Sunday, March 4, 2012 , by Claudia Calleja
Adopting children in care may soon be made easier

Video: Mark Zammit Cordina
 The government is looking into a system that will make it easier for people to adopt children living in institutions by allowing their natural parents to remain in touch, Family Minister Chris Said has said.

We were afraid we would not see her again. That was when we decided to adopt her...The Gozitan minister, who is himself an adoptive parent, has made it his mission to free more Maltese children in care for adoption.

The government is in the process of establishing what is keeping more Maltese children from being put up for adoption.

It will also consider introducing a so-called open adoption system, which would encourage natural parents to allow their children to be adopted while adoptive parents take legal responsibility. He said this system could be ideal for a small country like Malta.

In 2011, Soros Foundation has entered in its 21st year of activity in Romania.

In its first 20 years of activity, the Foundation has developed programs dedicated to education – scholarships, access to technology and internet, alternative manuals – but also to public health issues, culture, civil society and NGO development.

The Soros Foundation was the first Romanian organization to have developed a long term and exhaustive program of monitoring social changes in Romania – the Public Opinion Barometer.

The support for the development of Romania as an open society dates from 1990, when the Soros Foundation for an Open Society Association was established. Continuing to focus on critical issues for the development of the Romanian society, the Foundation currently streams its financial and human efforts towards advocacy activities, also gaining and providing substantial expertise in fields such as migration and inclusion of vulnerable and marginalized minorities, and going further with monitoring the decision-making process at both central and local levels, the fair allocation of EU funds etc.

The Foundation role in Romania is to act as a change agent for the society, sizing its most pressing problems and proposing practical solutions by combining innovation, resources and opportunity. Through our entrepreneurial approach we propose solutions to social problems and then, if worthy, scale them up on our own or through others by mobilizing outside resources. Our mission is to fuel the society with new ideas for wide-scale change.

Left out in the cold: Russian official demands full ban on US adoptions
Published: 29 February, 2012, 22:09

Russia’s children’s rights ombudsman has called for a full ban on US adoptions of Russian children. The move follows an American couple’s shocking decision to abandon baby twins on the cold streets of Saint Petersburg.

Children’s Right Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov demanded “the suspension of the issuance of documents on the adoption of Russian children by US citizens” until a bilateral agreement on child adoptions between Russia and the US is ratified.

His strong words came after a Russian citizen holding a US passport abandoned her adopted children in Saint Petersburg this week.

According to reports, an unidentified man brought the children to a Saint Petersburg custodial organization on Monday with a note saying the kids' "foster mother had given them up."

WORLDPOST

Mexico Adoption Bust Reveals Vast Child Trafficking Ring

02/29/2012 05:29 pm ET | Updated Apr 30, 2012

400

Erin Siegal McIntyre

WORLDPOST

Mexico Adoption Bust Reveals Vast Child Trafficking Ring

02/29/2012 05:29 pm ET | Updated Apr 30, 2012

400

Erin Siegal McIntyre

In 1955, a special act of Congress allowed Bertha and Harry Holt, an evangelical couple from rural Oregon, to adopt eight Korean War orphans. The Holts had a large family before the adoptions, but they were so moved by their experience that they became pioneers of international adoptions and arranged hundreds for other American couples. They relied on proxy adoptions and overlooked the minimum standards and investigatory practices endorsed by social workers. They honored adopters' specifications for age and sex, gave priority to couples with one or no children, and asked only that applicants be “saved persons” who could pay the cost of children’s airfare from Korea. They paid close attention to race-matching for children whose fathers were African-American, but otherwise ignored it entirely. They were happy to accept couples who had been rejected, for a variety of reasons, by conventional adoption agencies.

The Holts believed they were doing God’s work, but they became lightning rods for controversy about how adoptive families should be made. In the press, the Holts were portrayed as heroic, selfless figures. In Congress, Oregon Senator Richard Neuberger called them incarnations of “the Biblical Good Samaritan.” In Christian communities around the country, their work was held up as a model to be emulated. But many professionals and policy-makers in the U.S. Children’s Bureau, the Child Welfare League of America, and the International Social Service devoted themselves (unsuccessfully) to putting the Holts out of business. They considered the Holts dangerous amateurs, throwbacks to the bad old days of charity and sentiment. Their placements threatened child welfare by substituting religious zeal and haphazard methods for professional skill and supervision.

