The baby market Type of document: News Topic: Normative and institutional framework Geographic descriptors: Kenya Language: English Source: www.eastandard.net/hm_news/news_is.php?articleid=1143952188 Date of publication: 08 May 2006 Long Abstract: The baby market Has adoption changed since its liberalisation? Dauti Kahura looks at what changes in law, five years ago, have meant for orphaned children in Kenya Five years after the Children’s Act was made into law in 2001, there has been a proliferation of unprecedented adoption services not witnessed in the country before. The Child Welfare Society of Kenya (CWSK), the oldest adoption organisation in the country, had been providing adoption services for the last 50 years, till 2001, when adoption services were liberalised by Cap 256 of the Act. The executive director of CWSK, Ms Irene Mureithi says the Act enabled many more organisations to handle adoption and they are seeking licences for the service. "Since then adoption has become a buzzword in non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) dealing with children," adds Mureithi. "Before the Children’s Act, CWSK was the only adoption society. Now we have 3,000 others trying to get registered." In Nairobi alone, there are more than 2,000 adoption homes. Because of the decentralisation of adoption services, a kind of commercialisation of adoption services has spurned unwittingly, she says. "Today, most of the children being adopted off are presumed ‘abandoned’, even though they actually maybe just lost children", says Mureithi. Inevitably, children’s homes have sprung all over the country that today only specialise in only "abandoned" children. "Unfortunately", states Ms Mureithi, "there are no efforts made to trace the parents of the so-called abandoned children." Thus even abducted children are termed abandoned, "and because of the way the law is framed, it tends to give tacit approval of children who could have been abandoned, abducted or even kidnapped" for easy adoption. Although CWSK does not have statistics to show how the adoptions trends have been taking shape since the enactment of the Children’s Act, the organisation believes that more than ever before children’s homes now go ahead to place children for adoption without following the proper procedure. They do so without the required documents such as a police letter showing that the police have been unable to trace the parents of the child in case of abandoned/lost children," says Ms Mureithi. The Director surmises that some Kenyan parents have also been tricked to give up their children for adoption to foreigners either living locally or abroad through material inducement. The Director argues that her international experience for example is that some unscrupulous foreign pharmaceutical companies allegedly send people to other countries to go and adopt children who are used as guinea pigs for testing drugs. "These conduits find their way to developing countries and sponsor Children’s homes so that it becomes easier to access these children," states Mureithi. She also observes that in the world of international paedophiles roaming countries with porous borders, such people could end up getting into contact with children in the numerous children’s homes. Mureithi’s argument has been that, no home should be allowed to let its sponsors adopt its children. "There have been cases where people running children’s homes adopt some of the very children in the same homes and leave the country with those children in questionable circumstances," she says. It is a fact today that human beings are trafficked for purposes of organ harvest, sexual exploitation, labour, and for using as guinea pigs in the race for HIV vaccine and other diseases. "We must guard our children from falling into the wrong hands who would end misusing them," says Ms Mureithi. Adoption is the process of placing a child in need of a family with a family in need of a child. It is both a legal and social process that provides a child with new legal parents. It also involves both the applicants and the children to be adopted. It severs the bond between a child and its natural parents and establishes a new permanent one with the adoptive parents. Adoption provides a lasting solution to a child without a family and is a better alternative to institutional care. The adoption arrangements should be guided by the best interest of the child and with respect to his or her fundamental rights. "People that qualify to adopt must be 25 years and over and are at least 21 years older than the child to be adopted, or are relatives of the child or are either the mother or father of the child," says CWSK Programme Officer Alphaxard Chabari. A court cannot make an adoption order in favour of the following persons (unless it is satisfied that the order merits special favour): a sole male applicant in respect of a female child; a sole female applicant in respect of a male child; an applicant or joint applicants who have attained the age of 65 years; and a sole foreign applicant. Yet there are those who do not qualify absolutely. They include: an applicant who is of unsound mind as per the definition of the Mental Health Act; an applicant who has been charged or convicted by a court of law, for any of the offences under the Penal Code, the Children’s Act and any other offences involving bodily injury; or a homosexual. Children who may be adopted include, any child who is resident in Kenya whether the child is a Kenyan citizen or was or was not born in Kenya provided that the child remains in the continuous care and control of the applicant within the country for three consecutive months preceding the filing of the application in court. Both the applicants have to be evaluated by an adoption society. Children who are adopted could have been abandoned or offered for adoption. Children are offered when the mother/parents who desire to have unborn babies adopted place them with CWSK for adoption. This process involves: 1. Interviewing the parent to get further information about their background. 2. An explanation to the mother of what the adoption process entails. 3. A counselling programme is tailored with the aim of exploring all the possibilities of the mother keeping the child. 4. After delivery, and if the mother still wishes to continue with offering the child for adoption, she is allowed six weeks to go and think about the whole issue and it is only after the six weeks that she is supposed to finally sign consent that the child can be adopted by another family. 5. If the mother happens to change her mind, she is encouraged to make arrangements for the care of the baby and then collect the baby. She signs a consent, which is then used as evidence in court that she wilfully surrendered the baby. A registrar of the high court, magistrate or advocate witnesses this consent. 