Wait for adoption longest for special needs children: Data
New Delhi, Nearly two-thirds of children waiting for adoption in India are those with special needs, even as the overall adoption numbers have seen a record rise over the years, government data shows.
According to the Union Women and Child Development Ministry's latest annual report accessed by PTI, 3,684 children were declared legally free for adoption in 2024 and 2,177 were available for placement through the Central Adoption Resource Authority . Of the 2,177 children, 1,423 or 65 per cent were those with special needs.
Despite sustained efforts and awareness campaigns to encourage adoption of children with special needs, official records accessed by PTI through an RTI query show that the numbers remain much lower.
Special needs adoptions peaked at 401 in 2018-19, plunged to 166 the following year, and the number has since remained between 300 and 370 annually.
When Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize she said,"With this money I will build homes for the poor because it is in the home that love begins". Perhaps, for most of us who surf the net, having a home is something we take for granted. It is impossible for us to imagine what life is like for children who do not have homes, or families, or anyone in the world to love or look after them.
A home can only be a dream for children who, as a result of wars or disasters, lose everything in life including their family.
It may surprise you to know, as you read this, that every 30 seconds a child, somewhere, is being orphaned as a result of war or disaster and will face a life without hope, having to survive by begging, crime, prostitution and violence.
"So what?" You might ask. "There is nothing I can do about it." But if you could, would you?
If we make it really easy for you to give a dream home to children such as these to give them real hope for the future, will you?
Employee, intern for a public service. Father of two children. What else? Lawyer, field hockey player (I try), likes to walk (but not more than 30 km in a day) etc etc
Lumos Moldova, in partnership with UNICEF and the Government of Norway, proudly announces the inauguration of the first Early Intervention Centre integrated within a public medical institution in Chișinău – the Territorial Medical Association Centru (AMT Centru).
This milestone ensures free, specialised early intervention services for children aged 0–5 with developmental disorders or disabilities in Chișinău. The centre, established through the UNICEF project ‘Creating and Developing Early Intervention Services for Children with Developmental Disorders and Disabilities,’ represents a $100,000 investment from the Government of Norway. It offers critical early assessments and personalised support during a child’s formative years, significantly enhancing recovery and development outcomes. Parents also benefit from counselling and a supportive, family-friendly environment to address early signs of developmental challenges.
Mihai-Constantin Petcu, 40 (L) and Marian Barbu, 33 (R) both claim they were sexually trafficked in Romania. | United States District Court Central District of California
Three men have filed federal lawsuits claiming they were sexually abused and trafficked by a former Harvest Christian Fellowship pastor, Paul Havsgaard, while living in the now-defunct church-run children’s homes in Romania. The filings also accuse the church's founder, Greg Laurie, and missions pastor Richard Schutte of negligence in failing to prevent the abuse and covering it up for 20 years.
The lawsuits were filed Tuesday and Thursday in the United States District Court for the Central District of California by Marian Barbu, 33, Mihai-Constantin Petcu, 40, and Cristian Aeroaiei, 36.
A Harvest Christian Fellowship spokesperson told The Christian Post in response to the lawsuits that the allegations are "serious and disturbing," but denied that the church knowingly covered up the alleged sexual abuse. The spokesperson said that since being contacted by the representatives of the alleged victims, Harvest Riverside has reported the case to law enforcement and plans to cooperate with authorities in the investigation. Harvest also sees the lawsuits as a "form of financial extortion" and expects to "vigorously defend against these claims" in the courts of law.
The lawsuits, filed by attorney Jan Cervenka of McAllister Olivarius, allege in stark detail how Havsgaard recruited the plaintiffs as children off the streets of Bucharest with McDonald’s meals and the promise of shelter in a Harvest Home where they would be fed, clothed and educated. Other survivors interviewed as part of the lawsuits claim Havsgaard even dangled the idea of them escaping Romania through adoption by American families.
Instead of receiving hope, these men allege Havsgaard left them with a lifetime of trauma. Other survivors report developing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression, drug addiction and being functionally illiterate.
The law change will immediately and temporarily suspend the recognition of international adoptions under section 17 of the Adoption Act 1955 (the Act) by New Zealand citizens and residents for citizenship and immigration purposes. Photo: 123RF
The New Zealand government is pausing the recognition of some international adoptions, primarily affecting Samoa, due to concerns over child abuse in cases involving adoptions from overseas.
Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee says efforts are underway with Samoan authorities to address the issues surrounding international adoptions. But she says that until adequate safeguards are established, adoptions will remain on hold.
South Korea on Wednesday launched a committee to oversee domestic adoption policy, as well as individual adoption cases, in accordance with new legislation.
