Panaji: A total of 330 parents in Goa are on the wait-list for adoption as on date, women and child development minister Vishwajit Rane told the assembly in reply to a question by Benaulim MLA Venzy Viegas.

Over the past five years, 77 children — from 2-month-olds to 15-year-olds — have been adopted from Goa by parents from Goa and other states.

Nineteen out of the 77 children were given in adoption to parents in Goa and the rest to parents in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Bengal, Telangana, Rajasthan, New Delhi and even US through inter-country adoption.

During this same period, 55 older children, mostly teenagers, were taken under foster care by foster parents. Over the past five years, however, 12 older children given under foster care were returned and five children given for adoption were returned.

The reasons given for returning foster children ranged from the child and foster parents not being able to adjust with each other, the foster parent not willing to continue to take care of the child, the child not able to adjust and not ready to stay with foster parents, the child not being able to bond with the foster mother and behavioural and discipline issues of the child.

In the case of the five adopted children who were returned over the past five years, the reasons ranged from the adoptive parents not able to adjust, the parents backing out feeling incompetent, problematic child behaviour, child emotionally attached to old friends and no bonding between child and adoptive mother.

Older foster children are mostly those who have lived in child care institutions their whole life and often find it difficult to adjust to a family set up, a stakeholder said.

Paula Beer was just 17 when she fell pregnant.

Afraid to tell her parents, she hid her pregnancy and travelled from her hometown of Bridgend to Essex to stay with her aunt.

At seven months pregnant, she decided to give her baby up for adoption.

After giving birth in February 1967, Paula spent just three days with her little boy before he was taken away.

Paula had been working in a grocery shop when she found out she was pregnant.

John Portmann (61) believes he is first to use modern technology to prove that he is entitled to an Irish passport

An academic in the United States who discovered his 100 per cent Irish ancestry following a DNA test has been awarded Irish citizenship.

John Portmann (61), who was adopted and unaware of his heritage, was granted an Irish passport after proving that his biological father Thomas Fitzgerald was from Dublin and his biological mother Térese Delahanty’s family was originally from Co Kilkenny.

Prof Portmann believes that he is the first person to gain Irish citizenship solely on the outcome of a DNA test.

Prof Portmann is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and the author of several books. He was born on June 6th, 1963 in Phoenix, Arizona into the care of the Sisters of Mercy nuns in the city.

Description

Our project

200,000 is the number of Korean children who have been adopted since the end of the Korean War in 1953. For several years now, the voices of Korean adoptees around the world have been heard and their testimonies agree to paint a picture of a flawed international adoption system . Between demands and recognition of illegal procedures, Korean adoptees are now demanding compensation from the responsible states.    

Among these states, Belgium. Despite its small size, our country has welcomed nearly 3,700 Korean adoptees , which ranks it 7th in the world in terms of the number of Korean children welcomed. This relatively high number of adoptions obviously raises questions: in what circumstances did they take place? To what extent was the Belgian government aware of what was happening on its soil, and what is its responsibility for the scale of the phenomenon? 

Fliss and Memet Demir are travelling to the Ukrainian capital, where a surrogate mother is due to deliver the child

They have been warned not to make the trip from their home in Cambridgeshire

Friday June 07 2024, 11.30pm, The Times

Like any expectant mother with a baby due in a few weeks, Fliss Demir is packing sleepsuits, nappies, infant formula and wipes.

But her excitement and trepidation are tempered by fear, for Demir and her husband, Memet, are travelling to war-torn Ukraine to pick up their surrogate infant.

Louise and Paul's daughter was left at a hospital when she was just one day old

Louise Timmins, 49, adopted daughter Marika in Nepal in 2011 - almost six years after starting the process. She tells us about the long journey, and how life has changed since her daughter's arrival.

Drinking my coffee, I listened to my colleague Rachel describing children’s homes filled with orphaned babies in Nepal. It upset me to think of children in need of love, particularly as I wanted nothing more than to hold a baby in my arms.

It was early 2005 and I’d met Rachel through my role as Fundraising Manager for The Leprosy Mission in Peterborough, as she and her husband ran the charity’s specialist hospital in Anandaban, Nepal.

Now they were visiting the UK as part of their work, and I’d confided in Rachel about how my husband Paul and I had endured six heartbreaking years of fertility issues and devastating early miscarriages due to me having polycystic ovary syndrome.

Mumbai: A sperm or egg donor has no legal right on the child and cannot claim to be its biological parent, the Bombay High Court held on Tuesday while allowing a 42-year-old woman visitation rights to her five-year-old twin daughters.
 

The woman, in her plea, said her daughters, born via surrogacy, were living with her husband and younger sister, who was the egg donor.

The petitioner's husband had claimed since his sister-in-law was the egg donor, she had a legitimate right to be called a biological parent of the twins and that his wife had no right over them.

A single bench of Justice Milind Jadhav, however, refused to accept this contention, citing that though the petitioner's younger sister was the egg donor, she has no legitimate right to claim that she is a biological parent of the twins.

The court said the role of the younger sister is that of an egg donor, rather, a voluntary donor, and at the most, she may qualify to be a genetic mother and nothing more.

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The liberal leader Valeriu Stoica, nicknamed by the media "the baron of illegal adoptions", should shed light on the disappearance from the archives of the authorized institutions, between 1997 and 2000, of hundreds of adoption documents. Valeriu Stoica must publicly declare the destination of the children entrusted for adoption and the reason why they no longer appear, for more than suspicious reasons, in any database.

PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES

Sittings of the Chamber of Deputies of March 23, 2004

March 23, 2004

The news of the day

otherwise, the former PNL president threatening legal action. In the PSD press release of March 19, the former president of the PNL is accused of involvement in illegal international adoptions, being called "the baron of adoptions".

Valeriu Stoica, former Minister of Justice, rejects the accusation, calling it a lie and asks PSD president Adrian Năstase to apologize within 48 hours.