6. The mother is encouraged to come and visit the social worker if she requires further counselling and can also be referred for further help. "Over 40 per cent of parents wishing to give away children for adoption actually reconsider their stance," notes the Programme Officer. In cases of abandoned children, the Programme officer says they should be reported to the police soonest possible." After 14 days, they are then referred to an institution which arranges for a care and protection order," says Chabari. The infant remains in the care of the institution for six months. If the police confirm in writing that the infant has remained unclaimed and its parents cannot be traced and the children’s department also confirms the same and recommend adoption. "CWSK then begins arrangements for fostering or adoption." People adopt children for various reasons the major one being the fact that they are unable to sire their own children. CWSK alone handles about 300-500 cases of adoption every year. "About 80 per cent of the people who want to adopt children from CWSK say they cannot have their own children," says Mureithi. "In the Africa culture, impotency and infertility were not celebrated virtues they are still not," notes Chabari. "That’s why, many of the people who adopt babies of between six weeks and 18 months will not openly discuss why they are adopting. Not being able to have your children is still considered to be a cultural taboo." The other set of people who adopt children are old (wealthy) couples whose children have gone their own way and have a need to fill their lonely void in their house. "This type of adopters will adopt any children as long as he or she is under 18 years." Another group of people who adopt children are Good Samaritans, who often time are the well-to-do senior citizens "whose consciousness tell them they must give back to society". International/inter country and interracial adoption was illegal in Kenya until the coming to force of the new Children’s Act (Cap 256) in 2001. (There was a major scandal involving children being adopted by couples in Germany shortly before this.) According to CWSK, the government should supervise all charitable organisations dealing with children. "The government’s role should be in ensuring standards by training and supervising the adoption officers from the NGOs," says Chabari. The children’s society argues that the country has seen a surge of inter-country adoptions in the last three to five years years. "Can the government for instance, account for the number of children who have been adopted by foreigners since the enactment of the Children’s Act?" pose CWSK officials. They point out that the Kenyan law leaves it to the discretion of the judge to order for follow up reports of the progress of the child from the destination country. For all the cases handled in the last three years, for example, less than five cases have been ordered to submit follow up reports back to Kenya on the progress of the child. The society reckons that for the last five years or so, Kenya has been sending children to other countries for adoption without regulations. The adoption regulations just came up in September last year. The Chief Justice’s rules are not out yet. "Still, these regulations are very important as they are supposed to cover the gaps that can be used in child trafficking," she says. The advantage of clear laws, rules and regulation make trafficking impossible and inter-country adoption possible to people who are really interested in helping out a child. Since inter-country adoption was allowed in this country in 2001, lawyers have been laughing all the way to the bank. This is according to a Nairobi lawyer, who deals in the adoption services. "Some charge as much as Sh300,000 to process one case. Some literally act as middlemen who bring adoptive parents from outside the country, introduce them to the children, represent them in court and process birth certificates for the children", said the lawyer who could not give his name for fear of a backlash from his colleagues and children’s homes that have turned adoption into a lucrative business. "Some have even started children’s homes or are in the management boards of homes that they facilitate adoptions from," she says. CWSK official concur with the lawyer and even point out that this state of affairs is known in the governmental circles. A recent report on adoption by United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Children (UNCRC), points out that instead of formal adoptions, informal foster care often takes place around the extended family system in Kenya, where relatives take care of cousins, nephews, nieces among others, for varying periods of time. The UN Committee expressed its concern that informal adoptions are more accepted and practiced than formal, and recommended the Kenyan government to strengthen the administrative procedures for formal domestic adoptions in order to prevent misuse of informal and private adoptions. Considering the increasing number of children without sufficient family support, the Committee also encouraged Kenya to establish an effective foster care programme and to ratify the 1993 Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Inter-country Adoption. Kenya has yet to ratify the Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoptions. Although the Hague Convention legitimises inter-country adoption as a means of providing a permanent family to a child "for whom a suitable family cannot be found in his or her state of origin," considerable debate about the role of inter-country adoption remains. Opponents of inter-country adoption argue that the practice exploits impoverished nations; robs children of the opportunity to be raised in their community of origin and identity; takes away resources that could be used to improve the lives of a larger number of children; and contributes to the problem of abduction, coercion and trafficking of children. Alternatively, supporters of inter-country adoption counter that the practice benefits children by removing them from the detrimental effects of growing up in institutional settings or on the streets by providing permanent families, helps children who might otherwise be marginalised in their societies as a result of illegitimacy or racial or ethnic difference; and provides them with families in a context where there is little evidence that the elimination or restriction of inter-country adoptions would remove the problems of poverty that contribute to the abandonment of children. The Hague Convention was created to address a large number of abuses that had come to light in the 1980s, by establishing a legal framework for the arrangement and formalisation of inter-country adoptions The Hague Convention deviates from the UN Declaration and CRC in that it sets out in the preamble a "hierarchy of options" believed to safeguard the long-term "best interests" of the child. These include preference for family solutions (return to birth family, foster care, adoption) rather than institutional placement, permanent solutions (return to birth family, adoption) rather than provisional ones (institutional placement, foster care), and national solutions (return to birth family, national adoption) rather than international ones. However, the Hague Convention only applies to countries that have ratified it and thereby are parties to it. As of 2004, only 46 countries had ratified the Hague Convention.

