The Michigan Supreme Court will hear a challenge that could upend a law that allows birth parents to anonymously drop off newborns at a hospital, shelter, fire department, or other safe space.

The case deals with a complex set of facts that revolve around a couple’s troubled relationship, divorce and her decision to surrender the infant for adoption without naming her ex-husband as the father.

Much of the confusion stems from the fact that there were two separate cases dealing with the divorce and custody that proceeded simultaneously in two counties. The result was a court in Ottawa County granting custody to the ex-husband as a judge in Kalamazoo County terminated his parental rights.

That was a surprise to Peter Kruithoff, the ex-husband, who did not find out his parental rights had been terminated until after the child had been placed with a family.

“We’re all entitled to due process and having a child and raising a child is a fundamental constitutional right,” said his attorney, Michael Villar.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights has published the first tranche of written evidence it has received as part of its inquiry into the adoption of children of unmarried women between 1949 and 1976. The submissions include a large number of personal testimonies from mothers who were separated from their children, and people who were separated from their mothers as babies.

Inquiry: The right to family life: adoption of children of unmarried women 1949-1976

Joint Committee Human Rights

The testimonies reveal the societal and institutional pressures that led to unmarried mothers feeling they had no choice but for their baby to be adopted, and in many cases being given no option at all. They reveal a pervasive sense of shame and judgement towards unmarried mothers that led to pregnant women and girls being hidden or sent away and an air of secrecy for many years afterwards. This extended to the standard of treatment experienced during and after the birth, and has left a lasting impact. People who were adopted described the legacy of not knowing their family history, particularly for health issues.

A central aim of the inquiry is to listen to those affected by adoption practices during this time. As part of this the Joint Committee is holding a round-table event where members of the public can relate their experiences. Further information about how to take part can be found here.

Liz Harvie was 16 years old when she discovered her name was actually Claire Watts.

Sitting on the sofa of her childhood home, on a tree-lined street in a Birmingham suburb, she had just been given a sheet of paper containing the first chapter of her life.

The document said “Claire”, a “compact baby” with a “pale complexion” and “light auburn hair”, had been born at a Northampton hospital in January 1974 and then put up for adoption.

It also included descriptions of her birth parents: Yvonne, a “neat”, “articulate” and “quite attractive” telephonist who liked swimming, reading and knitting, and Andrew, a “well-built” wireless operator who liked rugby and tropical fish.

“It was mind-blowing,” said Harvie, now 48. “I was reading about a different person born in a different part of the country. Technically, it was me.”

The Bombay High Court said that the adopted child will take the caste of single mother and authorities cannot insist on the caste certificate of father.

The Bombay High Court has directed the administration to issue a caste certificate to the adopted son of a single mother, assigning him the same caste as her.

The woman had adopted a boy from an orphanage in the Tardeo area of Mumbai. At the time of adoption, the 5-year-old boy was called Pappu and the identity of his biological parents was not known. According to procedure, the woman had applied for registration of birth in the record of the Municipal Corporation and the certificate was issued in 2010 which showed the woman as the mother.

Since the woman was from “Hindu Mahyavanshi” caste, which is a scheduled caste, she applied for issuance of boy’s caste certificate to the deputy district collector. However, the authority, in 2016 rejected the application on the grounds that documents of the caste of the boy’s father were not submitted and so the boy was not entitled to get a caste certificate.

Aggrieved by the order, she approached the District Caste Certificate Scrutiny Committee in Mumbai City, which dismissed the appeal in 2017 and confirmed the order passed by the deputy district collector.

Just 3,559 children were placed for adoption with families living in India and abroad in 2020-21

In the summer of 2019, Vinay Raj* and his wife Kanika gathered their family and friends to announce the most important decision they had made in their eight years of marriage: they were going to adopt a baby girl. They had registered on the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) website in April that year, and the home survey report was approved in a month. The couple, based in New Delhi , was told they could take the baby home in a year. The prospect of adopting a baby allayed the trauma of the miscarriage Kanika had just suffered. The couple pulled out all the stops: “We bought little blankets and baby clothes, soft toys and books,” says Vinay.

And then began the wait. It’s been three years now, and CARA has not yet referred a child to the couple. “We have almost given up hope,” says Vinay. “It has been emotionally exhausting.” To make matters worse, there has been no word from the adoption authority either. “No one picks up the phone, and when we meet them they blame the pandemic for the delay. But now they have no excuse,” he says. So interminable has been the process and so great the emotional toll that Vinay and Kanika have changed their mind about adopting a second child.

