Kolkata: A steep rise in preference for adopting girls has also been noticed. In 2019-’20, the total number of girl adoptions was 122, with 86 boy adoptions. While the whole country has seen a decrease in the total girl adoption rate, Bengal saw a 9.2% increase in girl adoptions, compared with before the pandemic.

Behala Resident Ritayan Pal, 36, and his wife had applied for adoption three years back and finally completed the process to adopt a two-month-old girl during the second wave of the pandemic in 2021. “Amid the gloom of Covid, she has brought light and joy to our family,” said Pal.

The ratio of girls adopted in Bengal in respect to the entire country was 5.5% before the pandemic. This touched 6.6% during the pandemic.

Shashi Panja, Bengal’s minister of women and child development and social welfare, said adoption was a regular, ongoing and transparent process.

“The pandemic has not affected the adoption rate. As it is a process that takes 3-4 years, we did not stop the process because of the pandemic,” she said. She added that the app ‘Sneho Chaya’, which was developed by the Bengal government to track orphans, their problems and needs during Covid, had helped adoptions as well.

The Juvenile Justice Committee (JJC) of the Andhra Pradesh High Court on Monday enquired about the alleged child trafficking and surrogacy racket in Eluru district.

The JJC, which took suo moto notice of the alleged sale of an infant in Pedavegi mandal in Eluru district, asked officials about the details of the case.

Principal Secretaries of the concerned departments, Eluru Deputy Superintendent of Police G.V.V.S. Pydeswara Rao and Two Town CI D.V. Ramana appeared before the JJC.

The JJC, while expressing concern over the alleged sale of babies, directed the officers to take steps to prevent recurrence of such incidents.

This figure of the Belgian banking world who worked within the foundation for the protection of children, died on July 26, at the age of 91.

Baron Daniel Cardon de Lichtbuer, who had a leading role in the creation of Child Focus and its European counterpart, Missing Children Europe, which he both chaired, died on July 26 at the age of 91. , announced Child Focus in an obituary published on its site. A great figure in the Belgian banking world, the man was notably at the head of BBL, which later became ING Belgium.

Born November 16, 1930 in Brasschaat (Antwerp), Daniel Cardon de Lichtbuer grew up in a French-speaking bourgeois environment. With a doctorate in law and a degree in applied economics from UCL, the man continued his career at the European Coal and Steel Community and then at the European Economic Community as chief of staff between 1957 and 1974.

In 1973, he became a director of the Banque de Bruxelles, then a member of the executive committee of this financial institution the following year. Two years later, he became managing director and member of the management committee of the merged bank BBL (Banque Bruxelles Lambert) before taking over the management of the latter in 1992.

After an aborted plan to create a “Great Belgian Bank” which would have brought together BBL, Générale de Banque (future Fortis Bank) and Crédit Communal (which became Dexia then Belfius), Daniel Cardon de Lichtbuer left BBL in 1997, just before its takeover by the Dutch company ING.

Juvenile Justice Committee takes suo moto notice of sale of infant

The Juvenile Justice Committee (JJC) of the Andhra Pradesh High Court on Monday enquired about the alleged child trafficking and surrogacy racket in Eluru district.

The JJC, which took suo moto notice of the alleged sale of an infant in Pedavegi mandal in Eluru district, asked officials about the details of the case.

Principal Secretaries of the concerned departments, Eluru Deputy Superintendent of Police G.V.V.S. Pydeswara Rao and Two Town CI D.V. Ramana appeared before the JJC.

The JJC, while expressing concern over the alleged sale of babies, directed the officers to take steps to prevent recurrence of such incidents.

The Search For My Daughter’s Birth Mom

“In 2013, on a dusty, deserted road in Southern Ethiopia, four of us headed deep into a village in search of my daughter’s birthmother. Navigating the bumps and dodging an occasional goat, Asfaw drove us to where it all began.

As luck would have it, my driver spoke the language of the region as well as Amharic and English, and the older gentleman in the passenger seat beside him held in his lap a large book with the details of hundreds of adoptions. Just a few hours earlier, seated in the garden of the Abebe Zeleke Hotel, he had opened that book and confirmed the information I had been given on my daughter years ago—the name of her mother and the region where she was from. And he knew how to find her. I looked out the window. Despite the aridity, the landscape was lush; replete with the large leaves of the false banana trees. The anticipation was indescribable.

