It seems natural to know who your parents or grandparents are. Except for donor children like Jessie Kerkhove.

Today is Genetic Identity Day, the day to reflect on the importance of genetic identity. Many people do not think about it, because it is obvious where you come from. You know your parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents. But not everyone has that privilege. Think of adoptees and donor children (and other target groups whose right to genetic identity is violated).

This is a day to raise awareness. Primarily by the government. Last year we were given a towel for the bleeding and after a lot of work from the target groups and the initiators – for which all due respect – the Flemish Descendancy Center was created. This center provides psychological counseling to donor children, among others, and has set up a DNA database, which currently contains about twenty DNA samples. They also talk to fertility doctors and gynaecologists and give lectures to students.

Although these are certainly also important activities, this does not change anything for the (adult) donor children who are already there. The real changes must come from politics.

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Starting in 2023, Quebec parents who want to adopt a child internationally will be required to take a preparation program developed by the Ministry of Health and Social Services.

The first steps international adoption program was launched Monday morning in Montreal by junior health minister Lionel Carmant.

The preparatory course will be done entirely online through a series of nine episodes, including readings, videos and questionnaires, in order to allow prospective parents to follow the training at their own pace.

The program aims not only to equip parents with the intricacies of international adoption but also to allow them to evaluate themselves about the process.

The nine episodes include the basic motivation to adopt a child, the experiences of children in the adoption context, their social-emotional development and risk and protective factors. The episodes also discuss the child's pre-adoption experience and subsequent search for identity.

With the help of the Donorkind Foundation, donor children found ten fertility doctors in the past five years who used their own sperm without permission to conceive children with women who wanted to have children. Not all those cases have appeared in the media, board member Ester de Lau of the foundation told NU.nl.

Some cases, such as those of well-known sperm doctors such as Jan Karbaat, Jan Wildschut or Jos Beek, have been extensively in the news in recent years. These doctors used their own semen instead of the intended father's to father dozens of children. For example, Karbaat has at least 81 offspring, which increases the risk of love relationships between siblings.

Donorkind Foundation searches for fathers of donor children in commercial DNA databases. Over the past five years, they found a total of 150 to 200 fathers of thousands of children. De Lau finds it "difficult" that especially the donor doctors and their descendants receive a lot of attention in the press. "It is always very much about the abuses, while Monday (the Day of the Donor Child, ed.) is a day to celebrate."

At the same time, the abuses also generate more attention, concludes the board member. "Every time a doctor is in the news, we get a flood of applications from donor children." The attention also ensures that parents start talking to their children.

'Being the doctor is an extra handicap'

Abortion opponents say unwanted pregnancies should end in adoption. What happens when a child is given up? Here's everything you need to know:

Are all unwanted babies adopted?

No, despite a strong demand by couples who can't have children. In a leaked draft opinion of a Supreme Court decision that could enable state abortion bans, Justice Samuel Alito cited a 2002 federal report that the nearly 1 million Americans seeking to adopt far outstripped the "domestic supply of infants." A birth mother, he argued, thus "has little reason to fear that the baby will not find a suitable home." Only about 18,000 American infants are relinquished by new mothers each year, so it's true that there is strong competition for most of those babies through private adoptions or agencies. Directly paying for babies is illegal in every state, but adoptive parents and agencies enter into agreements with pregnant women that provide from $15,000 to $45,000 to cover their legal, medical, and other expenses. Still, not every child put up for adoption finds a good home.

What's the problem?

Adoptive parents generally want the youngest, healthiest, least troubled children possible. They also have clear racial preferences: New York University economist Allan Collard-Wexler found in 2010 that on average it was $8,000 more expensive to adopt a white baby than a Black one. Among babies adopted in 2020, according to Statista Research, 29,325 were white, 11,631 were Hispanic, 9,588 were Black, and 5,304 were mixed-race. The racial disparity may partly reflect the fact that Black teens are less likely to put babies up for adoption than white ones, and more likely to have family members raise an unwanted child. But it's also a product of the market pressures within the adoption industry, which is rife with profiteering and exploitation. Pregnant women who sign contracts to turn over their babies have reported being threatened with having to repay all costs if they back out. "Special needs" infants come at a major discount. Children that no one adopts often wind up in foster care. Today, approximately 400,000 children linger in the foster-care system.

(CNN) I've known for my whole life that I was adopted, although I didn't know all the details. Less than 48 hours after my birth, I was placed with the people I'd call my family the rest of my life. All I know about the young woman who gave birth to me decades ago is that she was single and that she felt ill-equipped to raise a child.

Adoption has featured prominently in the national discourse in the weeks since the leak of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade. I suspect that will continue to be the case as we get nearer to the formal Court ruling, which is expected sometime in June.

