MUMBAI: A 25-year-old woman, unwed when she gave up her son up for adoption last year, ran into a trafficking ring when she wanted the boy back after she got married to his father. She has been forced to approach courts for custody of her year-old baby, reports Rebecca Samervel.

Julia Fernandez, who 'facilitated' the adoption, was arrested earlier this month with an alleged aide Shabana Sheikh for trying to sell a newborn girl for Rs 4.5 lakh.

The Ulhasnagar woman moved the civil court last week to "recover" her son from a Malad couple who had taken him from Fernandez. In a plea submitted through Edith Dey and Mikhail Dey, the mother sought the court "to direct the DCP, ACP and senior police inspector of Bangur Nagar police station, to assist her in recovering her child from the respondents (adoptive parents) who are living within the jurisdiction of Bangur Nagar police station."

The plea will come up for hearing on August 24. The mother said that due to personal and financial difficulties, she was unable to raise the baby and was advised to approach one Julia Fernandez. The mother said that Julia informed her that she had an NGO and would help look after the baby until things settled down and she was in a state to take back the child. The mother said that Julia facilitated adoption of her baby son and informed her that the adoptive couple was wealthy and would look after him well.

In March this year, the civil court had rejected the plea by the Malad couple to be declared the adoptive parents of the boy. The biological mother had told the court then that her husband and she wanted their son back. However, the mother said she never received custody of her child despite the court's orders. "Despite the rejection of the adoption petition, the respondents did not return the baby and are till date illegally holding the custody of the child," the mother's plea said. The mother said that her husband and she had tried to contact the couple several times, through Julia, however, she kept giving excuses and later began threatening to complain to the police.

Julie Bindel, one of Britain’s best-known radical feminists, has written a savage critique of commercial surrogacy in Prospect, a progressive magazine. Bindel is a “political lesbian” and has campaigned for many years against prostitution, pornography, and rape, and more recently against transgenderism. Here are a few paragraphs from her article, “Why commercial surrogacy is little better than the sex trade”.

I’m concerned about all children born to surrogates. None of the protections that reputable adoption agencies put in place before parents are approved such as criminal background checks, mandatory participation in adoptive parent preparation classes, assurance that the adoptive families are medically, financially and mentally stable and comprehensive home visits, are required. Although some surrogacy clinics may do these checks, there is no legal requirement for them.

Surrogacy is exploitation whether it is carried out for profit or altruism. The harm to surrogate mothers is well documented, especially now that former surrogates are speaking out about their experiences. The law should reflect this, and outlaw all formal surrogacy arrangements. The surrogates themselves—lured in by the promise of money, and by suggestions that surrogacy is altruistic, and they are “helping a family”—should never be criminalised, but the brokers and other profiteers should.

The buying and selling of women’s bodies for reproduction is supported by many on the left—a notable exception to their usual critique of capitalism. In fact, surrogacy in the US is celebrated and seen as little different to purchasing an airline ticket. The women in the system have no name, no voice, no identity. The state allows the trafficking of their reproductive system, with a high risk of maternal mortality, protecting only her right to be paid. The surrogacy trade is similar to the sex trafficking and mail-order bride industries—in that the female body, in one way or another, is the merchandise for sale.

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Woman who facilitated adoption, which was legally rejected, was later arrested for being child trafficker

After news reports on a woman, Julia Fernandez appeared that she was a child trafficker and sold infants, a mother moved a civil court, seeking to get her baby back from a couple with whom Fernandez had facilitated the adoption of the petitioner's infant.

The mother, an Ulhasnagar resident, had purportedly borne the child out of wedlock and had come in contact with Fernandez who convinced her for adoption. She had now married the father of the child.

In her application against the adoptive parents filed before a city civil court, she had sought that they be directed to return her baby. Her plea stated that she was unable to raise the infant due to personal difficulties. And, Fernandez facilitated his adoption to the couple, saying they are wealthy and her son will be well looked after.

Accordingly, she said the couple also filed an adoption petition in court. She said during the adoption proceedings, her husband informed the court that they did not want to go ahead with giving up their son for adoption. Accordingly, in March last year, the court rejected the couple's adoption petition. The mother said that despite that, the couple has not returned the child and are illegally holding his custody.

Fake Lawyer Case: Madras HC Directs Bar Council To Verify Advocates' Antecedents Before Permitting Them To Hold Posts In Statutory Committees

The Madras High Court has directed the Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry to verify the antecedents of lawyers

before they are permitted to hold significant positions in the statutory committees.

