THE LEADER OF the Catholic Church in Ireland has “unreservedly” apologised to the survivors of mother and baby homes following the publication of the long-awaited final report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission.

Archbishop Eamon Martin said he accepts that the Church was clearly part of that culture in which people were “frequently stigmatised, judged and rejected”.

“For that, and for the long-lasting hurt and emotional distress that has resulted, I unreservedly apologise to the survivors and to all those who are personally impacted by the realities it uncovers,” Martin said in a statement issued this evening.

Martin called on all those who are in positions of leadership in the Church to study the report carefully and “identify, accept and respond to the broader issues which the Report raises about our past, present and future”.

The report details the experiences of women and children who lived in 14 mother and baby homes and four county homes – a sample of the overall number of homes – between 1922 and 1998. It confirms that about 9,000 children died in the 18 homes under investigation – about 15% of all the children who were in the institutions.

SUSAN LOHAN HAS been campaigning for the rights of adopted people for 20 years.

She co-founded the Adoption Rights Alliance in 2009 and more recently was appointed to the Mother and Baby Home Collaborative Forum.

The forum was set up in 2018 by then-Minister Katherine Zappone to help inform the Department of Children of survivors’ wishes on legacy issues related to the homes as the commission carried out its work.

The forum was separate to the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation and submitted its own 84-page report in December 2018, six months after it first met.

The forum’s recommendations were published in April 2019 but the report itself was not, with the department citing advice from the attorney general as the reason.

Survivors adopted from mother and baby homes have said many of them left without their births being registered and some with the signatures on their adoption papers being forged.

Others only became aware of the fact as adults that they had been the subject of secret vaccine trials while babies in the facilities in Cork and Tipperary.

The revelation came as Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, Co Tipperary, remained the major focus of revelations about the appalling treatment of young women and their babies.

With Tuam in Galway and Bessborough in Cork, Sean Ross Abbey ranked among the most notorious of Ireland’s mother and baby homes.

Sean Ross Abbey was also at the centre of the story of Philomena Lee whose campaign to trace her son – sent to the US for adoption in the 1950s – was the basis of a BAFTA-winning film.

The Mother and Baby Homes Commission Report demonstrates the state’s continuing failure to communicate with survivors and recognise their experience. To illustrate this point, I want to discuss one of the Report’s most important conclusions; that there was “very little evidence” of “forced adoption” in Ireland in the period 1922-1998. This conclusion is based on an analysis that divorces law from its social and political context, assuming that if conduct was ‘lawful’ then it cannot have been abusive.

“Forced adoption” was one possible, partial, name for the ways in which some single mothers and their children experienced adoption law. As part of the process of holding the state accountable for past abuse, survivors wanted and expected the Commission to evaluate how the law was applied to them. Instead, however, the Report focuses on explaining the old adoption laws and on assessing whether adoptions were generally legal or illegal at various points in Irish history.

The Report emphasises that mothers in Ireland “had time after the initial placement for adoption” to understand the consequences of their decision, assess it, and perhaps change their minds. It is true that the Adoption Act 1952 provided that the baby must be at least 6 months’ old before an adoption could be finalised. Even if a woman decided to place the baby for adoption while still days or weeks old, in theory she had a months-long “cooling off” period in which to change her mind. If she did not object during that period, the law assumed that her decision was not forced.

The Commission contrasts Irish law with the law in Australia which, in the Commission’s opinion did enable forced adoption. In Australia, a legal adoption could take place within days of birth. This analysis is weak. Ireland’s mandatory six-month waiting period only applied between 1952 and 1974. Before 1952, Ireland had no adoption legislation and therefore no statutory cooling-off period. From 1974, the mandatory waiting period was reduced to six weeks. In any event, we know that prescribing this period in law did not ensure that women had meaningful opportunities for free choice. If a woman spent that period in a “Home”, for example, the Commission accepts that she was often subject to “emotional abuse”. This inevitably undermined her freedom of choice.

Ronan Mullen calls for national voluntary collection for mother and baby home survivors

PHOENIX (AP) — 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.

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Sometimes life comes full circle — something 33-year-old Mousami Damle would fully testify to, after she returned to the

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Mousami is now the Vice President (Human Resources) of a New York-based advertising company, but returning to the place

that was her home before she found a loving family, she could barely hold back her tears. Today, Mousami knows that she too

may adopt a child someday, and give him or her a happy home.

Sisters allegedly forced to give birth by their killers so offspring could be sold to clients in Greece

By

Yannis-Orestis Papadimitriou

IN ATHENS

17 January 2021 • 5:48pm

A woman who won a legal battle to adopt a boy in Uganda has brought him to the UK for the first time.

Emilie Larter, 29, from Worcestershire, was volunteering for a children's charity in the African country in 2014 when she took care of a baby whose mother had died.

Five years later, after raising thousands through crowdfunding, she was allowed to adopt Adam, now six.

However, she now has to go through the legal process all over again in the UK.

Being in England is "surreal", she said, "but he's loving the attention".

Rolson Price still scans Facebook for her picture. He’s seen her occasionally, at the periphery of someone else’s photo, instantly recognisable.

But he’s never met her, and concedes he never will.

He still doesn’t know his daughter’s name.

Price is one of dozens of victims of an extraordinary and brazen human trafficking ring, operating for years across the Marshall Islands archipelago and three states of the United States of America. The scheme involved pregnant Marshallese women being lured to the United States and enticed, with offers of $10,000 and the promise of a new life in America, to give up their babies, which were then adopted out to US couples willing to pay four times that amount for a child.

Paul Petersen, a 45-year-old former elected county official in Arizona, pleaded guilty to human smuggling, conspiracy to smuggle illegal aliens, and fraud in a US federal court. He has been sentenced to six years in prison, and faces further jail time still on more charges.

Authorities in Uzbekistan have revealed that they recorded 185 cases of babies being bought and sold between 2017 and 2020.

Interior Ministry representative Nargiza Khojiboyeva said in a briefing on January 12 that in the majority of such cases, mothers had resorted to this extreme act because of financial and social insecurity.

Across the board, figures on human trafficking point to a positive trend. If 574 cases of human trafficking were recorded in 2012, that had dropped to 74 by 2020, according to the Interior Ministry.

Children remain acutely exposed, however.

A report produced in December by the National Commission on Combating Human Trafficking and Forced Labor concluded that 31 percent of women who sold a newborn child did so because of their “social and economic situation.” Fifty-two percent are said to have done it for financial gain.