PUNE: The process of issuing final adoption orders to prospective adoptive parents has come to a standstill in Maharashtra since January 11, a day after Bombay high court stayed implementation of a notification authorizing district collectors to pass such orders.

Child adoption agencies said the move has further delayed issuance of the final adoption order to prospective parents in waiting since September last year, after the amended Juvenile Justice Rules were notified.

The notification of the 'Model Amendment Rules 2022' to implement the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Amendment Act 2021, which came into force on September 1 last year, empowered district collectors to issue adoption orders, which were till then the domain of the district courts.

However, after the HC order stayed the new rules' implementation in January this year, adoption agencies have been unable to obtain adoption orders for prospective adoptive parents.

Prajakta Kulkarni, founder of Snehankur Adoption Centre, told TOI, "We have 13 older children currently in foster care with their prospective parents, who have been waiting for the final adoption order since September 2022. The absence of an adoption order is affecting various processes, such as preventing the parents from getting the child's birth certificate required for admitting him/her into a school or get Aadhaar made."

The new law on international adoptions has entered into force in France, which establishes the obligation for French couples to be followed by an authorized body, the possibility of adopting for unmarried couples and a one-year post-adoption follow-up. The other most important news

A reform that "will have a direct and beneficial impact on the daily life and development of thousands of children in our country"... for "better taking charge of children's needs , guaranteeing them fully reassuring life plans". With these words the secretary of state responsible for children and families to the Minister of Solidarity and Health Adrien Taquet greeted the reform of international adoptions that France has recently launched by introducing several rather significant innovations which, here, we will try to briefly analyze.

International adoptions in France: ban on proceeding with individual procedures

First of all, the Law regulates international individual adoptions: all candidates in possession of suitability must, therefore, be accompanied by an Authorized Adoption Organization (OAA) - of which there are 24 in all - or by the French Agency for Adoptions ( AFA).

The other significant aspect of the reform is the introduction of a mandatory follow-up period of one year starting from the moment in which the minor is definitively accepted into the adoptive family.

A six-day-old baby girl, who the gang had abducted and wanted to sell, was recovered from the possession of the accused.

Mohali police on Friday said that they have so far found that a woman — who had been arrested earlier this week and subsequently found to be part of a racket that stole newborns — also provided fake adoption certificates.

Police are also probing the role of some Asha Workers in the scam as the gang could have in touch with the workers to know about the deliveries of children.

Police on Monday had arrested Manjinder Singh, and his wife Parwinder Kaur — both residents of Faridkot — and Charanbir Singh, and his wife Sakshi, both residents of Patiala, for being part of a racket that was involved in stealing and selling newborns. A six-day-old baby girl, who the gang had abducted and wanted to sell, was recovered from the possession of the accused.

On Friday, the police told The Indian Express that they have found in the course of their investigation that Sakshi was also involved in providing the fake adoption certificates. A laptop that was issued to Sakshi by Punjabi University — where she was an employee — for official work was confisticated for further probe.

Olivia Atkocaitis, now 19, alleges in the lawsuit that her parents prevented her from attending public school and imprisoned her in a room in their basement.

A woman born in China and adopted by parents in the New Hampshire town of New Boston is now suing them alleging years of abuse, dangerous living conditions and racist treatment.

Olivia Atkocaitis, now 19, alleges in the lawsuit filed Monday that her parents, Denise and Thomas Atkocaitis, prevented her from attending public school and imprisoned her in a room in their basement. It also alleges they forced her to perform intense manual labor, beat her and shouted racial slurs at her, among other abuses, for nearly 14 years.

Atkocaitis said in the suit she attempted to escape multiple times throughout her childhood but was reprimanded and returned to her home’s dangerous conditions by local police each time, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit says Atkocaitis escaped for the last time in 2018 by digging through the walls of a “basement prison” and running away to nearby woods.

Upon learning of her escape, the New Boston police used dogs to track her, according to the lawsuit. After a private citizen found Atkocaitis covered in dirt from the woods the next day, the New Boston Police Department investigated and arrested her adoptive parents and initiated criminal prosecutions of them for felony-level offenses in September 2018. After pleading guilty to the charge of criminal restraint, Denise Atkocaitis did not serve jail time, while Thomas Atkocaitis served six months after pleading guilty to endangering the welfare of a child, according to New Hampshire Public Radio.

A woman gave her one-and-a-half-month-old child up for adoption for Tk 42,000 in Gazipur’s Sreepur Upazila. Police later returned the child to the mother as no legal process was followed.

She was forced to place her son for adoption due to poverty as ‘Tuhin’, the father of the child, refused to recognise it, the mother claimed.

Narail resident Saddam Hossain, a technician in a local cable factory who was also a tenant at Abdar village in Telihati, adopted the child, police said on Tuesday.

The child's mother, a resident of Mymensingh’s Fulbaria Upazila, lives in a rented house in the same village.

She gave her son to the childless Saddam for adoption in exchange for money by signing a stamp, said Abu Raihan, sub-inspector of Sreepur Police Station.

Yung Fierens, on behalf of adoption interest groups Adoption Schakel Connecteert, CAFE, CAW, Racines Perdues Raìces Perdidas, Empreintes Vivantes.

YUNG FIERENSFebruary 1, 2023 , 03:00

In June last year, a resolution on intercountry adoptions was voted in the Chamber of Representatives.

With this, the submitter of the resolution Michel De Maegd (MR) was supported by the entire hemisphere in asking the Minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne (Open Vld) to investigate illegal adoptions that have taken place from various countries to Belgium.