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Boy says yes to adoption

Standing in front of Douglas County Juvenile Court Judge Elizabeth Crnkovich, the 12-year-old stood inches taller Friday than he was the last time he appeared before her 2½ months ago.

His early-stage Mohawk was gone, replaced by short-cropped hair. He wore size 8½ Nike Flight sneakers. His right arm, broken on a church trip to a haunted farm over Halloween, hung from a sling.

Yet, to the judge, the adoption hearing felt like déjà vu.

“It’s kind of like we’ve been here before,” Crnkovich said as she considered a permanent home in Lincoln for the last of the Staton children — the nine children left by their father at Creighton University Medical Center on Sept. 24, 2008, under the state’s former safe haven law.

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The children were among 36 left at hospitals when the law had no age limit on children who could be left by adults without fear of prosecution. It has since been limited to newborns.

On Aug. 18, the boy cried and choked out his words to Crnkovich: “I don’t want to get adopted today.” So the judge held up his adoption by his great-aunt, nicknamed Aunt Tiny, while approving her petition to adopt six of his siblings.

In May, an Omaha foster mother was named legal guardian of two older brothers.

Friday was the 12-year-old’s turn.

Aunt Tiny testified that the sixth-grader was doing well medically, socially and academically and that she loved him like her own child.

Tom Incontro, the boy’s guardian ad litem, said he is doing very well.

The judge looked at the Staton child and told him it’s hard to stand out when you’re from a big family, adding that she knows this personally as the seventh of eight children in her own family.

“I find it in the best interest of this young man … that he be adopted,” Crnkovich said. “And it is so ordered. Hooray!”

