigeria to the UK were suspended with effect from March 12, 2021.

President, Literacy Integration & Formal Education (LIFE) foundation, Elvira Salleras, in a statement insisted that the law is a gross abuse of adoption law.

Salleras currently operates an adoption agency with expertise and extensive experience in inter-country adoptions from Nigeria since 2006, working in partnership with Lagos and Anambra States.

“We feel constrained to address the issues raised in the said circular, using Lagos state, which has similar processes to those of Anambra State, as a reference point, to provide clarity and set the records straight,” Salleras said.

Monday, January 12, 2015 will be exactly five years since Haiti was hit by one of the worst earthquakes ever. On Sunday 11 January, NCRV will broadcast a documentary about the hastily set up air bridge between the Netherlands and Haiti, with which more than 100 adopted children were rescued from the rubble and brought to the Netherlands.

After the earthquake of 7.0 on the Rigter scale that kills a quarter of a million people and makes 1.5 million homeless, contact with the children's homes where more than 100 adopted children live at that time is impossible, one of the houses is even partially collapsed. It takes a while before it becomes clear that the children survived the quake. More than half of the children have already met their adoptive parents-to-be from the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, the brave plan arises to take the children away. An air bridge between Haiti and the Netherlands can bring the children to safety. A tough and exciting mission, in the chaotic conditions in which the country finds itself. But how do you organize such a thing?

Macky Hupkes, director of the Dutch Adoption Foundation knows how to charter a plane. The World Children's Association is joining this initiative. The children are picked up by Dutch marines by bus and transferred to Port-au-Prince airport by navigating through the devastated country. The atmosphere at the airport is tense, 'get the fuck out of here!', one of the soldiers shouts. When the plane takes off, the discharge comes. More than a hundred children start to cry. Macky Hupkes texts to the Netherlands: 'Close the doors, the most beautiful crying concert ever'.

In NCRV 2Doc The kids are OK, those directly involved tell their story. How did the adoption organizations get the governments of the Netherlands and Haiti to authorize this action? Was it ethically right to get the children to the Netherlands more quickly? How did the parents experience the news of the earthquake when they had already embraced the child they were about to adopt? And what about the children now?

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FOCUS - While India, bruised by the second wave, has exceeded 300,000 deaths from Covid-19, an increase in the number of orphans, exposed to all types of trafficking and exploitation, worries NGOs.

The baby was barely crying. The news shook India bruised by its second wave of covid-19: in Pune, in the south of the country, a child of a few months was found near the body of his mother, who died of the disease several days earlier, tells The Times of India . The neighbors had not dared to approach for fear of being contaminated.

In the chaos of the epidemic, what becomes of the children of the 300,000 deceased from covid-19? The authorities counted on Wednesday, May 27, 577 new children who lost both parents to the coronavirus and were placed in orphanages during the month of April. But that's without counting all those who vanish in nature. Illegal adoptions, prostitution, forced labor: in India, 50,000 children go missing each year. It was before the pandemic.

The situation is chaotic, people are afraid. They dare not approach a potentially sick child

Akancha Shrivastava

The following notice was recently published by the Hungarian Central Authority concerning adoptions from Hungary. The US DOS website does not currently contain information on adoption from Hungary. If you are a prospective adoptive family currently working with an agency and hoping to adopt a young child (under 8) from Hungary, you may wish to forward this notice to your agency"

Information for the prospective adoptive parents about the number of the applications the Hungarian Central Authority can accept in 2009:

"The Hungarian Parliament ratified the Hague Convention of 29 May 1993 on Protection of Children and Co-operation in respect of Intercountry Adoption in 2005.

The Hungarian Central Authority has been dealing with intercountry adoptions since October 2005 and according to the three years long experience, the number of the children, their age and health status as well as the high number of the applicants being registered in the international registry the Central Authority determines how many applications they will accept in 2009.

The Central Authority is responsible for the applicants. We informed the accredited bodies several times the last months that there is almost no chance of adopting healthy children younger than 6 years old and in spite of this fact, we received applications wishing a healthy child under 6 even in the last days. There are more than 100 prospective adoptive parents in our registry who want to adopt a healthy child or a child with small, correctable problem under six. So far in 2008 we could only help three international adoptions of children with these characteristics. (There were some other young children, but they had older siblings.) There are plenty of applicants waiting in Hungary and the children under 6 can be adopted in Hungary as well.

DEORIA: Three children from the shelter home in UP’s Deoria, where

inmates were allegedly abused and trafficked, were adopted and sent to

Spain and France in February this year. A special investigation team (SIT)

of the UP police made these disclosure in the chargesheet submitted to

the Allahabad HC last week.

Summary

Background and issue

The group of children released for adoption is essentially our country's or other countries' child welfare children. Many have been exposed to neglect and many have major health challenges. This places great demands on the capacity and caring ability of adoptive parents, not only while the children are minors, but also in a life course perspective. In order to be able to make a good and sound assessment of adoption applicants , it is necessary to have up-to-date knowledge of which factors are important for the applicants' ability to take care of an adopted child's care needs and howthe various factors may affect the ability to care over time. The Directorate for Children, Adolescents and Families (Bufdir) has therefore asked the National Institute of Public Health to make an assessment of the criteria currently used in assessing applicants for adoption. The assessment of the criteria shall be made in the light of a literature review with a systematic search of which characteristics of adoptive parents are important for the adoptive children's health and development. The report is a presentation of the results of this literature review.

Method

We conducted a literature review with a systematic literature search based on a number of inclusion and exclusion criteria described in more detail in the report. The report presents and discusses the results from 146 identified studies that included study variables about both adoptive parents / adoptive family and adopted children where (1) the variables about the adopted children were outcome variables, (2) where parental stress was outcome variable, and (3) where the studies maintained sufficient scientific quality.

KUALA LUMPUR, May 28 — Friends of university undergraduate Rain Lee have been pointing out that he does not look like his parents since he was young.

While his father is tanned, his mother is much fairer than him.

Lee, 20, said in secondary school, a teacher actually asked his mother point-blank whether he was her real child.

“Things boiled over when my father signed my university admission form.

The person in charge at the counter said my father should put himself as my guardian instead of father. All because his skin colour is different from mine.”