A total of 11 children have been surrendered to special adoption agencies in Madurai district during the COVID-19 lockdown since March 2020.

Representatives from the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) and the adoption agencies say that the numbers were higher compared to previous year.

Chairman of CWC, Madurai district, K. Vijayasaravanan, says that a major reason cited by parents when they surrender children was loss of livelihood due to COVID-19 pandemic.

Giving an instance, he said that one of the children admitted to a adoption agency was a four-day-old girl child who was surrendered by her parents at the primary health centre in T. Ramanathapuram which is part of Elumalai block on Thursday. The parents said they already had girl children to look after.

According to a data accessed by The Hindu, the children surrendered to the two special adoption agencies in the district- Grace Kennett Hospital and Claretian Mercy Home- include seven girls and four boys.

My name is Winnie (Venkatamma). I was born in India. I was in an orphanage and was about 2 years old when I was adopted by a white Jewish family. Up until about the age of 6, I didn’t understand what my adoption meant. I would tell people that I’m adopted, not knowing there was a whole meaning behind it. I was 6 years old when I understood what my adoption meant. When it happened, everything changed. It was then I realized I had a birth mother who was Indian and had given birth to me, and SHE was my mother, not my adoptive mother.

Everything switched, and I started to become obsessed with wanting to know who she was. I would always ask questions, but my parents would be very quick to change the subject. I know I can speak for a lot of adoptees when I say the trauma of being rejected by our birth parents will never go away. If you’re an adoptive parent, your number one job is to make sure that we don’t feel that rejection again. If you can’t understand that, you have no business adopting. Because I constantly experienced this, it caused me to not want to be close to my adoptive parents. It’s to the point that I don’t care if my yearning for my birth mother hurts them. I helped fill a void for my parents…they’re fine. That’s what adoption is…filling a void for the adoptive parents. No one wants to ask if we’re ok.

I always struggled with identity issues, fitting in, depression, and suicidal thoughts. I definitely feel that if I wasn’t adopted my life would be different and probably better. Adoptees are taken from everything, their culture, family, birth mother, country, and people expect us to be ok. My number one trauma growing up, and still until this day, is not knowing who my birth mother is. It’s been frustrating to know how many birthdays, holidays, graduations, and achievements of mine that she’s missed. No one understands the trauma of not knowing who gave birth to you, other than adoptees. I’m currently in the process of trying to find her, but there’s a lot holding me back from doing it.

I’m learning more about my culture that has caused me to be scared to proceed with my search. Many women in my country are affected by the dowry system, which has caused so many girls to be unwanted, abandoned, aborted, and, worst, killed. I’m definitely afraid that my mother was a victim of this. It’s also the fear of what if she has no interest. I still plan to proceed because, in the end, I need closure answers. Our trauma is ignored because people have been stuck believing that we have a better life, and most of us don’t.

I also want to share my story in the hopes that it will save a life, let adoptees know that they are not alone, and that more adoptees will share their story.

Child rights activists have urged the public not to circulate or fall for fake messages seeking adoption of Covid orphaned children that are increasingly seen on social media in recent times.

They have urged people to report such messages to 1048, clarifying that adoptions take place according to

established norms. Recently, a message asking people to contact a person to adopt a girl child went viral on

social media.

“If anyone wishes to adopt a girl, please feel free to contact 097******73 (Priyanka). One girl is 3 days old, and

Nagpur: Social media has been flooded with messages about children orphaned due to Covid-19 and how people can adopt them by simply reaching out to a number mentioned in the message. Legal experts warn that indulging in any such activity is nothing short of ‘child trafficking’ because adoption involves a very comprehensive legal process.

In India, adoption process is solely under the purview of Centralized Adoption Resource Agency (CARA), which is a statutory body under the Union ministry of women and child development. This agency then has a State Adoption Resource Agency (SARA) to coordinate at the local level. So, regardless of a prospective parent approaching an NGO or an orphanage, all applications will ultimately be routed to CARA.

Well-known lawyer Shyam Dewani said if your adoption process is not registered with CARA, then it’s illegal. “The law is very clear and there are two things you must not do. First, don’t forward such messages to anyone regardless of who sent it. Second, don’t ever call on that number because out of the goodness of your heart, you wish to adopt that child,” he said.

“If you do any of these things, then knowingly or unknowingly you become part of a larger criminal conspiracy. And people must use some common sense too that you just can’t call up a number and take home a baby. We are talking about a human being here, not some product on online site,” said Dewani.

These fake or illegal social media messages can get extremely creative to pull at people’s heart strings. Emotional messages about a child being found wandering after both parents died due to Covid-19 and how he needs a new home, are being circulated.

Smriti Irani said anyone who has information about a child whose parents have died of Covid-19 and has no one take care, should inform police and the district child welfare committee.

Union Minister for Women and Child Development Smriti Irani on Tuesday urged people to inform police about children who have lost both parents to Covid-19 and have no one to take care of them.

Appealing to the people, the minister said this is a legal responsibility and people should help the government in preventing illegal adoption.