The 15-member adoption policy committee, chaired by Health and Welfare Minister Jeong Eun-kyeong, includes experts on adoption, medicine and law as well as academics.
It will review adoption policy plans, set standards for pre-adoption parental training and rule on the suitability of prospective parent-child pairings.
Two eight-member subcommittees will separately handle domestic and international adoption cases, with their rulings carrying the weight of the main committee.
At its first meeting, the panel discussed operating guidelines and the implementation of the new public adoption system, which transfers oversight of the process from private agencies to local governments and the state.
Jeong said the committee would be the “driving force” behind a transparent public adoption system focused on the best interests of children.
The Government is moving with urgency to suspend recognition of unsafe international adoptions to protect children and young people from harm, Associate Justice Minister, Nicole McKee says.
The Adoption Amendment Bill has been introduced to the House today to immediately and temporarily suspend New Zealand’s recognition of unsafe overseas adoptions for citizenship and immigration purposes.
“There is evidence that our international adoption laws do not provide sufficient safeguards for children and young people. Adoptions that take place in overseas courts do not always access or require an adoptive parent’s criminal or child protection record,” Mrs McKee says.
Child welfare has resurfaced as a rallying cry in Korea, particularly after a series of heartbreaking cases of abandonment and infanticide. This renewed attention reflects domestic concerns as well as a global shift in how adoption and child protection are understood. The 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption embodied this change, shifting focus from the interests of prospective parents toward the rights of children. Ratified by more than 100 countries and set to take effect in Korea this October, the convention reframes adoption as child-centered, emboldening many adoptees to organize and press for recognition of their lived experiences.
While adoptees have gained a stronger voice, unwed mothers — the primary source of children placed for adoption — remain marginalized. Society views unwed motherhood as an individual failing that signifies moral inferiority, even as intercountry adoption was shaped by broader structural forces.
It began in the devastation of the 1950-53 Korean War, with tens of thousands of children orphaned and dependent on foreign relief. Stigmatized in a society that prized ethnic homogeneity, mixed-race children born to Korean women and foreign servicemen fueled intercountry adoption. Declining birthrates and concerns reflecting existing racial hierarchies in the United States further heightened demand for Korean children.
The 1997 Asian financial crisis undermined government efforts to curb intercountry adoption by producing new waves of poverty and family dissolution. In its aftermath, the government embraced a market-oriented welfare model characterized by deregulation. Above all, powerful, profit-driven adoption agencies — shielded by lax oversight — perpetuated the system. In this context, lacking both institutional support and societal acceptance, unwed mothers were often left with adoption as their sole recourse, a constrained choice that nevertheless exposed them to further stigma.
Switzerland is under scrutiny for fraudulently rehoming thousands of babies. The failures go back further than previously understoodThis story was initially published with our partner, New Lines magazine.
When Paul Harwood, a founding member of the Central Intelligence Agency, relocated to Paris from Vietnam, he was keen to expand his family. It was 1961, the Berlin Wall was about to go up and Europe was embroiled in a Cold War crisis, keeping Harwood and his fellow agents on their toes. But besides his undercover work at the U.S. Embassy, Harwood was on a more personal mission: He and his wife, Mary Ellen, were trying to adopt a baby girl.
They ended up using an agency run by a Swiss welfare worker named Alice Honegger. Harwood welcomed her assistant to his apartment on the top floor of an older house in central Paris. A staircase led up to a room ready for a child, reachable via a gallery and complete with its own bathroom.
“Mr. and Mrs. Harwood are extremely likable people, kind, very calm, and I don’t see them as typical Americans at all,” reads the report she wrote for Honegger in St. Gallen, a canton in the country’s northeast near the blue-green waters of Lake Constance. “They are both of medium height, with brown eyes and brown hair.” The Harwoods wanted a girl to complement the little boy they had previously adopted in the United States.
On Aug. 2, 1962, the couple received a letter from Honegger’s agency with the news they had spent years agonizingly waiting for: a “very handsome” little girl of Italian nationality who was a perfect match for them, with the same color of hair and eyes. She added that the child’s expatriation papers were still missing but assured the new parents she would urge the birth mother and the Italian authorities to send what was necessary.
The baby arrived in France in November of that year and, by 1963, had been named Ann Elisabeth Harwood, according to her adoption papers. A few days after her arrival, Honegger wrote to the Harwoods asking them to stay in touch through the child’s development and to thank them for a future donation which would allow the agency to continue its work protecting “abandoned mothers and children.”