Eight months later, Van Quickenborne seems to make little move to accede to this request, supported by his own party. The minister replied to questions about the lack of any initiative, including that he had been 'very busy'. He refused to answer the request to set a date for a first meeting. He also indicated that he did not know exactly what was expected of him.

You were adopted, but your adoption papers were tampered with in the past. Still, you want to know where you come from. And maybe also find biological relatives. “Searching using DNA also has a lot of potential for adoptees,” says Jeroen (38). We asked him about his experiences.

Jeroen was adopted from Indonesia. Together with his adoptive sister and brother, he used to live with his parents in the east of the Netherlands. I have fond childhood memories. When I lived abroad for a while for work in 2008, people sometimes thought it was strange that I looked Asian, but I came from the Netherlands. At that moment, Jeroen becomes curious about his roots. That was very broad back then. For example, I started listening to Indonesian music, was interested in the culture.

In that year Jeroen writes a letter to Spoorloos. It could take a while, they immediately said. So I didn't have high expectations. The papers showed that I had an Indonesian mother and a Chinese father. Furthermore, there were too many gaps in the file, so Spoorloos indicated that they could do nothing for me. Although I expected it, that message was not nice. In the meantime I had already made a roots trip to Indonesia in 2010. There people asked if I was from Japan, Korea or Vietnam. Anything but Indonesia or China. This was all painfully confusing. I thought I found my roots, but instead I felt like a foreigner there too.

In 2011 he reads an article in National Geographic about DNA research. You can not only demonstrate kinship with this, but also map out your ethnic background. I thought the chance of a match with a distant relative was quite small, but maybe that way I could get confirmation for my Chinese roots. I immersed myself in the matter and registered with FTDNA. I sent the swab with my saliva. An online account will then be created and you will be kept well informed. In the beginning I checked the website every day. I opted for an extensive test. It costs €700, but then you can also find your 'deep ancestry'. Then you see where your ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago come from. I find it very interesting and cool that this is possible. It's an ongoing journey

And those results are coming. I have ancestors in Southeast Asia, but that is still very wide. FTDNA mainly focuses on customers from Europe and the United States. That is why Jeroen contacts a professor who is mapping 70 subpopulations in Asia. She did this in response to the attack in Jakarta in 2004. This is how they hoped to find the perpetrators. At the same time, she had collected a lot of information about ethnic groups in Indonesia. I then sent her my raw data from FTDNA. Then Jeroen receives a special message: he is almost 100% Javanese. It was clear that my adoption papers had been tampered with. So my father was not Chinese. This gave peace. Indonesia is big, but I didn't have to go all over Southeast Asia.

Yung Fierens, on behalf of adoption interest groups Adoption Schakel Connecteert, CAFE, CAW, Racines Perdues Raìces Perdidas, Empreintes Vivantes.

YUNG FIERENS 1 February 2023 , 03:00

In June last year, a resolution on intercountry adoptions was voted in the Chamber of Representatives.

With this, the submitter of the resolution Michel De Maegd (MR) was supported by the entire hemisphere in asking the Minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne (Open Vld) to conduct an investigation into illegal adoptions that have taken place from various countries to Belgium.

Eight months later, Van Quickenborne seems to make little move to accede to this request, supported by his own party. The minister replied to questions about the lack of any initiative, including that he had been 'very busy'. He refused to answer the request to set a date for a first meeting. He also indicated that he did not know exactly what was expected of him.

Crying that she wanted to go home, a 3-year-old girl was sent to live with a new family Tuesday afternoon, devastating the one she had lived with her whole life.

“You could hear her crying down the hall,” said Nicole DeHaven, tears falling down her cheeks as she talked about the little girl she and her husband, John, have raised since she was three days old. “They had to hold her back. She kept saying, ‘I want to go home. I want to go home.”

Wyandotte County Judge Jane A. Wilson ordered the DeHavens to turn over the girl at the county’s juvenile office by 4 p.m. Tuesday, the couple said. From there, the girl in the pink Aurora princess dress would be taken to a family in Manhattan, Kansas, that wants to adopt her.

In a decision Friday, Wilson ruled against the recommendation of the Kansas Department for Children and Families that the girl stay with the DeHavens, who have been her foster family since Oct. 31, 2019.

Wilson then consented to the girl being adopted by the Manhattan family, which has three of her biological siblings, although she has never lived with them.

HYDERABAD: In a heartening trend, Telangana is witnessing a growing demand for girl children among couples aspiring to become parents. According to official data, the state saw 1,430 children being adopted between 2014 and 2022. Of these, 1,069 were girls and 361 were boys.

Until a few years ago, the statistics were starkly different. Prospective adoptive parents (PAP) at that time were willing to wait for years - almost close to a decade in some cases - only to take home a baby boy. The little girls weren't so lucky.

"Now, things have certainly changed. In fact, there is such a demand that we are not being able to meet it," said an official of the Telangana Women and Child Welfare Department attributing this overwhelming preference for girls as a "personal choice" that PAPs are making these days.

"Slowly but surely people are becoming more accepting of girl children," said the official, an observation seconded by prospective parents and women activists. "For me, the priority is to get a child who will complete us. I do not care whether it is a girl or a boy," said a parent-to-be who applied for adoption in 2022 and is now waiting for clearance from Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA).

Activists agree that most PAPs are not gender specific any more. "So, since the wait time for adopting a girl is lesser, they are going for that," said activist and founder of Tharuni, Mamatha Raghuveer Achanta. While the waiting period for a boy, even now, is at least three to four years, for girls it's just about a year from the date of applying, Mamatha added.