The hearing also marked this milestone: ending the court’s jurisdiction over the Staton children.

Crnkovich handed the boy a congratulations card and six others like it for his siblings.

In the lobby, the child reached for his great-aunt, who at 4-feet-11 is now shorter than he is. He placed his arm around Aunt Tiny’s shoulder, smiled and asked about their celebration plans.

“So. What are we going to do, Mom?”

Contact the writer:

444-1136, erin.grace@owh.com

Xin Yi Date of Birth: Gender: Special Need: Location: Entered Center: Last Update:Sept. 1, 2008 Male Pneumonia Siping Center December 3, 2008 June 2009 Xi Yi was very ill with pneumonia when he arrived at the orphanage on December 3, 2008.

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The Observer (Kampala)
Uganda: Adoption is Now the Rage in Uganda
Moses Talemwa
11 November 2009

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A fight to change adoption law 
 

A group of expats in Seoul are driving a movement to create a major shift in how the country deals with adoptions. With Democratic Party Representative Choi Young-hee, the coalition presented its bill to revise the current Special Act Relating to Adoption Promotion and Procedure law at a National Assembly public hearing on Nov. 10. [Photo by Marc Champod]

Leveraging the help of a group of lawyers and a Korean unwed mothers' organization, a group of expats in Seoul are driving a movement to create a major shift in how the country deals with adoptions.
With the support of Democratic Party Representative Choi Young-hee, this coalition presented its bill to revise the current Special Act Relating to Adoption Promotion and Procedure law at a National Assembly public hearing on Nov. 10.
The coalition has been working together for over a year to draw up a proposal for a new adoption law. Involved are three adoption-related groups - Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoptee Community of Korea (TRACK), Adoptee Solidarity Korea, KoRoot - an unwed mothers group, Miss Mama Mia, and the Gonggam Public Interest Lawyers Group.
What initially began last year as a request to the Anti-corruption and Civil Rights Commission for a probe into cases of allegedly inaccurate or falsified adoption records has expanded into a movement that could change the course of Korea's adoption program.
So Ra Mi, the Gonggam lawyers' group representative, said that while the probe failed to "correct the wrongdoings of the past," she wanted to "help change the present and future" of Korean adoption. 
 