Throughout her nearly 50-year career, Honegger was keen to portray her work in an altruistic light, with the feelings of outcast women her main priority. But in actuality, she capitalized on the desperation of pregnant women with few options, coaxing, cajoling and sometimes simply stealing their babies to place them with affluent Americans. Among her clients were spies, diplomats and alleged criminals.
Switzerland’s past and present adoption system is under scrutiny following government-commissioned investigations that showed how thousands of children from at least 10 countries were fraudulently adopted between the 1970s and 1990s. The 2023 report shows that Swiss authorities were aware of the practices of child trafficking, falsification of documents and false indications of origin regarding children from Bangladesh, Brazil, India and elsewhere.
Our two-year investigation shows how Honegger cut her teeth exporting the children of migrant women and perfected her modus operandi for intercountry adoptions, setting the standards for this illicit and morally questionable industry. We reveal how her dubious practices date back much earlier than previously understood, to the late 1940s, leaving a legacy of distrust among the adoptees — including Harwood’s daughter, who, at 62, only recently discovered her true origin story.
By piecing together archival material in Switzerland, Canada and the U.S., interviews with adoption center workers, researchers and adoptees, and Honegger’s official correspondence obtained by archival requests, New Lines and Investigate Europe have found evidence that Honegger placed at least 2,000 babies with families until the 1970s and expanded her network to other parts of the world.
“Alice Honegger was very interested in having power over human beings,” journalist and researcher Sabine Bitter — who was commissioned by several Swiss cantons to investigate international adoptions and the activity of agents like Honegger — told New Lines. “She notoriously ignored the law and set her own rules.”
Honegger was first connected to illegal adoptions in 2017, some 20 years after she died. That year, the St. Gallen canton issued a report saying that up to 70% of the 750 adoptions of Sri Lankan children sent to Switzerland from the late 1970s to the 1990s were illegal. The report sent shockwaves across the Swiss adoption industry.
Today, adopted people from the 1950s and ‘60s are looking for answers. They want to know the truth about their adoption. They want to discover their birth parents and understand who is responsible for their lives.
A photograph of Ann Elisabeth Harwood, later Lisa Helmick, as a toddler.Courtesy of Lisa Helmick
In March 2022, while standing in line in a downtown store in Bassano del Grappa, my hometown in northeastern Italy, I met the Harwoods’ adopted daughter. She heard my Canadian partner’s accent and introduced herself as Lisa Helmick, a fellow North American but with an Italian mother from Bassano del Grappa. We got to talking and later had a drink together, when she told me how she was adopted by an American family and had recently found her birth family.
Her name is Ann Elisabeth, “but everyone calls me Lisa,” she said, explaining how her father was in the CIA. I had just become a mother myself and Helmick’s story seemed the opposite of mine: While I had come back to Bassano del Grappa from Sarajevo to deliver my baby, Helmick’s mother Aurora had departed Bassano del Grappa to give birth abroad to her only child.
Helmick had just moved to Bassano del Grappa with her husband to reconnect with her birth family, settling into a centrally located apartment with exposed wooden beams. “I’m trying to catch up with the time I’ve lost in the past 60 years,” she told me.
She always knew she was adopted but had been told by her parents that her mother was too poor to care for her. In 1999, when Helmick was training in Virginia to become a teacher, her father Paul died. “Everybody at his funeral thought he was working for the State Department,” Helmick’s husband Jeff tells me. Harwood didn’t reveal much about his job and past. Details of his daughter Lisa’s story were among his secrets.
But he left her some documents in a safe-deposit box in the bank. They detailed, in English and French, information about her adoption on onionskin paper with a large red wax stamp of the law firm that formalized the adoption in 1963. “When I opened up the envelope, it was amazing because a sentence stated my mother’s name, the town she was from and that I was named after her. So it was a shock. It was a surprise.”
For the first time, Helmick read the name of her birth mother, but she didn’t believe it was real. “I thought it was like Jane Doe protecting privacy. Well, because the names were the same,” she says. Confusing Helmick further was the fact that the mother and the daughter had the exact same name, Aurora Gramatica. The only detail that stayed in her mind was the Italian woman’s hometown, Bassano del Grappa. It was the initial element for searching for her birth family. But that’s not what happened.
“It was not the right moment,” Helmick explained. The 9/11 attacks happened shortly afterward and Jeff, as a colonel in the U.S. Army, had to go to the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan. “I folded the documents up and I had three kids to raise.” Seventeen years passed before she began her search. “Had I done this a little earlier, I would have been able to talk to my mother,” she said, her words tinged with regret.
Mihai-Constantin Petcu, 40 (L) and Marian Barbu, 33 (R) both claim they were sexually trafficked in Romania. | United States District Court Central District of California
