Mie Lee Hansen, now 38 years old and living in Denmark, thought she knew the story of her adoption and the family that gave her away. She had documents that offered convincing information about her Korean background, including the fact that she had two older sisters.
After taking a DNA test, she was reconnected with a Korean relative — but the story she learned from this long-lost relative differed radically from what was in those files.
“The real story is that when my mother went into labor, she was rushed to the hospital,” Lee said. “She gave birth, and after she recovered and requested to see her baby, she was told that the baby was stillborn. The day after my mother went home, my maternal grandmother returned to the hospital to claim my body. But the doctors told her to go home and became angry with her.”
Needless to say, her family was shocked to learn that she was very much alive.
“When my Korean family read my adoption file, they said, 'Everything here is fake.' The file had their names and the city we lived in, and it was true that I had two older sisters. But everything else was false. Birth parents never gave permission for me to be adopted. Somebody took their child. Somebody stole me,” Lee said.
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Tens of thousands of abandoned children were adopted internationally between 1990 and 2004. Many of them are trying to understand their roots but their search can be overwhelming as the Romanian state still hasn’t recognized it has failed to protect them.
I’ve made a habit out of checking The never forgotten Romanian children Facebook group and other similar groups whose shared mission is to reconnect adopted children with their birth families. I read through the discussions of Romanians scattered all over the world, united in their desire to know about the lives they had before they joined the ranks of the more than 30,000 who left the country with their adoptive parents.
“Greetings from Canada”, “Hello from Italy”, “Hi from France” write young people aged between 20 and 40 who are seeking for their roots. They post photos from their childhood and current photos of themselves hoping some relative or some neighbor might recognize them. Many say they have been brought up by wonderful families and are grateful to have grown up abroad; but they’re missing their story at home.
Switzerland is under scrutiny for fraudulently rehoming thousands of babies. The failures go back further than previously understoodThis story was initially published with our partner, New Lines magazine.
When Paul Harwood, a founding member of the Central Intelligence Agency, relocated to Paris from Vietnam, he was keen to expand his family. It was 1961, the Berlin Wall was about to go up and Europe was embroiled in a Cold War crisis, keeping Harwood and his fellow agents on their toes. But besides his undercover work at the U.S. Embassy, Harwood was on a more personal mission: He and his wife, Mary Ellen, were trying to adopt a baby girl.
They ended up using an agency run by a Swiss welfare worker named Alice Honegger. Harwood welcomed her assistant to his apartment on the top floor of an older house in central Paris. A staircase led up to a room ready for a child, reachable via a gallery and complete with its own bathroom.
“Mr. and Mrs. Harwood are extremely likable people, kind, very calm, and I don’t see them as typical Americans at all,” reads the report she wrote for Honegger in St. Gallen, a canton in the country’s northeast near the blue-green waters of Lake Constance. “They are both of medium height, with brown eyes and brown hair.” The Harwoods wanted a girl to complement the little boy they had previously adopted in the United States.
On Aug. 2, 1962, the couple received a letter from Honegger’s agency with the news they had spent years agonizingly waiting for: a “very handsome” little girl of Italian nationality who was a perfect match for them, with the same color of hair and eyes. She added that the child’s expatriation papers were still missing but assured the new parents she would urge the birth mother and the Italian authorities to send what was necessary.
The baby arrived in France in November of that year and, by 1963, had been named Ann Elisabeth Harwood, according to her adoption papers. A few days after her arrival, Honegger wrote to the Harwoods asking them to stay in touch through the child’s development and to thank them for a future donation which would allow the agency to continue its work protecting “abandoned mothers and children.”
Throughout her nearly 50-year career, Honegger was keen to portray her work in an altruistic light, with the feelings of outcast women her main priority. But in actuality, she capitalized on the desperation of pregnant women with few options, coaxing, cajoling and sometimes simply stealing their babies to place them with affluent Americans. Among her clients were spies, diplomats and alleged criminals.
Switzerland’s past and present adoption system is under scrutiny following government-commissioned investigations that showed how thousands of children from at least 10 countries were fraudulently adopted between the 1970s and 1990s. The 2023 report shows that Swiss authorities were aware of the practices of child trafficking, falsification of documents and false indications of origin regarding children from Bangladesh, Brazil, India and elsewhere.
