Sharron and Mark are waiting for an American baby: "As far as we are concerned, the call comes quickly"

DRONTEN - Sharron (31) and Mark (34) Eikelboom will soon prepare a bag if they have to take the plane to the United States unexpectedly. Their profile has been on an American adoption website for a month now and a phone call can come any time.

"If the mother has chosen us while she is still pregnant, we can plan our trip. If she has given birth and if she chooses us as adoptive parents, we must travel within 72 hours and stay in America for a month to await the papers of our little one. Only then can we return to Dronten. "

Waiting for phone call

Mark is working and Sharron tells their story in their brand new home in the youngest district of Dronten. It is strange, so waiting for a phone call that can come any time but can also take months, she notes. "Just live on, people tell us. We do that, but it is sometimes difficult, "says Sharron.

Leading Maltese fashion designers Charles & Ron have taken a moment from designing fabulous pieces to help out one of their friends – a former street kid named Amin Sheikh from India.

After leaving his orphanage at the age of 17, Amin wanted to find a way to tackle the child homelessness that could be seen all over his city of Mumbai. That’s when he came up with an idea.

“Amin’s dream is to help street kids and give them a purpose by working and earning a living in the Bombay To Barcelona Library Cafe in Mumbai,” Ron Van Maarschalkerweerd Borg told Lovin Malta.

Amin’s a former street kid among a group of former street kids like our friend Khushboo,” Ron continued.

Having worked closely with some of these street kids, most of whom are orphans, Charles and Ron became close to their cause and wanted to help out.

By Priyanka Sharma

New Delhi [India], Sept 29 (ANI): Scores of medicos

practising at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (/search?query=All India

Institute of Medical Sciences) (AIIMS), Delhi (/search?query=Delhi) are

demanding stricter surrogacy laws after a 42-year-old surrogate mother, who

Inside the horrifying trade exploiting Vietnamese women for their bodies

By Samantha Dick

Abandoned by her husband with a young son to feed on her own, Linh* was desperate.

Her family in a remote Vietnamese village had never had much money, and after a "very difficult" marriage to a local man ended in divorce, Linh fell deeper into poverty.

She needed a way out.

Around 275 adopted children were “returned” to the system over the past two years in India. What went wrong?

Data indicates that gaps in pre- and post-adoption counselling, which arose after the digitisation of the adoption process, could be one of the major factors for these disruptions.

Over the past three years, a group of social workers and counsellors from Karnataka, all working with non-government organizations (NGOs) in the field of child welfare and adoption scrutiny, started noticing a disturbing trend in the adoption cases they were handling. They realized that a fairly large number of adoptions were failing—the children were being “returned" by parents to the Specialised Adoption Agency (SAA) that had handled their case. Finally, with a sense of growing unease, a few of these social workers submitted an RTI application seeking information about the number of failed adoptions to the Central Adoption Resource Authority (Cara)—the main government body handling all inter- and intra-country adoptions in India.

When the responses to the RTI application came in earlier this year, their apprehensions proved to be overwhelmingly correct. It turned out that in the two years between April 2017 and March 2019, the period for which the data had been sought, 275 children had been returned to the system across states—almost 5% of the number of children adopted in India in the same period.

Though hard data on the number of disruptions that happened before 2017 is not yet available, after talking to several child welfare activists and former Cara office-bearers for this story, it seems clear, anecdotally, that the number of children being returned are on the rise. Social workers who have worked in this field for decades maintain that the number of children being given up by adoptive parents either during the foster-care period or even after the adoption has been finalized in a court of law is seeing an alarming rise.

The Department of Social Welfare (DSW), has introduced new reforms on adoption processes to safeguard the interest of orphans as well as children who cannot live with their parents.

The reforms were developed to formalise alternative care system and formal gatekeeping structures to prevent the unnecessary admission and readmission of children into residential care to stem abuses.

The DSW, disclosed this at a day’s sensitization workshop on adopting and foster care regulations in Ghana, organised by the Department in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Cape Coast for stakeholders in Central Region.

The Acting Regional Director of DSW, Monica Siaw, encouraged stakeholders to educate the public on the new reforms which would be implemented by the Department.

She said couples who were willing to adopt should provide a suitable, secure and loving family home for a child and visit any Regional office of the DSW to go through the various processes before the child could be adopted to avoid child trading and trafficking to a foreign country only to be maltreatment.

Distance and adoption in the Netherlands between 1956-1984

Many women renounced their child for adoption between 1956 and 1984 under pressure. The government is therefore conducting research into the situations of distance parents, distance children and adoptive parents in that period until the end of 2020. And the role of the organizations involved and the social environment such as family and social workers.

Do you want to share your story and experiences for the distance and adoption study 1956-1984?

Distance and adoption by pressure

In 2017, Radboud University conducted research into women who renounced their child for adoption between 1956 and 1984. According to this research, this happened under pressure. Often because the women were not married. Distance mothers felt pressured by their immediate environment and care providers. Such as family, doctors, social workers and the church. The distance between the mother, father and child was broken. This caused a lot of lasting sadness and shame for parents and children.

Europol smashes a gang that dealt with babies

A gang of criminals is accused of bringing pregnant Bulgarian women to Greece for their birth. According to Interpol, the babies were adopted for around 25,000 euros. The suspects are also said to have acted with egg cells.

Greek investigators have teamed with Europol dug up a gang of criminals who are said to have traded with newborn babies and with egg cells. Twelve people were arrested, Europol said on Thursday in The Hague.

As a result, since 2016, the gang has been soliciting young pregnant Bulgarian women and brought them to Thessaloniki, Greece. There, women in private clinics gave birth to their children.

According to Europol, the babies were then illegally adopted for around 25,000 euros each. More details on this did not mention Europol. Some of the young women were brought to Thessaloniki as surrogate mothers.

Explanatory

Report to the

Guidelines regarding the

implementation of the Optional

Protocol to the Convention on the

Explanatory

Report to the

Guidelines regarding the

implementation of the Optional

Protocol to the Convention on the