Hapless parents and relatives are compelled to wait on the road in front of an NGO working for protection of children and their rights. Most of the families are from North India who migrated to Bengaluru for livelihood. They expressed concern over the delay in getting their children released from the NGO after completing the due process as per the law.

They complain that there is no proper designated space to wait. They have to rush to a nearby public toilet to attend nature’s call. The parents, most of them are daily wagers, have to abstain from work as they wait, thus losing the wages.
 

“I have been visiting this NGO for the last three days. They told me that they could not release my nephew who was brought by the police while he was at a playground. His mother works as a Group D employee at a private hospital. She has to work without fail to make ends meet. So, I have come here to get my nephew released,’’ said Radha (name changed), a resident of Kamakshipalya.
 

Rohan Singh Rajput, a relative of four children from Uttar Pradesh, was seen waiting near the NGO. He alleged that a volunteer at Majestic railway station caught the children when he had gone to buy the train ticket. “The volunteer assured me the enquiry would be over in 10 minutes. It all happened on Thursday morning. Today is Monday. All these days, the people at the NGO neither expedited the release of my relatives nor gave proper guidance,’’ he said. He blamed the volunteers of the NGO for not letting him take his relatives after producing all the documents. “I do not know why they kept us waiting for more than five days. I did not go to work all these days. How to make ends meet?’’ he asks.

Surrogacy is more popular than adoption in Sweden. The government coalition is divided on how to deal with this new challenge.

Childless Swedes chose surrogacy over adoption to get a child, says Annika Strandhäll. She is an MP for Sweden’s largest party, the Social Democrats, and chairman of Sweden’s Social Democratic Women’s Federation. Strandhäll opposes the practice, likening it to prostitution, trafficking, and organ trade. She, therefore, wants to forbid women to carry a baby for someone else.

Surrogacy became a fierce debate in Swedish society after a celebrity spoke in the media about how he and his husband got a child through surrogacy in the United States.

Currently, Sweden does not know legislation regarding surrogacy. In theory, it is thus possible to ask women around you to carry a child for you altruistically. However, in practice, many Swedes travel abroad to get their child in the commercial sector. Various agencies in Sweden can connect intended parents with clinics abroad. Although there are no official statistics about surrogacy in Sweden, the Swedish Authority for Family Law and Parental Support acknowledges that the number is growing.

And that has to stop, says Strandhäll, whose party ended up in opposition last year after ruling for eight years. She compares commercial surrogacy to prostitution, and does not believe in altruistic surrogacy either. “There aren’t any middle-class mothers who come forward as surrogate mothers”, she says to the Swedish daily Aftonbladet. “It is poor women who are often already exploited and who do this for financial reasons.”

After retiring from swimming, the Paralympian began researching her origins. This led her to her birth family – and to uncover the shocking difficulties facing other disabled children

As a child, Ellie Simmonds would fantasise about what her birth mother might be like. In her wildest visions, maybe her birth mother was a rock star, or famous, or extraordinary in some other way. “You never think as a seven-, eight-year-old, that you’re actually going to meet your birth mum,” she says. It turns out that the woman knew exactly who the baby she had given up was – and that the child was the famous and extraordinary one. When Simmonds, then just 13, competed at the 2008 Beijing Paralympics, and won two gold medals for swimming, her birth mother put the pieces together: her name, her age, the details of her life that were becoming public. In February this year, they met for the first time.

Simmonds has made a powerful and very moving documentary – I sobbed throughout – about tracing her birth family, which also highlights the shocking difficulties faced by disabled children waiting to be adopted. Thankfully, this wasn’t the case for Simmonds, who has achondroplasia, or dwarfism – she was adopted within months of being born – but it remains the reality for many other children.

She began the process just over a year ago; the time felt right. Her retirement in 2021 after the Tokyo Paralympics – a career that saw her win five Paralympic gold medals and countless world titles, and break several records – had given her the time and space to think about life beyond swimming. But the end of her career as an athlete when she was still in her 20s (she is now 28) had also shaken her identity. If she wasn’t a swimmer and champion Paralympian, she thought, then who was she? It was a question that became even harder to answer when so much of her own life was a mystery to her.

Where did her warmth and chattiness, or her beautiful blue eyes – all strikingly radiant characteristics when we meet in a rather dull office – come from? Her love of animals, especially horses? Her competitiveness and determination? Mostly: what was going on for her birth mother that meant she decided, when her daughter was just two days old, to place her for adoption?

