In their book '(Un)wanted: The Complex Reality Behind the Adoption Fairytale', Ae Ra Van Geel and Kiran Van der Avert describe the often conflicting interests and emotions that adoption entails. Although the end of transnational adoption seems near, they view a definitive adoption freeze as merely the beginning. “The impact of adoption does not stop when you arrive in our country and end up in the adoptive family here.”

© ID / Sebastiaan Franco

At least 23,000

Today, there are at least 23,000 transnational adoptees in our country – we do not know the exact number because the number of adoptions has only been properly recorded in recent years. Many of them need help. They have questions about their origins, family, relationships, and identity. They wish to travel back to their country of origin or face psychosocial challenges linked to their adoption, where current support services fall short.

https://www.beobachter.ch/gesellschaft/wie-terre-des-hommes-babys-fur-experimente-missbrauchte

Before leaving India, we sat down with the tour members for India Ties Kolkata and asked them what the journey was like for them - what made them travel with Ties, how the trip has impacted their relationships to themselves and their families and if they would recommend a Ties tour to anyone considering it. Excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Michelle, adoptee: It's been a couple of years that I've been wanting to go back. I turned 40 and I finished my studies and I lost my job all at the same time - it just seemed like a perfect moment to do something for me, to take some time for me, and maybe to redefine, think about who I am. And I realized that in order to do that, I needed to know a little bit more about where I came from.  And it just felt like a right time. I mean, there's never a right time: I've got two kids, got a lot going on, never a right time. But the more and more I thought about it, the more and more I thought the time is now.

What impact has this trip had on how you see yourself, your identity, or your story?

Lizzie, adoptee:  This trip has given me more of a sense of pride in who I am. I feel like visiting this country has been so important to me. I've wanted to do it for a long time.  I used to feel a lot of shame about being Indian or being born in India. I had maybe a negative impression of India growing up. I didn't know a lot about India growing up, and I had false impressions about India growing up. But by taking this trip and visiting my birthplace, as well as other cities in this country, exposed me to so many things I didn't know about India, and I've learned a lot about this country. I'm very happy that I took this trip.

The Government must provide an unqualified formal apology to all those affected by historical forced adoption in the UK, the cross-party Education Committee recommends in a report launched today.

Ministers should provide an initial commitment to an apology, begin working with survivor groups as quickly as possible, and commit publicly to a clear timetable for developing and issuing its apology, MPs say.

It should work directly with mothers, adult adoptees and lived-experience organisations to co-author the apology and any subsequent commitments.  

The Chairs of the Education Committee and the Joint Committee on Human Rights have also jointly signed a letter to the Education Secretary, published today, which highlights the recommendations made in the Education Committee’s report and calls for the Government to act urgently. 

The Gujarat High Court recently paved way for the adoption and immigration process of twin children who had been adopted by their Australia-based uncle and his wife after the twins' mother had passed away.The Petitioners were facing difficulty as the State of Victoria, where they reside, was not accepting applications to adopt a child from India that are completed under the Hindu Adoptions...

https://www.livelaw.in/high-court/gujarat-high-court/gujarat-high-court-adoption-minors-australia-immigration-528039

elow you can read more about the purpose, applicant pool, target group, deadlines and more for the pool.

Distributed subsidies

See an overview of distributed subsidies here

Application deadline

March 12, 2026 at 11:59 PM

The video, widely shared on Facebook, shows a man scolding a young girl for locking her bedroom door, insisting it is “his house.” While the relationship between the two is unclear, the footage has sparked public outrage and drawn attention to deeper issues surrounding child protection.

The incident echoes findings which highlighted the plight of nearly 1,000 Samoan children adopted abroad each year. According to the report, some of these children have been subjected to forced labour, physical violence, and sexual abuse in the very homes meant to care for them.

Kris Teikamata, a frontline social worker with Oranga Tamariki in New Zealand, said she worked with multiple survivors between 2019 and 2024. Many described years of abuse and control.

“They were threatened, coerced and had no freedom,” Teikamata told the media in New Zealand. “By the time I met them at 17 or 18, they appeared emotionally withdrawn, as if they had lived decades of trauma.”

In some cases, children were promised education and better opportunities, but were instead forced into domestic labour from an early age. As teenagers, some were sent to work in factories, with wages withheld and limited contact with their families in Samoa.

Two Korean Americans from the Midwest, one from Minnesota and one from Chicago, are leading up a small organization with a big job.  The newly-formed U.S. Korean Rights Group (USKRG) is a group of Korean American adoptees who will dialogue with South Korean government as part of a global coalition of Korean adoptees from many countries.

The coalition has a common goal, to seek reconciliation and restitution from the South Korean government for widespread international adoption records fraud, and to change policies and laws in both the U.S. and South Korea that will streamline Korean adoptees’ access to their own adoption records in the future. 

As many as 200,000 adopted children who were born overseas are now at risk of detention or deportation by the Trump administration because they never received U.S. citizenship, lawyers say.

Over the past 80 years, American parents have adopted a total of more than 500,000 children from abroad — some kidnapped from their biological parents by unscrupulous adoption agencies.

But some of those parents never got around to actually obtaining citizenship for their children, leaving tens of thousands who have spent almost their entire lives in the U.S. but have no legal status.

"Most immigrants know from the very beginning what they have to do to gain legal status, but many adoptees have never questioned whether or not they have it, until now," Minnesota-based family law attorney Mónica Dooner Lindgren told The New York Times in a recent report shedding light on the problem.

According to the United States Department of State, intercountry adoptees are 3.6 times more likely to die by suicide than non-adopted peers. For transgender adoptees, that weight is more than fourteen times heavier. Since 1999, more than 6,800 Indian children have been adopted by American families. These are not just statistics. Almost no social science research exists on what becomes of them.

We conducted extended interviews with several Indian adoptees living in the United States and Europe—mostly women, with two men, between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five. They are professionals, many raising families of their own. But each carries, beneath the surface of a functional life, a wound the rescue stories never accounted for.

They call themselves Indian in spite of being asked to shed it. The Indian identity is what they have spent their lives trying to reclaim.

“India Never Left My Body”

Rupa Ryan was two years old when she left India in 1985, adopted from the Green House orphanage in Patna and flown to Minneapolis. She traveled with a group of children from different parts of India—none familiar to her.