The direction was made while dealing with a habeas corpus petition by a mother seeking production of her 17-year-old

adopted son, whereby the Court had come across a 'fake lawyer'.

They were born in South Korea, Brazil, Australia, Rwanda and Sri Lanka. They were all adopted. All grew up in France. And today, they tell each other.

Une histoire à soi , a feature-length documentary written and directed by Amandine Gay, in theaters from Friday August 26, for a rare time, gives the microphone to the main stakeholders in matters of adoption. Not the adoptive parents, even less the institutions, but indeed the children… grown up. A step back which makes it possible to propose, beyond the intimate, a downright political angle to the discourse.

“We come from somewhere. We are the fruit of a prior history. We all come from someone”, said one of them, analyzing his career.

“The idea is to show that adoption is not a limited moment in time,” explains the director in an interview. “But let it last a lifetime. »

An idea in tune with the times, exploited earlier this year by Nicolas Ouellet in his web series You come from where , then next year by Phara Thibault in his autobiographical monologue Chokola , on the boards of the Little Unicorn.

LOCAL ADOPTIVE MOM CHOSEN AS A 2022 CONGRESSIONAL COALITION ON ADOPTION INSTITUTE (CCAI) ANGELS IN ADOPTION® HONOREE FROM MISSOURI WITH SENATOR BLUNT

Adoptive mom of a sibling pair and author, Marcy Bursac, selected to travel to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC for CCAI’s Angels in Adoption® Leadership Program.

St. Louis, MO – Because of her tremendous work in the adoption, foster care, and the child welfare community, Marcy will be traveling to Washington, DC Sept. 20-21, 2022 to participate in congressional meetings with federal policymakers, receive advocacy training and education training, meet with fellow advocates, and receive recognition at the Angels Celebration. Honorees represent a wide spectrum of individuals involved in child welfare who are making a difference. Since the program’s inception in 1999, more than 2,900 Angels have received this honor.

About the Marcy Bursac

Adoption was Marcy's Plan A. She and her husband adopted a biological sibling pair.

The established adoption process should not be bypassed to increase the numbers

Policy intervention without knowledge of the ground realities often ends up as an exercise in self-gratification for those in authority and results in little or no benefit for the intended target group. Wanting to do good must be matched by knowing the right thing to do in the circumstance, and in the case of children, be guided by child-centric policies. Whether the recent recommendation of a parliamentary panel to bring more abandoned children into the adoption process will fulfil these parameters is an issue that warrants further discussion. A recent report, “Review of Guardianship and Adoption Laws”, by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances and Law and Justice has pointed to the huge mismatch between the number of people wanting to adopt children and the number of children legally available for adoption, and suggested that the way to remedy that would be to ensure that “orphan and abandoned children found begging on the streets… are made available for adoption at the earliest”. To do so, it has suggested periodic district surveys to identify children who are orphaned/abandoned. The report argued that in a country with millions of orphans, only 2,430 children were available for adoption. It is true that there are always more people wanting to adopt children than the number of children actually available for adoption; it has been so historically, but the increasing chasm, as the report indicates, will undoubtedly have to be addressed. According to the report, there were 27,939 prospective parents registered with the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) as on December 2021, from nearly 18,000 in 2017. There were 6,996 orphaned, abandoned and surrendered children residing in childcare institutions considered adoptable, but only 2,430 were declared legally free for adoption by Child Welfare Committees. It claimed that the waiting time for adoption had increased to three years from one year, in the past five years. The total number of children adopted in 2021-22 was only 3,175.

But the process of adoption in the country was tightened — procedurally and legally — in response to rampant malpractices and inter-country adoption rackets. CARA was installed as the nodal body for in-country and inter-country adoptions, to monitor and regulate the process, ensuring through stringent rules that the adoption is in the best interests of the child, and no illegality is involved. While the parliamentary committee has interpreted that there is automatic happiness when a child in an institution is placed in a home, it is important to exercise caution. No doubt, the country should take care of its children orphaned due to circumstances, but even as it acknowledges that institutionalisation may be detrimental over the long term, it should pay equal attention to the finer aspects of child care, and allow itself to be guided by a child-centric philosophy. There are no shortcuts in ensuring orphaned children come to no harm.

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When Cristina Prisco, 42, was growing up as an adopted only child in the Bronx, she always had a clear idea of where she came from — or so she thought.

“There wasn’t really a day that went by that I didn’t think about where I was born and how my story started,” Prisco told The Post exclusively.

Her supposed origin story, long accepted by Prisco and her adoptive parents, was that she had been born to a poor woman in Chile. The birth mother couldn’t afford to raise her baby herself, so she gave Cristina up to a Catholic orphanage.

