Bufetat has now opened the door for advice and guidance to adoptees and their adoptive families. When I read the information on the websites, I was left with more questions than answers.

It is possible that I have become cynical, but for now my thought is: Well.

The information on the page is not exactly comprehensive. I called to ask my questions and was able to speak to a pleasant adviser.

Inquiries have increased considerably

The service that has now been created is primarily to refer to already existing offers that you can turn to. Which offers there should be is more unclear to me.

Frank, 22, and Victoria, 19, were adopted separately in the early 2000s, and only recently learned discovered they're biological siblings

A brother and sister who were adopted into the same family as babies recently discovered they are actually biological siblings.

Frank, 22, and Victoria, 19, were adopted separately by parents Angela and Dennis in the early 2000s, according to CBS affiliate WCBS and ABC affiliate WABC.
 

The siblings recently decided to learn more about their family history through DNA testing, only to make the shocking discovery, FOX affiliate WNYW reported.

"We were both found a year and a half apart and wound up in the same family," Frank said, per WNYW. "The odds are insane."

The Arrow of God Community Children’s Home in Onitsha has been closed down over allegations of illegal adoption and selling of children.

The Anambra State Commissioner for Women and Social Welfare, Ify Obinabo,   led security operatives to seal off the structure on Wednesday, after a report and documentary by Fisayo Soyombo made the rounds on social media and local television .

The report also accused  the state Ministry of Women and Social Welfare of involvement  in an illegal adoption of a baby girl alongside one of her registered homes in the state.

A new born baby was among about 20 children   recovered from the orphanage operator, while the founder and the employees had fled and are currently at large.

The children recovered were between the ages of one and 17 years; ten boys, nine girls, and a newborn baby.

The commissioner said that a total of 20 children, comprising of 10 boys, nine girls and a newborn were rescued from the facility and were currently in the ministry’s custody.

Anambra Government on Wednesday sealed an orphanage home, Arrow of God Community Children’s Home at Nkwelle Ezunaka in Oyi Local Government Area.

Mrs Ify Obinabo, state’s Commissioner for Women and Social Welfare, while speaking to Reporters after sealing the facility, said the licence of its owner had also been withdrawn indefinitely.

Obinabo said the action followed a news report accusing the ministry of involvement in illegal adoption of a baby girl in connivance with one of the registered homes in the state.

She added that the founder of the orphanage home, Rev. Deborah Ogo, presently at large, had ignored her invitation to explain.

MUMBAI: The Bhoiwada police have arrested four persons, including three women, allegedly involved in illegal adoption of a seven- day-old baby.
The accused made a fake agreement on a stamp paper to make it look like a genuine adoption. The biological mother of the boy, who is from Pratapgarh in UP, is among those arrested.
 

Those arrested are Bhiwandi residents Rubina Akhtar (26), Irshad Istiaq Rangrez (33), his wife Tahira (28) and Heena Parveen (28), the mother of the baby from UP. They have been charged with child trafficking, criminal conspiracy and negligence.
The crime came to light when Rangrez and Tahira, who are childless, brought the baby to Wadia Hospital for jaundice treatment. On inquiry, Tahira told doctors that she had adopted the baby from her sister-in-law.

The doctors asked them to get an NOC from the police. The cops got suspicious and upon a thorough probe found that it was a case of illegal adoption.

A Perth woman who was adopted by a West Australian family after her parents died in Ethiopia is sharing her story to help older adoptees hold onto their cultural identities.  

Meseret Cohen was 13 years old when she and her three siblings were thrust into a new life with a Busselton family.

She said being adopted as a teenager was difficult because she had already spent her formative years in Ethiopia.  

Ms Cohen now provides consultation, coaching and peer support to adoptees and their families to provide the kind of guidance she said would have been useful to her and her family.

"You have all the worldview and the values that you bring with you, and then knowing that you have to completely shift and put that away, was how I dealt with life," Ms Cohen said.

BENGALURU: An adopted son cannot continue to exercise rights as a coparcener in his genitive family, the Kalaburagi bench of the Karnataka high court has observed in a recent judgment.
Dismissing the regular second appeal filed by Bheesmaraja, a resident of Secunderabad, Justice CM Joshi has pointed out that in M Krishna vs M Ramachandra and in another case, the HC had already held that on adoption, the adoptee gets transplanted into the family that adopts him with the same rights as that of a natural-born son, and such transfer of the adopted child severs all his rights with the family from which he was taken in adoption.
 

“It was categorically heldthat he loses the right of succession in genitive family properties,” the judge added.
Son of Pandurangappa Ellur and Radhabai, Bheesmaraja was given in adoption to Hyderabad-based couple P Vishnu and P Shantabai. The adoption deed was executed on December 22, 1974; at that time, Bheesmaraja was 24 years old. His biological father died in 2004.
Thereafter, in the very same year, he moved the Raichur court for partition. He argued that the adoption was without his consent and was prohibited under the provisions of Section 10 of the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956. His mother, sister and brother resisted his claim, saying he was a consenting party to the adoption, and the suit was dismissed on December 10, 2007. OnJanuary 22, 2010, Bheesmaraja’s appeal, too, was dismissed.
Challenging both orders, he moved the HC, reiterating he is a coparcener in his genitive family and, therefore, had an existing right in family properties.

On the other hand, his mother, brother and sisters, and the children of his deceased brother, Ashokraj, argued that in the Arya Vysya community, to which they belong, adoption of a person aged more than 15 is allowed.

