Olivia* was sat in her conservatory last May, looking out into the garden, when she realised she was ready to adopt. She’d been furloughed for three months, and the lengthy haze her abusive ex-girlfriend left behind had finally cleared. Feeling uncertain and hopeful, she caught sight of a sign, perched there on the fence. “A sparrow and a blue tit,” she beams. “I hadn’t actually seen birds in my garden for years because of construction work going on around the area. It just seemed to be a symbol of hope, really, in amongst the pandemic. That I was hoping to adopt two children and suddenly, there’s these two little birds outside.”

The 34-year-old decided to take the leap after the pandemic wrung all notions of what if from her head. “Nobody expected this time last year for the pandemic to get as bad as it did, and as it is now. You can spend your whole life saying, ‘Well, I’ll just wait until...’ And then ‘until’ never comes,” says Olivia. “With plenty of time to apply to adopt and go through the process without the pressure of having to do it around work, I thought, ‘When am I going to get another opportunity to do this?’”

Adoption interest rates are buoyant for the first time in half a decade. Since lockdown was first implemented in March, Adoption UK has seen traffic on prospective adopter web pages surge by 63 per cent. For agencies such as One Adoption West and Adopt South West, interest has doubled since the pandemic began, with other agencies across the country observing similar waves of applicants. It comes as a welcome shock to a sector grappling with a sharp decline in adoptions since 2015.

“We went into 2020 with an adopter shortfall,” Sue Armstrong Brown, chief executive of Adoption UK tells British Vogue. “So children in care waiting for adopters, and not enough adopters. The pandemic started, and everybody was deeply concerned about that. But what we actually saw was really surprising, and extremely encouraging.”

Brown suspects that a slower societal pace has allowed more scope for reflection. “It appears that the lockdown and the disruption to the world caused by coronavirus has actually been prompting people to think about what really is important in their lives. I think people have, for better or for worse, been forced to step out of their normal lives, and think about what they would really value doing.”

A REPORT INTO the operation of institutions for women and babies in Northern Ireland is to be published later today.

The academic research on mother and baby homes and Magdalene Laundries will be considered by Stormont ministers this morning.

First Minister Arlene Foster is due to outline the findings to the Assembly this afternoon.

Prior to that, Foster and Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill are due to meet survivors at Stormont.

The region’s political leaders are already facing calls to establish a public inquiry into the institutions and those are likely to intensify after the release of the Stormont-commissioned research.

The embattled chief executive of Oranga Tamariki has stepped down, saying the focus of the story has become about her, rather than the well-being of New Zealand’s most vulnerable children.

Gráinne Moss’s resignation follows growing concern about the uplift of M?ori babies, and the high number of M?ori children in care – they account for 65% of kids in state care though M?ori comprise just 16.5% of the country’s population.

A two-part investigation by the office of the children’s commissioner into Oranga Tamariki released at the end of last year found that M?ori infants were five times more likely to be taken into state custody than non-M?ori, often in traumatic circumstances and including from maternity wards.

Meng Foon, the human rights commissioner, noted that the report highlighted persistent inequities that affect M?ori, including intergenerational harm being done to M?ori children and wh?nau (family), and how this collides with entrenched disadvantage, colonisation and systemic bias.

“Such systemic bias needs to go,” Foon said.

Mumbai: A city couple on Friday alleged the child welfare committee (CWC) took away their “adopted” infant and kept her in

“illegal detention”. They have sought orders to be reunited with the baby, now aged two.

The childless couple said they had adopted a newborn from a single woman under provisions of Hindu Adoption and

Maintenance Act (HAMA) through an adoption deed in January 2019. That June, CWC filed a criminal case against them and

“immediately took” the child from their legal custody, they alleged. Currently, the child is being looked after by a trust that runs

The Department of Social Welfare has debunked the notion that the application process for child adoption is strict and cumbersome.

This comes on the back of the arrest of some 11 persons in connection with baby harvesting and human trafficking at some health centres in Accra.

The group sold two baby boys for GHS30,000 and GHS28,000 respectively.

The Deputy Director in-charge of Child and Family Welfare at the Department of Social Welfare, Fred Sakyi Boafo explained that “the application form costs GHS70 and after going through the process one will spend on the average GHS1,200 “.

He argued that this process is seamless and “adoption from the start to the end should not be less than three months.”

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court Thursday said it would hear next week a plea seeking a direction to the Centre to remove "anomalies" in the grounds of adoption and guardianship and making them uniform for all citizens.

The plea came up for hearing before a bench, comprising Chief Justice S A Bobde and Justices A S Bopanna and V Ramasubramanian, which said that the matter be listed next week.

The plea, filed by advocate and BJP leader Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, has sought to declare that the "discriminatory grounds" of adoption and guardianship are violative of Articles 14, 15, 21 of the Constitution and also to frame "uniform guidelines" for adoption and guardianship for all citizens.