The search for my daughter’s birth mother was more than twice as long as the lengthy process of international adoption (which for me was two years, five months—plus an additional 4 months, 2 weeks, and 3 days waiting for a referral—according to my blog). After not finding success in adopting through the DC foster care system and being dissuaded from pursuing domestic adoption from the agencies themselves, I landed on international adoption, hopeful that I could have an open relationship with my daughter’s Ethiopian family. When I submitted my paperwork to the agency in June 2009, there were a handful of countries open. I chose Ethiopia because I had read the children were well taken care of and the country didn’t appear to be engaging in unethical practices.

I had also spent a month volunteering at an orphanage in Addis Ababa the year before and the experience had been nothing but positive. I loved the country and its people and was beyond excited to have it inextricably woven into my own family fabric. I was aware that some countries had been exposed for coercing or paying birthmothers to give up their children; others flat-out abducting and trafficking kids to meet the demand of families wanting to adopt. But in my research, I hadn’t heard of such things happening in Ethiopia. In addition, the agency I chose was recommended to me by an adoptive mom who said they facilitated birth mother introductions and she believed them to be above board. Satisfied, I forged ahead, open to a boy or a girl from birth to age 3.

Throw us into jail, but repatriate our child to India,” says Bhavesh Shah. “In any case, without her home is like a jail,” he adds. Bhavesh, a software developer, arrived in Germany in 2018 on a work visa. His wife Dhara delivered a baby girl in February 2021 in Berlin. When the baby was seven months old, she suffered an injury.

What happened thereafter might seem fairly uncomplicated, but in a foreign context, it assumed nightmarish proportions.

On September 23, 2021, the child protection agency made the Shahs sign a document whose contents were in German and, took the baby away. The translator was Urdu-speaking and knew no Gujarati. The Gujarati-speaking Shahs don’t know Urdu. They know Hindi, though not enough to understand legalese.

The incident has since become a legal battle. It transpired that the visiting paternal grandmother had inadvertently caused the injury but was too embarrassed to speak up. The criminal case against the Shahs was closed post-investigation, but the civil custody case is on. In the meantime, somewhere in an undisclosed location, in foster care, their baby has started to walk.

The Shahs have their own set of complaints beginning with the removal of a breastfeeding baby from its mother; of language as a hurdle in communication at every step with every institutional set-up; of decreased frequency of permitted visitations and cultural obdurateness — their request to let the baby be raised on a vegan/vegetarian diet has been ignored.

A 7-year-old boy was found dead inside of a washing machine just hours after his parents reported him missing Thursday.

At about 5.20am Thursday, the parents of Troy Khoeler filed a missing persons report with police, Lt Robert Minchew of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said during a press conference.

When police officers arrived at the home of Troy’s parents in Spring, Texas, the distraught couple said the boy had been missing since about 4am.

After the parents partook in a brief interview for the missing persons report, deputies found there were ‘signs’ indicating that they should search the house in its entirety for the boy.

Minchew could not say what those signs were, or if it was standard procedure, but authorities also searched the immediate area outside the home for the boy.

The Punjab and Haryana High Court has ruled that a biological mother can also be an “adoptive mother”. The ruling came in a case where a woman’s plea for adopting her daughter from her first marriage, after she tied the knot again, was dismissed by a Bhiwani family court.

During the course of hearing, the Bench of Justice Ritu Bahri and Justice Ashok Kumar Verma was told that the biological parents got a divorce vide judgment and decree dated April 25, 2016, passed by Sonepat District Judge (Family Court).

Thereafter, the mother solemnised the second marriage in September 2017. The two then filed the application under the provisions of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act for the seven-year-old girl’s adoption.

Along with the application and other documents, permission/consent by the biological parents for surrendering the minor’s custody to the step-parent, duly allowed and “stamped by the seal” of the Bhiwani Child Welfare Committee, was placed on record.

The minor’s consent that she wanted to stay with the biological mother and her second husband was also placed on record. But the application was rejected on the ground that a biological mother cannot become a mother in “dual status” — a biological mother as well as adoptive mother.

Timeschange,systemschange. Weevolvefrom generationsto generations.

In nearly 15 years as a volunteer group, we have become a known value in the adoption world, where we

have given everyone the opportunity to give a voice around and for adoption and foster-related groups on

our platform. We want to make clear what adoption entails and what impact it has on the various parties.

We aim to strengthen international and domestic adoptions worldwide so that we can provide more

Gather as many of the approximately 4,000 Belgians adopted from South Korea as possible, and then look together at recently surfaced reportage images from more than forty years ago. That is what Yung Fierens wants to achieve. “These images show that people already knew what suffering was being done to us. It's time we finally get recognition for that."