Prisco’s adoptive father, Benito Zagaglia, travelled to Chile in the spring of 1980, using an Italian passport to enter the country under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

He brought his baby home in May of 1980, holding her close the entire 11 hour flight from Chile to New York City where her adoptive mother Ann Marie Zagaglia anxiously awaited. Little did the newly completed family know that their baby was a victim of child trafficking.

Last month, cops arrested a woman trying to sell a 15-day-old girl; now, a mid-day investigation shows that despite past such cases against her, she ran a baby-selling racket from a Sion nursing home with impunity

Wanted in two human trafficking cases, 35-year-old Julia Fernandez had been brazenly running a baby-selling racket from her Sion-Koliwada nursing home for the past seven-eight years, the police said. She was caught last month selling a 15-day-old girl, after a Pune resident raised the red flag. The Mumbai Crime Branch is now probing whether she conducted abortions.

Julia faces four more human trafficking cases that are registered at Mankhurd police station, Wadala TT police station, Bandra police station and Mahatma Phule police station in Kalyan. On July 31, the Crime Branch of the Mumbai police department arrested her accomplice Shabana Shaikh, 30, too. One of Julia's victims is fighting a legal battle to get back her son, who was snatched and sold about a year back.

“Despite being most wanted in two human trafficking cases, she had been running her baby-selling shop from Sion-Koliwada for seven-eight years. Our team nabbed her on July 31 from her nursing home in Sion-Koliwada,” said an officer.

The rescued child is at Mahalaxmi-based Bal Asha Trust, a charitable organisation that helps abandoned and destitute children in Mumbai. “The baby is healthy. My nurses are taking care of her. We will also do further tests and initiate adoption process, if needed,” Vaishali Bhakte, a social worker from the trust, told mid-day.

On April 3rd 2020, the Child-Parent Security Act (CPSA) passed in the New York Legislature, meaning that commercial or “compensated” surrogacy is now legal in the state of New York. Similar laws are in place in 46 other US states. “Compensated surrogacy will be legal in New York in February of 2021!” read the Circle Surrogacy’s jubilant advert. But to those who consider commercial surrogacy to be dangerous and exploitative, the CPSA has effectively sanctioned the pimping of pregnancy; as demand for surrogate mothers increases, so does the likelihood that women will be coerced into the arrangement by abusive husbands or boyfriends. Not to mention the associated health risks for the woman giving birth.

Gestational surrogacy is where the egg and a sperm (the embryo) are formed from material belonging to either “commissioning parents,” or from egg and sperm donors. The embryo is then transferred into a mother who carries the baby to term for the parents. The New York law allows for commercial gestational surrogacy in which the birth mother has not contributed any of her own genetic material and for commissioning parents to be named on the birth certificate. Under this law, if the birth mother changes her mind and wishes to keep the child, she will have no legal right to do so. It also requires that the baby produced from a surrogate pregnancy be born in New York, but not that the surrogate mother is a New York resident.

Traditional surrogacy (also known as partial surrogacy) involves the surrogate’s egg being fertilised with the sperm of the intended father. This remains illegal in NYC, a legacy of the 1986 Baby M case, where a surrogate mother refused to give up her baby and fled to Florida. She fought and lost a custody fight against the couple who had contracted to pay her $10,000 to bear the child. A task force was appointed in the wake of this case, resulting in traditional surrogacy and commercial surrogacy being banned in 1992. Traditional surrogacy remains against US law but the 2020 CPSA overturned the ban on commercial surrogacy in New York state.

The campaign to legalise surrogacy in New York is a decade old. Versions of the legislation were first introduced in 2012 and again in 2017. Intended parents, lawyers seeking to profit from dealing with surrogacy cases, and of course the clinics and agencies, all argued that because other states had legalised commercial surrogacy, New York should follow suit. Others argued it was discriminatory to “prevent gay couples from having the same right to fertility treatment as heterosexuals.” I heard from one lesbian couple in the US that they couldn’t agree on which one would carry the baby so they decided to “outsource the pregnancy.”

Commercial surrogacy is banned in the UK, but there are regular attempts by industry profiteers to introduce it. A number of UK couples and individuals travel to Ukraine where it is legal, but it is impossible to gage exact figures. In Ukraine, more than 2,000 children are born through surrogacy every year. The majority of “commissioning parents” are foreign, heterosexual couples. During Covid lockdown and the subsequent war, business continued and clinics merely “stored” the babies until intended parents were able to travel to collect them. Surrogate mothers continued to be sourced across the country and would give birth in collective housing facilities.