Article 14 of the Constitution deals with equality before the law, Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth and Article 21 deals with protection of life and personal liberty.

The plea, filed through advocate Ashwani Kumar Dubey, has alleged that current practice of adoption is blatantly discriminatory as Hindus have a codified law of adoption but Muslims, Christians and Parsis don't.

There is a lot of controversy on this topic, but finally the coalition agrees on a compromise that should anchor the rights of children in the Basic Law. The change in the law is now being passed through the Federal Cabinet. But she could fail at the next hurdle.

The federal government wants to strengthen the rights of children and has initiated an amendment to the Basic Law. The federal cabinet decided in Berlin that children's rights should be expressly included in the constitution. However, it is uncertain whether the project will result in anything, because two-thirds majorities in the Bundestag and Bundesrat are necessary for amendments to the Basic Law.

The grand coalition is therefore dependent on the approval of the opposition, which has already expressed itself critically - either because the project goes too far or not enough for it. "Children are not little adults. They are particularly vulnerable and have special needs," said Federal Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht.

Anchoring in the Basic Law

Children are demanding more rights in front of the Bundestag

Numerous news outlets and activist groups in India have reported an increase in trafficking, bonded labour, and slave-like working conditions in the past weeks. The two main stories were the rescue of young boys from a basement bangle factory in Rajasthan and Gujarat and the rescue of young girls from sex work and domestic servitude. Instead of seeing increases in trafficked and coerced labour as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown imposed in March, I suggest that it is located in a longer story of labour’s weakening position vis-a-vis their employers and the erosion of their existing rights. The pandemic and the lockdown did not create the conditions for the subjection of labour or for trafficking. They deepened existing asymmetries.

The popular view of the ‘India success story’ is that of sustained high growth rates on the one hand and record reductions in absolute poverty on the other. But in fact high growth was delivered on the backs on hyper-exploitation of ‘informal’ and ‘migrant’ labour, which has been “ground down by growth”. India has also relied heavily on the large-scale transfer of land ownership and the hyper-exploitation of nature. Successive governments have pursued the strategy of making ‘cheap land’ and ‘cheap nature’, along with ‘cheap labour’, available to capitalists, which has produced a steady stream of workers away from affected rural areas to the cities.

Factors other than the effects of economic policy also bear on the conditions of labour. Climate events leading to drought or flood, for example, have pushed people into hyper-exploitative labour relations and work conditions. The simple fact of too little or too much rain has helped fuel pockets of extreme deprivation – in Bihar, Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa, and Uttar Pradesh in particular – which are the main sources of trafficking and coerced labour in India. Wage theft by employers, poor enforcement and understanding of rights, the presence of extremely coercive work conditions, violence with impunity against workers – all are endemic to this milieu.

Rightlessness, wage theft, and precarity made plain by the pandemic

That migrant workers overwhelmingly come from poor, rural families with no or little land was well established before the pandemic. In 2018, the 56% of the rural population was landless. A UN report found that India had the largest number of people – 364 million – facing multidimensional poverty. Of those, 113 million – 8.6% of the population – were classified as extremely poor. At the same time, a sharply increasing number of people from rural areas have been displaced by changes in land laws that allow for the reclassification of agricultural land, opening it up for other purposes. Workers enter labour markets from a position of dispossession and desperation, which the pandemic intensified.

MUMBAI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Police in Mumbai have charged nine alleged members of a baby-trafficking ring - among them a nurse at a maternity hospital and agents who operated in the impoverished slums of India’s financial capital, officials said on Monday.

In the second such case in the city in five years, the nine are accused of having bought and sold at least seven babies over a six-year period.

The mothers of three infants and a man who had bought a baby were also arrested in a four-day police operation.

“We’re now investigating how many more children have they sold and if there are more agents operating in the area,” said police inspector Yogesh Chavan, who received a tip-off about the baby-trafficking racket last week.

“The mothers of the babies were poor and the buyers were couples desperate for a child,” he said.

PHOENIX -- A former Arizona politician must report to prison Thursday to begin serving the first of three sentences for running an illegal adoption scheme that paid pregnant women from the Marshall Islands to come to the U.S. to give up their babies.

Paul Petersen, a Republican who served as Maricopa County assessor for six years and also worked as an adoption attorney, was sentenced to six years after pleading guilty in federal court in Arkansas to conspiring to commit human smuggling.

Petersen, who has acknowledged running the adoption scheme, is awaiting sentencing in state courts in Arizona for fraud convictions and in Utah for human smuggling and other convictions. Sentencing dates have not yet been set for those cases.

Prosecutors have said Petersen illegally paid women from the Pacific island nation to give up their babies in at least 70 adoption cases in Arizona, Utah and Arkansas. Marshall Islands citizens have been prohibited from traveling to the U.S. for adoption purposes since 2003.

Petersen’s attorney, Kurt Altman, did not immediately respond to phone and email messages seeking comment.