For the Holts, family-making required faith and altruism, not social work or regulation, and they found nothing wrong with the idea of Americans adopting foreign children, sight unseen. American childhood, they assumed, was unquestionably superior to childhood in developing nations. The Holts' form letter seeking adoptive parents included the following request. “We would ask all of you who are Christians to pray to God that He will give us the wisdom and the strength and the power to deliver his little children from the cold and misery and darkness of Korea into the warmth and love of your homes.” For the Holts and many of their supporters, Korea was a backward country whose children deserved to be rescued.

Many Americans cheered the Holts and found their promises of speedy and uncomplicated adoptions a refreshing alternative to inspection by choosy agencies with waiting lists that could last for years. Pearl S. Buck admired the Holts, even though she disliked their Christian fundamentalism, and shared their suspicion that the professionals who were supposed to be helping children were actually doing them more harm than good. By identifying themselves with suffering children that most people ignored, the Holts reinforced the messages that emerged from popular books like The Family Nobody Wanted. Adoption was an act of faith. Love was enough to make the families that children needed.

By the early 1960s, the Holts responded to pressure from the child welfare establishment. Their operation began to follow standard professional procedures, hired social worker John Adams as its Executive Director in 1962, and gradually evolved into a typical adoption agency. In a little more than a decade, the Holts repeated a pattern central to the history of modern adoption: the movement from humanitarian to professionalism and from religion to science.

Sting busts shocking baby-selling racket

By: Bhupen Patel and Shubha Shetty-Saha Date: 2012-02-21 Place: Mumbai

MiD DAY's Bhupen Patel and Shubha Shetty-Saha posed as a childless couple looking to buy a baby. Within a week, this woman (a cook at an orphanage) sold them a 6-day-old boy

In an explosive sting operation that lasted for about a week, MiD DAY blows the lid off a thriving baby-selling racket in the city, in which infants are sold like commodities for Rs 2-3 lakh.

Baby bazaar: Vijaya Sonawne, who cooks food for the orphans in the

Application acceptance from international adoption organizations suspended in Kyrgyzstan 20/02-2012 08:54, Bishkek – 24.kg news agency , by Anastasia BENGARD Application acceptance from international adoption organizations is suspended in Kyrgyzstan. It was said by Head of Family and Children Department at Social Development Ministry Ekaterina Horoshman for 24.kg news agency. According her, in total, 24 applications have been sent to the Department: 11 are from USA, 6 – Spain, 3 – Italy, 1 from each country – Finland, Canada, Netherlands and Sweden. “Currently, only one non-commercial corporation Christian World Adoption (South Carolina, USA) is accredited in the country. Other – a Holland company – is on stage of approval. Totally, only 10 organizations will be accredited or 3 companies from the each country,” she explained. Recall, from 2005 to 2008 216 Kyrgyz children were adopted. They went to 8 foreign countries. Most of them found home in USA, 30 per cent – Switzerland, Sweden and Germany, 2 children are in South-African Republic. Moratorium on international adoption has been functioning for three years.

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Indonesian twin sisters appear to live 40 kilometers apart in Sweden. They also both became teachers.

Lin Backman and Emilie Falk were born as twin sisters in Indonesia. After their birth they were separated and adopted by two different Swedish families.

After some research on Facebook, the sisters found each other nearly 30 years after their adoption. They turned out to live 40 kilometers away from each other and had both become teachers. They have even more in common: they have the same wedding date (with a year difference) and chose the same song for their wedding (“You and Me” from Lifehouse).

What is special about the story of Lin Backman and Emilie Falk is that their adoptive parents had already contacted each other because they suspected that their daughters were twin sisters. A taxi driver in Indonesia had told the Backmans that their baby had a twin sister. Because the girls did not look alike and the adoption papers did not mention a twin sister, the families did not maintain contact with each other after a meeting. They knew that their daughters had the same mother.

The women tracked down each other via Facebook, where Emilie Falk found a message from Lin Backman stating her date of birth and the name of her biological mother. A DNA test confirmed that the women have the same parents. They also now know that the taxi driver who pointed out to the Backmans that they were taking half of twins is their father.