When the 1955 Adoption Act came into force, many M?ori children were separated from their birth parents and became part of non-M?ori families.

Now, a new University of Otago research project, supported by a Marsden grant, is looking to help descendants of M?ori adoptees reconnect with their birth families.

School of M?ori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies Te Tumu researcher Dr Erica Newman said the project was socially significant because it would bring to light the consequences of trans-racial adoption on identity and wellbeing for adoptees and their descendants in New Zealand as they searched for their turangawaewae.

"These adoptees had no knowledge of their M?ori ancestry. And because they were unable to [or chose not to] have contact with their biological wh?nau, their unknown history has not been passed on to their descendants.

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After my partner Eleonora and I attended a funeral three years ago at Agioi Anargyroi, one of the northwestern suburbs of Athens, she suggested we visit the Mitera Center for the protection of children. It is located within walking distance from the local cemetery, a solemn reminder of the closeness of life and death. But for the many persons who passed through there as infants, it is a reminder of the place they were adopted and started a new life.

Little did I know at the time about how many of those infants in the 1950s would be headed for adoption in the United States. I remembered sporadic articles about illegal adoptions through a network of intermediaries that included prominent Greek Americans who had begun their involvement as members of the American Hellenic Progressive Association (AHEPA) whose involvement in the early 1950s was also not above reproach. The full extent of the adoption phenomenon would become known only recently.

The Mitera (not to be confused with the Maternity and Children’s hospital with the same name which is also in Athens) is one of the leading institutions in Greece for housing children that have been given up by their biological parents or must live away from them.

Mitera’s mission is to find homes for these children by placing them into either adoption or foster care programs. It started operating in 1953 and opened officially two years later, on publicly owned property with thirteen separate picturesque pavilions with stone walls and red roofs spaced out around the main building. Within a few years it would accommodate a total of one hundred children and a number of expectant mothers.

As 17 year olds, Ernst and Tonny Fickweiler (68) gave their baby up for adoption after an unplanned pregnancy. They would never see him again. Or so they thought. "There is a hole somewhere and every time you think about it it makes it very emotional, it is just tangible."

It should be a few A4 pages, briefly describing the family history of the prodigal son. To catch up with him, to make up for the lost years. But it turned into a project that took four years and resulted in a book that turned out to be much more than a family chronicle.

Bomb

Anyone who reads their book feels how the bomb hit the lives of two 17-year-olds. It was a beautiful evening in September 1970. And as so often there was reason for a party, this time with a mutual friend in the attic in their Waddinxveen, where they grew up. Ernst writes about it as a happy memory. And then the song Albatros from Fleetwood Mac was played. ... When I brought Tonny home that evening, we were both happy and deeply in love with each other. Only from that moment on everything would be different, everything would be different. The world upside down. Our young life would change forever.

What followed was a succession of impressive events. As soon as her pregnant belly became visible, Tonny left for a foster home, so that she would not get the scandals in the village. In all loneliness and homesickness she carried her pregnancy there, in order to give birth to her son in the presence of strangers in a clinic. She would never see him, only hear him cry from behind a held up towel: a sound she wouldn't forget for the rest of her life.

The adoptive parents of a girl child have moved the Supreme Court challenging a Kerala High Court judgment of April 9, which had set aside the adoption of the child on the ground that a deed of surrender had not been executed by both the biological parents.

A Bench of Justices Vineet Saran and Dinesh Maheswhari stayed the judgment of the Kerala High Court after the petitioners pointed out that the High Court had passed its verdict without hearing them.

“Considering the facts and circumstances of this case, in the meanwhile, the operation of the impugned order shall remain stayed,” the Court ordered.

Advocates Liz Mathew, Manisha Singh and Sonali Jain appeared for the petitioners (adoptive parents).

Background

‘Social media posts on such children could be possible cases of trafficking’

Social media posts appealing for adoption of children orphaned during COVID-19 are illegal, warn experts. They appeal that citizens must dial helpline 1098 to pass on information about children in need of care and protection.

With deaths due to the COVID-19 on the rise, Twitter and Whatsapp have been flooded with citizens sharing details of children who have lost either both their parents or the only living parent to the disease and pleading for them to be adopted. On Monday, Chairperson Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights, Anurag Kundu, wrote to Delhi Police Commissioner S N Shrivastava flagging such posts as possible cases of trafficking and requesting for a probe in each of these instances.

Activists warn that such posts are illegal under Section 80 and 81 of the Juvenile Justice (JJ) Act, 2015, which prohibit offering or receiving children outside the processes laid down under the Act as well as their sale and purchase. Such acts are punishable with three to five years in jail or ?1 lakh in fine.

“There is a process as per the JJ Act which needs to be followed with children who have been orphaned. If someone has information about a child in need of care, then they must contact one of the four agencies: Childline 1098, or the district Child Welfare Committee (CWC), District Child Protection Officer (DCPO) or the helpline of the State Commission for Protection of Child Rights,” says Vaidehi Subramani, Chairperson of CWC, South Delhi District.