Transnational adoptions are again up for debate. But the sensitive subject contains a number of diverse destinies. Some are adopted from Germany, others from Sri Lanka, China or Iran. Some were adopted illegally, others in accordance with the rules. And some are angry, while others are grateful. Here, five adoptees are allowed to tell their story as they have experienced it - for better and for worse

I am insanely grateful

Ida Rekha, 33 years old, adopted from Sri Lanka

I was born in 1989. I was 17 days old when I came from Colombo in Sri Lanka to Anholt in Denmark. My biological father ran away when my mother became pregnant, and since she could not provide for me herself, she did what she could to give me a better life.
Many people ask me when it dawned on me that I was adopted. After all, I have always been able to see that my skin color was different from that of my parents. That I looked different. But when I went around with my friends at school, I never thought that I stood out. And unlike many others, I did not have to be told that I was different.

My parents have always talked a lot about the sensitive subjects - probably especially because my father himself is adopted, just in Denmark. His mother was inappropriately young when she gave birth to him, but my father actually, when he became an adult himself, found his own biological mother. This is probably a significant part of the explanation for the fact that I have always felt that there was room for that curiosity about what one comes from, without it being taken as an expression that I wanted a different or a better family .

On May 11th Korea marked the 18th anniversary of Adoption Day, intended to raise public awareness about adoption, promote a positive adoption culture, and encourage domestic adoption of children in need while safeguarding their rights and interests. For nearly two decades, the government has attempted to achieve these important goals through the enactment of new policies, but unanticipated barriers have limited their success.

With the longest-running adoption program in the world, Korea sent out more than 200,000 children between 1953 and 2022. Inter-country adoption was devised after the Korean War as a method of rescuing war orphans, but the demand for Korean children increased exponentially in the 1970s, reaching its highest point in the 1980s. In 1985 alone, 8,837 Korean children left for inter-country adoption, amounting to 1.35 percent of live births or more than one in 75 children, the highest rate anywhere in the world.

Inter-country adoptions declined in 2013 by two-thirds from their peak in 2004, due to a shortage of available children. This phenomenon became more salient during the COVID-19 pandemic because nations closed their borders for international travel. In this context, the pandemic functioned as a de facto moratorium on inter-country adoption. Nevertheless, inter-country adoption from Korea increased by nearly five percent from 2019 to 2020, becoming the third-largest source that year.

Inter-country adoption of Korean children has continued alongside alarmingly low fertility rates. According to Statistics Korea, the country's fertility rate fell to 0.78 in 2022 and is expected to keep dropping. A group of children's rights activists and the overseas Korean adoptee community ascribe the perpetuation of inter-country adoption to limited and often absent government interference, profit-driven practices, and powerful agencies influencing policies. However, some scholars (including this author) suggest that it may also stem from the country's collective wariness of differences. Those perceived as a threat to this moral order are thought as being unworthy of public assistance.

Historically, the Korean government seems to have used inter-country adoption programs as a mechanism for social exclusion. First, biracial children― those conceived of temporary relationships between Korean women and American servicemen or U.N. soldiers ― were sent abroad, because they were considered to be "racially contaminated" and thus considered unfit for Korean society. Between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s, close to 4,500 biracial children were sent abroad for adoption.

Gradually, Korean children, mostly born out of wedlock, have been offered for inter-country adoption. Korea underwent rapid industrialization in the 1960s, utilizing a labor force of young single women between the ages of 15 and 25. These women moved to large cities to financially support their families back home while working for exploitative wages. However, a lack of social support, inadequate sex education that emphasized women's chastity, and the financial burden of abortion led them to become unwed mothers, many of whom gave up their babies for adoption.

Lastly, children with disabilities or health challenges are more likely to be offered for inter-country adoption than domestic adoption. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, from 2018-2020, 1,025 infants were adopted domestically, with only 103 of them having a reported health condition. In contrast, during the same period, 852 children were placed for inter-country adoption with 341 of them having health issues. Historically, disability has been viewed as a moral problem, bringing disgrace to the family. Furthermore, these differences often instigate societal fear and discomfort. Therefore, it is considered the best for them to be removed from Korean society through adoption abroad.

Inter-country adoption has persisted in Korea for 70 years. If the government truly wants to terminate inter-country adoption, it needs to identify cultural and social barriers and develop a child welfare system indigenous to and appropriate for Korean culture. The system must recognize children of all backgrounds as relevant to the country and worthy of public assistance. Without this system in place, whenever "unfit" children are born, the Korean government will continue to look for quick solutions outside the country without making substantial efforts to solve them domestically. The result will be a continued legacy of perpetual dependency on inter-country adoption.