“If we accept the contention of the counsel for the appellant herein, it would lead to a situation whereby an adopted son would continue to be exercising rights as a coparcener in the genitive family as well as the adoptive family. Therefore, this contention at any rate cannot hold good,” the judge noted.

I first came into contact with the Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC) many years ago. They were hosting our transracial and transnational adoptee group at the time. It was decided that they would rebrand our group ‘International Searchers.’ You don’t need a degree in English to work out the connotations attached to this rebranding. I was told by quite a few adoptees that this name is what drew them to join, in the hope that they would find help to trace their birth families across borders.

That help never came. We would sit and talk about the frustrations of being people of colour in a white privileged society and how this has affected our entire lives. How being raised in a white adoptive home meant we internalised that racism. Our parents claimed to be ‘colour blind’ but the world around us was far from it. Social workers were privy to those meetings and one of them, a Black staff member, spoke of how she was raised by a white mother and had grown up with racism. This does not equate to understanding how it feels to be a transracial and intercountry adoptee. Her lack of knowledge and reflection on what it means to be separated from your biological family and raised without any genetic mirroring was quite shocking. We were not advised or supported on what routes to take to trace our biological families or how to navigate foreign bureaucracy. I was even approached after one meeting by another member of staff to say they did help with tracing – for a fee!

On 1st July 2023, IAC joined the Coram Group. The amalgamation would enable them to “transform the lives of vulnerable children worldwide who…need a loving home in the UK” they proudly announced, but let’s take a closer look at this collaboration. Coram has a history. I’ve visited the Foundling Museum a number of times for various events and what shocks me is the absence of the children whose lives they moulded. Where are their stories and where are their portraits? There are large portraits of the founders hanging from frames everywhere. Noble men and women who did right by society at the time. The foundlings they ‘rescued’ are voiceless, faceless; they exist but are hidden. This is how many of us adult adoptees feel today. We are no longer living in times of colonial empire. Gone are the days of the workhouse, although poverty is rife and coexists with the privileged aristocracy just like in the days of Thomas Coram. The founders believed they were helping the children who had been deserted by their mothers because of poverty and stigma. Sounds familiar, right?

IAC is the only organisation in the UK that facilitates international adoptions and proudly lists their ‘special programmes’ — countries with which they have negotiated to be the exclusive supplier, as if they are purchasing excess or unwanted children from orphanages. As history tells us the word orphan is a global term to mean a child who has been abandoned, but we all know there are so many stories of those same children who have grown into adults, and learned after years of tracing that their birth families were forced to give them up; some were even illegally traded. 

What I find astonishing is IAC’s refusal to acknowledge that these children had a history prior to the orphanages they ended up in. They have participated in the removal of these children from their countries of origin and have an absolute duty of care to ensure that all their identifying paperwork is intact. They have a moral duty (though sadly not a statutory one) to assist us on a governmental level to return to our countries of origin and reinstate our citizenships if we choose to reconnect with our roots. Taking a child from an orphanage and replanting that human being thousands of miles away from their native home comes with a responsibility to see that that child grows into a whole intact adult with complete knowledge of why they were left and where they came from. We should not be attempting to navigate the long and difficult process of trying to contact organisations in our native countries for documents pertaining to our biological history without the help of a registered governmental intermediary and interpreters provided and paid for, where needed. Alongside this, all avenues for access to cultural heritage should be made available to the intercountry adoptees that they place here in the UK. 

There is a half-crumbling church, covered in red dust, at Radium Hill, a former uranium mine deep in the South Australian desert. It was built by Father Vincent Shiel, with his own hands, in 1956. Six years later, his son Brendan was born in Melbourne to a former nun — a secret the priest kept until he died 37 years later.

Brendan was one of the lucky ones. Both he and his brother Damien were adopted by Roy and Bet Watkins, in Richmond, Melbourne. As Damien, who was adopted two years before Brendan, recalls: “One day a clergyman was talking to Roy and said, ‘Uh, how come you don’t have children yet?’ And Roy said, ‘Well, we haven’t been blessed’. And he said, ‘Maybe that’s something we can help you with’.”

Brendan and Damien had an idyllic life with Roy and Bet, who were huge Richmond Tigers fans. They told the boys they were adopted when they were young, but it was Brendan who was most curious about finding his biological parents.

In 1990, at the age of 29, Brendan decided to apply for his original birth certificate because it would carry the names of his biological parents. A meeting was set up at the Catholic Family Welfare Bureau in Melbourne. But it wasn’t what he expected.

“I was hoping that the birth certificate would have both parents’ names,” says Brendan. “It just had my mother’s”. And she wasn’t 16, 17 or 18, as he expected, but much older — 27 — and from South Australia.

“The connection with our roots will always stay, even if we are miles away”

I know there are thousands of adoptees who are out there. Looking for a part of their identity. Looking for answers. Looking for family. Looking for information. From my personally experience I understand that this search journey can be very emotional.

And the thing that hits the most is that often questions are replied by more questions. Not always necessarily by answers. Which in my opinion can be very frustrating. In my case, I have been searching for 40 years to find out from which region in India I was coming.

Only after 40 years I got my answers. I can’t describe the peace of mind this has given me. That is why I understand why it can be such a hustle, the searching, the waiting. And therefore I am happy to share my own personal story.

I hope you will also be able to find the answers you are looking for and I hope you’ll be able to find happiness in your life.