I was lucky to be adopted as a newborn, because it meant immediately joining my permanent family. As a result, being adopted has just been a quirky fact about me. My family is my family, just like everybody else's. Sometimes though, I still get questions about what it was like being adopted.

One particular question rankles me more than others, and it's one I still get more often than you might think: "Aren't you glad your birth mother carried you to term?" I am often asked, in other words, if I wasn't pleased that the woman who gave birth to me didn't opt to have an abortion instead.

It's a rather odd question: I find that people often look to those who have chosen to adopt children — or to people like myself who have been adopted — when seeking confirmation of their anti-abortion views.

Annie Goodchild, otherwise known as singer I Used To Be Sam, writes for PinkNews about their experience as a transracial adoptee and a queer, non-binary person of colour.

Adoption has a cruel and unique way of f**king up your identity.

Every time I think I’m getting a hold of who I am, I lose my footing and am yet again swept off course. I took one of those DNA tests a few years ago and it changed my life.

I confirmed my birth name was Samantha, not Annie, which I had been called for as long as I can remember. I also got an answer to a question I had been asking myself my whole life: “Does my birth mother want to meet me?”

The answer – a painful and clear no.

The fact that an adoption is difficult, adopted children have attachment problems and always want to find their biological parents, is not as easy as it seems, says Mirjam Postma. She was adopted from India as a baby of seven months and tells about it. Her adoptive parents are just her parents.

“Just because it's a success story doesn't mean it's always been easy,” Mirjam begins her story. “I just want to dispel the idea that all adopted children have attachment problems or want to find their biological parents. Of course there are many cases where it is, but it doesn't have to be an assumption.”

Mirjam is adopted when she is very small. “I think age matters a lot. As you get older, you may have a more active memory of the country of origin and that could be a bigger blow. I was only seven months old when I was adopted.”

'Put me a plate with stew and smoked sausage in front of me every day'

The feeling that is often described when it comes to adoption is: I feel different from my parents and other children, but Mirjam has never experienced that so strongly. “My parents have been very open about adoption from the start. Little by little I learned more about it if I wanted to. There has never been any mystery about it or there was a time when my parents finally told me. My brother and I have always been accepted in the village where I come from. Although we were one of the first adopted children, we weren't really bullied about it. I think that makes a big difference.”

Korean adoptee artists have garnered attention in the western countries where they live, but their works remain relatively unfamiliar to people in their country of origin. This obscurity isn't due to a lack of effort on the part of the adoptees. Despite their attempts to engage with Korean society, Koreans have yet to reciprocate in kind.

Therefore, the artistic endeavors brought to Korea represent more than the creative expressions of the individual artist's experience. They additionally serve as part of the collective discourse of adoptees and their attempts to cultivate a dialogue with Korean society. Whether through performances, paintings, or written words, these artists raise questions that often confront and challenge the dominant adoption narratives in Korea.

One such prevalent belief among people in Korea insists that if a person enjoys comfortable conditions in the present, then there's little need to broach questions about the past, including inquiries about one's roots.

This notion remains prominent in adoption representation, having been historically constructed first by adoption agencies and now reproduced by overly sentimental media portrayals of adoptees. However, the recent work of Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide) counters such accounts by employing art that unravels persistent untruths that adoptees are orphans, and she critically examines the colonial narratives around adoption. Her long-term project, "The Mother Mountain Institute," centers on the mothers who have been dehumanized and silenced by the lucrative transnational and transracial adoption industry.

In this installation, the audience listens to the testimonies of women whose children were stolen and trafficked. The film, "Brussels, 2016," shows a video letter from the artist to her mother in Korea and speaks about the processes of racialization towards citizens of color, including the experiences of racism experienced by adoptees in their predominantly white adoptive countries.

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TOKYO -- The word is spreading in Japan that becoming a foster parent is an option for members of sexual minorities including LGBT people who wish to raise children. The Mainichi Shimbun spoke with a lesbian couple who are considering fostering children.

Foster parents take children in who cannot live with their biological parents and need social care due to abuse, poverty, or other circumstances. The main requirements to become foster parents are that they complete foster parent training, and must not be in financial distress. There is no requirement to be legally married, and same-sex couples are not excluded.

Mari and Ayako (both pseudonyms), a female couple in their 50s living together in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo, met in their late 30s and have been together for about 15 years. Mari, who is older than Ayako, loves children, but considering her age and other factors she did not think she would ever have any. Ayako, on the other hand, had a strong desire to have children.

Same-sex marriage is not legal in Japan, but Mari and Ayako decided they wanted to spend their lives together as partners, and a few years ago had a wedding ceremony with close family. They learned about the foster parent system in late 2020, when they happened to come across some information in a local government magazine.

They realized that they might be able to have a child after all. They immediately contacted the local government's child consultation center. They went in to hear about the system, and told the staff there that they were a couple. They did not feel being a same-sex couple was any hinderance at the foster parenting course they took at a local children's home.