Ma Kyung-hee (kyungheem@daum.net) is a researcher and editor specializing in mental health.

The Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans, and Youth Rehabilitation has dismissed  a joint statement from human rights organisations requesting the governments of Cambodia and Italy to cease foreign adoption to avoid a revival of fraud that was common in previous adoption cases.

In a joint statement on Wednesday, four NGOs pleaded with the governments of Italy and Cambodia to halt initiatives that would reopen the international adoption market.

These non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were the Intercountry Adoptee Voices, the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association, and the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (Licadho).

These civil society organisations say that Cambodia stopped transnational adoption in 2009 after numerous reports of unethical acts related to adoption. Many countries banned adoption from Cambodia during the 2000s. But in recent months, Italy and Cambodia have begun to take steps to resume adoptions from Cambodia.

 Danish authorities helped deprive Greenlandic children of their identity through illegal adoptions before 1979. This is the opinion of a group of adopted children who will now demand compensation and an apology from Denmark.

Margrete Johansen found her biological mother in Greenland at the age of 39. Today, she is one of the adopted children who want to file a lawsuit against the Danish state for illegal adoption from Greenland.
 

There may well be another compensation case on the way against the Danish state. This time from a group of citizens who, as children, were adopted away from Greenlandic parents to Danish couples.

The group currently consists of seven people who want to file a case against Denmark for illegal adoptions from Greenland that took place before home rule was introduced.

New Delhi, Jul 2 (PTI) Women and Child Development Minister Smriti Irani on Sunday asked child welfare committees to visit child-care homes and review the cases of older children who could be made free for adoption as soon as possible.
    Many children living in child-care homes are not legally free for adoption.
    According to official figures, there are around 66,000 children residing in child-care homes across the country and less than 3,000 of them are legally free for adoption.
    Irani was speaking at a regional symposium on "Child Protection, Safety and Child Welfare" attended by child welfare committee members and officials from child-care institutions among others.
    The Union minister asked the child welfare committees to visit the child-care homes and review the cases of older children who could be made free for adoption at the earliest.
    Irani said the women and child development ministry has already reviewed two states, looked into 9,000 cases of older children and identified 164 such children who could be made legally free for adoption.
    She also asked the child-care homes to look into the infrastructure gaps in their areas and requested the apex child rights body -- the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights -- to review these gaps and present them to the ministry so that these can be brought up in the upcoming budget.
    Irani said the government will build up infrastructure to prevent child trafficking in the border areas.
    An online training module on the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, developed by the ministry in collaboration with the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (Mussoorie), was launched on the iGOT Karmayogi platform.
    The module aims at sensitisation and capacity building of all functionaries who need to be aware of the provisions of child safety, protection and welfare up to the village level.
    Irani also told the child welfare committees that the Centre will build offices for those that do not have one.
    She highlighted how seven lakh children across the country have been aided in nine years of the Modi government with the help of child-care institutions. She said about three lakh children who were declared missing have been reunited with their families in these nine years by District Child Protection Units and police administrations.

OPINION

Imagine this: You are a pre-schooler and through no fault of your own you cannot remain with your family.

You are placed into foster care and the carers are restricted from sharing images of you, including on social media or revealing any of your story. This is to protect your privacy, and to give you agency over your own story, including if, when and how you choose to tell it.

But what happens to those restrictions if, instead of remaining in care, you're adopted? They are no longer in place and your own story is now in the hands of your adopters. Can you see why this scenario could go badly?

Legal changes and global events have given rise to new challenges for the Family Justice System in England and Wales. At Children and Families Across Borders (CFAB) we experience these challenges first-hand in our work with lawyers, social workers, other professionals, and individuals who are navigating the complexities of cross-border cases involving children.

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CFAB was formerly known as ISS-UK, that is, the UK Branch of the International Social Service Network. The Network was established after the Second World War in response to the growing refugee crisis and huge numbers of children who were internationally displaced, giving rise to a need for cross-jurisdictional social work services to ensure their protection. CFAB now has partners in over 130 countries. Our partners include other ISS Network members, Central Authorities, statutory agencies, and charities. Importantly, in response to a rising demand for social work assessments from overseas, more and more of CFAB’s partners are independent social workers.

As children’s global connections change and grow, so too do the legal complexities associated with ensuring their protection and promoting their best interests. In response to this growing legal complexity, CFAB has developed a legal advice service. The service provides support and a range of resources to assist with child protection cases with an international dimension, as well as expert opinions on family law across the globe from our overseas legal partners. Arising out of this expansion, I will outline here some reflections on the legal and practice challenges we encounter at CFAB.