Our two-year investigation shows how Honegger cut her teeth exporting the children of migrant women and perfected her modus operandi for intercountry adoptions, setting the standards for this illicit and morally questionable industry. We reveal how her dubious practices date back much earlier than previously understood, to the late 1940s, leaving a legacy of distrust among the adoptees — including Harwood’s daughter, who, at 62, only recently discovered her true origin story.
By piecing together archival material in Switzerland, Canada and the U.S., interviews with adoption center workers, researchers and adoptees, and Honegger’s official correspondence obtained by archival requests, New Lines and Investigate Europe have found evidence that Honegger placed at least 2,000 babies with families until the 1970s and expanded her network to other parts of the world.
“Alice Honegger was very interested in having power over human beings,” journalist and researcher Sabine Bitter — who was commissioned by several Swiss cantons to investigate international adoptions and the activity of agents like Honegger — told New Lines. “She notoriously ignored the law and set her own rules.”
Honegger was first connected to illegal adoptions in 2017, some 20 years after she died. That year, the St. Gallen canton issued a report saying that up to 70% of the 750 adoptions of Sri Lankan children sent to Switzerland from the late 1970s to the 1990s were illegal. The report sent shockwaves across the Swiss adoption industry.
Today, adopted people from the 1950s and ‘60s are looking for answers. They want to know the truth about their adoption. They want to discover their birth parents and understand who is responsible for their lives.
A photograph of Ann Elisabeth Harwood, later Lisa Helmick, as a toddler.Courtesy of Lisa Helmick
In March 2022, while standing in line in a downtown store in Bassano del Grappa, my hometown in northeastern Italy, I met the Harwoods’ adopted daughter. She heard my Canadian partner’s accent and introduced herself as Lisa Helmick, a fellow North American but with an Italian mother from Bassano del Grappa. We got to talking and later had a drink together, when she told me how she was adopted by an American family and had recently found her birth family.
Her name is Ann Elisabeth, “but everyone calls me Lisa,” she said, explaining how her father was in the CIA. I had just become a mother myself and Helmick’s story seemed the opposite of mine: While I had come back to Bassano del Grappa from Sarajevo to deliver my baby, Helmick’s mother Aurora had departed Bassano del Grappa to give birth abroad to her only child.
Helmick had just moved to Bassano del Grappa with her husband to reconnect with her birth family, settling into a centrally located apartment with exposed wooden beams. “I’m trying to catch up with the time I’ve lost in the past 60 years,” she told me.
She always knew she was adopted but had been told by her parents that her mother was too poor to care for her. In 1999, when Helmick was training in Virginia to become a teacher, her father Paul died. “Everybody at his funeral thought he was working for the State Department,” Helmick’s husband Jeff tells me. Harwood didn’t reveal much about his job and past. Details of his daughter Lisa’s story were among his secrets.
But he left her some documents in a safe-deposit box in the bank. They detailed, in English and French, information about her adoption on onionskin paper with a large red wax stamp of the law firm that formalized the adoption in 1963. “When I opened up the envelope, it was amazing because a sentence stated my mother’s name, the town she was from and that I was named after her. So it was a shock. It was a surprise.”
For the first time, Helmick read the name of her birth mother, but she didn’t believe it was real. “I thought it was like Jane Doe protecting privacy. Well, because the names were the same,” she says. Confusing Helmick further was the fact that the mother and the daughter had the exact same name, Aurora Gramatica. The only detail that stayed in her mind was the Italian woman’s hometown, Bassano del Grappa. It was the initial element for searching for her birth family. But that’s not what happened.
“It was not the right moment,” Helmick explained. The 9/11 attacks happened shortly afterward and Jeff, as a colonel in the U.S. Army, had to go to the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan. “I folded the documents up and I had three kids to raise.” Seventeen years passed before she began her search. “Had I done this a little earlier, I would have been able to talk to my mother,” she said, her words tinged with regret.
Life imprisonment still exists, all families who have lost a child will be able to tell you about it.
Anyone who is now at least 40 years old remembers what they were doing the day Julie and Melissa's bodies were found, fourteen months after their disappearance. This legal case, which already had the country on tenterhooks, then plunged a little deeper into horror . It traumatized an entire country like no other had probably done before it, mixing the shameful dysfunctions between the gendarmerie and the police with the doubts and bottomless pain of the parents of the two girls; their lives were then irremediably plunged into an endless nightmare. Life imprisonment still exists, all the families who have lost a child will be able to tell you about it.