 
Korea has a long history of international adoption. According to the Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Family Affairs, since 1958 over 160,000 children have been sent abroad for adoption. Other estimates put the figure closer to 200,000, due to the many unrecorded adoptions performed in the years before 1958. Inter-country adoption began in Korea during the 1950s after the Korean War, initiated as an effort to help children orphaned by the war and children born to Korean mothers and U.N. coalition fathers.
The adoption program, however, quickly became what critics now say has been a substitute for any real government-level social welfare programs for children.
Adoption rates steadily grew throughout the 1980s, long after war orphans ceased needing homes. It wasn't until the 1988 Olympics in Korea that adoption rates fell, due to a wave of international media dubbing Korea a "baby exporting nation." This stigmatized reputation still holds today, as does Korea's inter-country adoption program that last year sent more than 1,000 children overseas.
Now those who were adopted abroad have returned to change the very program that sent them away.
Although Korea ranks as the fifth-largest "sending" country of international adoption - behind China, Guatemala, Russia, and Ethiopia - it has never ratified the Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption, nor does it meet the international standards of the U.N. Convention of the Rights of the Child.
The government has been maneuvering in what seems like steps address the issue. In recent years, task forces were created to research and propose revisions to adoption laws. But critics point out that these government task forces didn't originally include any adoptee organizations or single mothers groups, the groups that would be intimately affected by such changes.
TRACK president Jane Jeong Trenka believes that these groups are a valuable voice in the discussion. "It is significant that our bill has been written by a coalition of concerned Korean citizens and diasporic Koreans, international adoptees, and single Korean mothers who will reap absolutely no economic, professional, or social benefit from continuing the adoption system as it has been practiced in the past. Instead, we look forward to meeting international standards of human rights and justice," said Trenka.
Focus on families, unwed mothers
One of the biggest differences in the new bill that the coalition hopes to make into law is taking the focus away from promoting adoption. Instead, more emphasis would be placed on the preservation and support of original families.
According to Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Family Affairs statistics on adoption, 90 percent of children who are adopted, both internationally and domestically, are children of single mothers. This is indicative of the strong social stigma that unwed mothers face, as well as the lack of financial support from the government should they choose to keep their children.
Currently, single mothers who apply for government assistance can receive only 50,000 won per month ($43), based on whether or not they meet low-income stipulations. During the open floor portion of this week's public hearing, a member from the unwed mothers group Miss Mama Mia questioned the seemingly preferential treatment for adoptive families over single mothers. She raised the point that families who adopt domestically within Korea are able to receive 100,000 won per month in government assistance, with no low-income stipulations, versus the 50,000 won that is provided to unwed mothers.
The discrepancy points to a clear case of institutionalized discrimination against unwed mothers, says the group.
The central government's concern over the plummeting birth rate, and its policies on adoption and social spending for women and children, seems contradictory. Because Korea's birth rate is the lowest of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, the government has taken great strides to promote an increase in the birth rate; there are government incentives for families with multiple children, supporting childcare, and education subsidies.
Skeptics say it seems counterproductive, then, that the government is doing little to keep children already here, born to single mothers, in the country. When interviewed about her reasons for spearheading the adoptee coalition's bill, Rep. Choi told Expat Living that more needs to be done to support unwed mothers.
"The government is urging people to have children, but on the other hand, isn't supporting the children of unwed mothers ... it shouldn't just be about encouraging more babies but to also raise well the babies already born ... the most important thing is these babies are not just the children of single mothers, but they are all of our children," she said.
There is a general consensus that giving more adequate support to single mothers would go a long way in both stemming the country's low birth rate and creating a more ethical environment in adoption procedures.
Park, Min-ji, a representative from Miss Mama Mia, spoke during the hearing and gave examples of policies in other advanced countries, such as France, Sweden, Germany and the United States, that have increased the birthrate and helped single mothers keep their children. "In reality, unwed mothers are forced to choose adoption, for lack of another option. Therefore, I think there should be policy measures created to support single mothers," she said.
Her thoughts were echoed by Yang Jung-ja, director of the Korea Family Legal Service Center. Yang spoke above France's success in increasing their birthrate though government support for single mothers or unmarried couples. "In the past, France had the lowest birthrate in the world, but now it has the highest rate in Europe ... 52 percent of its children are born out-of-wedlock but they still get government support."
Miss Mama Mia representative Park also indicated a need for government-sponsored counseling for single mothers during and after their pregnancies. "Adoption agencies pressure you to give up your child ... they don't offer counseling on how to raise your child ... I believe that the goal is to get the mother to give up the baby.
"(Adoption) agencies should not be the first and only ones to provide counseling; there should be a neutral government agency," Park said.
These cases bring up obvious red flags over the questionable ties between unwed mothers' homes and adoption agencies. All four of the major adoption agencies in Korea operate their own unwed mothers' homes, a practice critics have labeled "baby farming."