For Bhuwaneshwari Chandrashekharan, a lecturer in Kuwait, the endless wait for adoption meant putting the brakes on a promising career shift. She had registered with CARA in February 2019, and expected to wait months, not years. Two years ago, Bhuwaneshwari, who specialises in organic chemistry, applied for a Ph.D in Canada, and made plans to eventually move to that country. “But I’ve had no choice but to stay on in Kuwait; this is the address with which I have registered with CARA,” she says. The wait has been tough. “I don’t know who to turn to. I feel blindfolded,” says Bhuwaneshwari, who continues to attend pre-adoption workshops in anticipation of bringing a baby home.

Behind the numbers

Children steal to do good? The Swedish adoptions from the time of the military dictatorship in Chile are finally examined in more detail

From 1970 to 1990 around 2000 babies and toddlers were adopted from Chile to Sweden. In hundreds of cases, the children may have been stolen or taken under duress from their biological mothers. But in Sweden, the responsible institutions hesitate to deal seriously with the injustice.

David Henningson actually has a different name. And no, this is not about the usual phrase that journalists use to protect their sources on sensitive issues. Henningson actually had a different name: he was born Manuel Jesús Gonzales in July 1973 in a provincial Chilean town. Three years later he lived with his then eleven-month-old brother Gabriel in a children's home. The father was an alcoholic, the mother missing and possibly pregnant by another man. Social services managed to arrange for the brothers to be adopted to Sweden. The boys came to Gudrun and Bo Henningson in Halmstad. That's what the adoption papers say.

It is one of the African countries where traffickers compete with tricks to obtain "children to adopt" illegally. Congolese children sometimes find themselves thousands of kilometers from their native country, at the mercy of families who exploit them without scruple as “domestic or sexual slaves”. The fight is engaged in Kinshasa to try to put an end to it.

Individuals presenting themselves as members of a charitable organization do not hesitate to trap poor Congolese parents. They promise to send their young children to school. Often, it is already too late when the families discover the deception.

Sequestered in clandestine accommodation centers in Kinshasa, some of these young Congolese were able to find their families who alerted relatives. The unluckiest begin a journey of no return. They land in unknown hands, in Lebanon, India, or in European countries. Subject to second adoptions, outside of any legal framework, they come completely off the radar and suffer the ordeal of their executioners who make them their slaves.

"Acts that hurt the conscience"

The Congolese government has denounced “ a number of acts that hurt the conscience ”. Adopted children were allegedly " abused" and " mistreated".

Information on the National Board of Appeal's four notes on a study of the Danish adoption agency from Colombia, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, from the Minister of Social Affairs and the Elderly

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The National Board of Appeal's four notes on a study of the Danish adoption agency from Colombia, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Sri Lanka from the Minister of Social Affairs and the Elderly

The National Board of Appeal has quietly given birth to their investigation, which does not surprisingly release Denmark from liability in relation to the illegalities they can not deny have occurred in adoptions from the 4 countries they have chosen to investigate.

It is sad to read that in all 4 statements they generally use terms such as "in most cases" or "In several cases". Nevertheless, it was concluded that no illegalities could be detected.

It is predictable that the responsibility is imposed on the donor countries' "unregulated" conditions and not the pressure the adoption agencies imposed on the donor countries, just as it is directly problematic that the economic conditions including the widespread use of donations (which the last revision of the Adoption Act reintroduced) are not proven to be the vast majority of illegalities.

The Adoption Policy Forum can conclude:

Mumbai, Mar 16 (PTI) The Maharashtra government has hiked the monthly allowance for orphans and homeless children in the state to Rs 2,500 each from the child welfare scheme, state Minister Yashomati Thakur told the legislative Assembly on Wednesday.

During the Question Hour in the Lower House, the state women and child development minister said the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has been conducting a survey of orphans and homeless children in the state since November 2021.

As per the ongoing survey, as of now 5,153 children are living on the streets with their families, 1,266 are on the streets but live in slums and 39 are orphans, Thakur said.

Street children are being kept in day-care centres for their daily needs, she said.

The state government has increased the monthly allowance for orphans and homeless children from the child welfare scheme from Rs 425 to Rs 2,500 per child, the minister said.