The Karnataka High Court was considering a Writ Petition seeking direction to the Central Adoption Resource Agency to allow the mother to adopt her minor child.
The Karnataka High Court has allowed adoption of a minor child by mother and step-father after the biological father failed to take a definitive stance on the issue in the Court, construing it as his approval.
The Court was considering a Writ Petition seeking direction to the Central Adoption Resource Agency to allow the mother to adopt her minor child.
The single judge bench of Justice BM Shyam Prasad observed, "...this Court is also of the view that if the inference is not drawn with the fifth respondent not taking a stand despite opportunity, the minor, who is keen to go in adoption with the petitioners with whom he is living, could lose the advantage of belonging to the family completely with all consequences that would be."
The Petitioner was represented by Advocate Sharanadeep while the Respondent was represented by Additional Solicitor General Arvind Kamath.
Couples were charged around Rs 30 lakh for the process, purportedly meant for the surrogate. However, the probe revealed that in several cases, the children handed over were not biologically related to the commissioning parents.
The Enforcement Directorate has unearthed a massive illegal surrogacy and child trafficking racket in Hyderabad, where a fertility centre supplied babies not biologically related to couples opting for surrogacy. These babies were taken from poor and vulnerable pregnant women, lured into giving up their newborns immediately after childbirth.
Acting under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002, the agency carried out search operations on September 25 at nine locations across Hyderabad, Vijayawada, and Visakhapatnam.
The searches at the Universal Srusthi Fertility and Research Centre, allegedly run by Dr Pachipalli Namratha, also known as Athluri Namratha led to the seizure of incriminating documents exposing the large-scale fraud, including records of couples who were allegedly defrauded and details of properties amassed by Namratha.
A three-month-old girl was reunited with her biological parents in Tripura’s Gomati district after police and childline officials foiled an alleged unlawful adoption attempt in Karbook subdivision.
Officials said the infant’s parents, Kanchan Chakma and Santana Chakma, handed her over to a childless couple from Madhumag para. In return, they allegedly received Rs 10,000 and an additional Rs 1,500. Later, when the parents sought the baby back, the adoptive family refused. The issue came to light after local media reports, prompting police to intervene and recover the child within 24 hours.
Sub-Divisional Police Officer Gamanjoy Reang said neither family admitted to exchanging money during questioning, though the biological father earlier acknowledged the payment. He added that financial distress and the burden of raising a second child likely influenced the decision. The Chakma family, dependent on a small rubber plantation, already has a two-year-old son.
Authorities decided not to register a case as the matter was resolved amicably. Both families were counselled on the legal adoption process and cautioned about possible consequences of bypassing it. The baby was formally handed back to her parents in the presence of police and child welfare officials.
Child welfare has resurfaced as a rallying cry in Korea, particularly after a series of heartbreaking cases of abandonment and infanticide. This renewed attention reflects domestic concerns as well as a global shift in how adoption and child protection are understood. The 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption embodied this change, shifting focus from the interests of prospective parents toward the rights of children. Ratified by more than 100 countries and set to take effect in Korea this October, the convention reframes adoption as child-centered, emboldening many adoptees to organize and press for recognition of their lived experiences.
While adoptees have gained a stronger voice, unwed mothers — the primary source of children placed for adoption — remain marginalized. Society views unwed motherhood as an individual failing that signifies moral inferiority, even as intercountry adoption was shaped by broader structural forces.
It began in the devastation of the 1950-53 Korean War, with tens of thousands of children orphaned and dependent on foreign relief. Stigmatized in a society that prized ethnic homogeneity, mixed-race children born to Korean women and foreign servicemen fueled intercountry adoption. Declining birthrates and concerns reflecting existing racial hierarchies in the United States further heightened demand for Korean children.
The 1997 Asian financial crisis undermined government efforts to curb intercountry adoption by producing new waves of poverty and family dissolution. In its aftermath, the government embraced a market-oriented welfare model characterized by deregulation. Above all, powerful, profit-driven adoption agencies — shielded by lax oversight — perpetuated the system. In this context, lacking both institutional support and societal acceptance, unwed mothers were often left with adoption as their sole recourse, a constrained choice that nevertheless exposed them to further stigma.
A three-month-old girl was reunited with her biological parents in Tripura’s Gomati district after police and childline officials foiled an alleged unlawful adoption attempt in Karbook subdivision.