Park said she was pressured to relinquish her son for adoption within six hours of giving birth. She later retracted her decision to relinquish and had to go through great measures to get her son back. Other mothers like her, she recounted, were forced to pay fees to the agencies for each day that the child stayed in their facilities in order to get their children back.
Park says it's not right that agencies ask mothers to make a decision about adoption so soon after giving birth. "This is not a time when a mother is able to make an informed decision."
In Korea, there are currently no regulations on the timeline of a mother's consent to adoption. The coalition's revisions would include a stipulation that consent from a mother is not valid until 30 days after the birth of the child, giving the mother ample time to get counseling about parenting resources and to understand the all of the implications of such a weighty decision. It also would include an extension on the time period that mothers are able to retract their decision.
Bringing the time period to 30 days would bring Korea up to international standards.
Ethical adoption procedures
International adoption standards aside, there is also a lack of clear national regulations, which can create questions of ethics in adoption agencies' procedures. Adoption agencies here run essentially as private organizations with little to no interference from the government. It is a troubling fact, given that their line of work deals with the welfare of the country's most vulnerable citizens - children.
According to the new bill, agencies would be required to keep accurate records during the entire adoption process. Some of the most common complaints of returning adoptees include a lack of access to adoption records and discrepancies between the adoption records that they are given and the records that are kept at agencies. In the past, these discrepancies have occurred due to a lack of administrative standards or intentional falsification. In her speech, Trenka gave a list of eight types of these abuses, documented by TRACK in real-life cases.
One of these, for example, is a falsified "orphan hojuk." According to the adoption laws of many of the countries where children are sent, the child must be an orphan to be adopted. In order to create the illusion that the child was in fact an orphan - even in cases where children did have families and may have even appeared on their family hojuk (registry) - agencies created "orphan hojuks" to indicate that the child had no family, which is a falsification of a legal document. Trenka says her own case shows multiple examples of these abuses by adoption agencies.
Trenka states that while adoptions may look legal on paper, falsification of records to facilitate adoptions is what prof. David Smolin, an academic expert on international adoption, calls, "child laundering," where children are obtained or sent under false pretenses, but processed to have "legal" adoption papers.
When adoptees come searching for their personal information, these fragmented or inaccurate records make it nearly impossible to track down biological family; the current rate of success is a mere 2.7 percent. Adoption agencies often use the privacy rights of the parent as a reason why information may not be disclosed, but unethical practices in the past may be another motivation to keep adoptees in the dark. The new adoption law proposed by the coalition would require the agencies to surrender all information, excluding any identifying personal information of the parent. In order to enforce the accuracy of adoption records and access to them, the new adoption law proposal stipulates that a central authority should be run by the government. This central authority would house all adoption records, give assistance to adoptees in birth-family searches, and be a watchdog of adoption agencies.
Other parts of the proposal include lowering the age that a child can give their consent to an adoption from 15 to 13 years of age, granting adoptees the right to keep their Korean citizenship, parenting education for prospective adoptive parents to prevent disrupted adoptions, and mandatory birth registration regulations to prevent child trafficking and secret domestic adoptions.
Currently Korea has no law regarding birth registration, so 97 percent of domestic adoption is done in secret, with adoptive parents listing the child as their biological child.
In an interview, Eun Sung-ho, the director of the Family Support Division in the Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Family Affairs emphasized the government's commitment to revamping the country's adoption laws, stating continued talks and plans for another public hearing on the subject by the end of this year. He said it was a priority for his department to promote a bill that makes the adoption procedures more transparent and fair, while preventing cases of disrupted adoptions. "We have to make it a priority to raise Korean children in Korea."
Rep. Choi said that she anticipates some opposition to the bill, which could hit the floor of the National Assembly next year, from proponents of international adoption, such as adoption agencies and prospective adoptive parents, and from those who think that making birth registration mandatory will discourage domestic adoption.
This is Rep. Choi's first time working with a foreign community group, but said that she appreciates when foreign groups want to work to make positive changes in Korean society. She encourages foreign groups who are compelled to activism. "If there is a problem that can affect the relationship between Korea and other countries, it's important to work together to make changes ... not everything can be changed by laws, but when we change laws, we began to change society."
ASK representative Kim Stoker said it's important that expats speak up. "As a foreigner, people might wonder why I'd be interested in changing legislation in Korea. Well, I am a foreigner ... (and) even though I don't hold Korean citizenship, I have lived in this country for more than 10 years. Once I heard that the Special Adoption Law in Korea was going to be revised ... I knew that we as a community living here in Korea had to be involved. Our voices needed to be heard."
For more information, visit the groups' websites: www.adoptionjustice.com or www.adopteesolidarity.org
For non-Koreans who are interested in other forms of social activism, the Seoul Global Center offers free legal counsel Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 2-5 p.m. You can also visit the website http://global.seoul.go.kr or call the hotline at 02-1688-0120.
(shannon.sgc@gmail.com)
By Shannon Heit