Jacqui McNeill was just 12 when her mom suddenly died of heart failure, but the child — one of 11 kids in total — didn't think twice about caring for her seven younger siblings.

Filled with anger and sorrow for years, Jacqui eventually found solace in her Irish Catholic faith and became closer to God, culminating in her decision to become a nun after high school. However, during her time in a religious community, she found that her desire to have her own child one day was too great to move forward with nunhood.

"You have to live a life of poverty and a life of celibacy for the church," says Jacqui, now 29, in this week's issue of PEOPLE. "People would come over and visit, and I would hold the babies the whole time or play with the kids. I would just cry when they left because it hurt so much to know that I was saying, 'I'm willing to not have kids in my life.'"

Inspired by the work of Mother Teresa, Jacqui decided to travel from her home in Ohio to India, where she worked for four months alongside children with disabilities at a foster home.

"I didn't understand how anybody could look at these kids and see anything but beauty, vulnerability and innocence," she says. "I would have brought them all back with me at 24 years old."

Vijaya, a woman hailing from Thiruvananthapuram is leading a life of loneliness and is seeking to adopt two youngsters to end her misery.

Thiruvananthapuram: Days that roll on without anything to do and anyone to keep her company. Vijaya, a woman hailing from Thiruvananthapuram, is leading a life of loneliness and is seeking to adopt two youngsters to end her misery.

This 62-year-old woman is in need of two kids who will bring back the light into her life. She is looking for youngsters above the age of 18 to be part of her family.

Vijaya lost both her daughters in a car accident. Her daughters aged 18 and 21 died in an accident during a family trip around 13 years back. She and her husband survived the accident. Vijaya lost her husband, a police officer, three years back due to heart attack. She has been leading a lonley life since.

She started thinking about adoption after she started sinking further down into solitude. Her relatives were very supportive of her decision. Considering the legal complications in adopting a child, she decided to adopt youngsters above the age of 18. This mother wants to adopt youngsters who are interested to study but are stuck without finding the proper resources to do so. She is also open to adopting orphaned kids.

AMERICA REFRAMED

Geographies of Kinship

BY DEANN BORSHAY LIEM. A MU FILMS PRODUCTION IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE CENTER FOR ASIAN AMERICAN MEDIA.

SEASON 10 EPISODE 5

GEOGRAPHIES OF KINSHIP weaves together the complex personal histories of four adult adoptees born in South Korea with the rise of the country’s global adoption program. Raised in foreign families, each adoptee sets out on a journey to return to their country of birth and map the geographies of kinship that bind them to a homeland they never knew. Along the way there are discoveries and dead ends, as well as mysteries that will never be unraveled.

A Japanese American veteran had the reunion of his life when he met seven of his siblings for the first time after undergoing a DNA test to find out more about himself.

Michael Bennett, 70, was born in Japan in 1951 to a Japanese mother, Yoshiko Nakajima, and an American father, Dick Webster, who served in the country after World War II.

Despite his attempts to stay in Japan, Webster was eventually forced to transfer back to the United States, leaving Nakajima alone with their son. Now a single mother with a mixed-race baby, she ultimately decided to give up their child for adoption.

Bennett arrived in the U.S. with his new American family in 1953. He grew up with knowledge of his biological parents and why his mother opted to have him adopted.

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Instead, they tell parliamentary panel to improve access to education to delay marriages

An umbrella body of child rights organisations set up by Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi, which appeared before the parliamentary panel studying the Bill on raising the age of marriage for women to 21 from 18 years, has opposed the move and emphasised the need to improve access to education to delay marriages.

The India Child Protection Forum [ICPF] comprising nearly 70 civil society organisations, represented by its convener Amod K. Kanth as well as Ravi Kant from the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation, made its submissions before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports headed by BJP MP Vinay Sahasrabuddhe on Monday.

The panel has been meeting NGOs for the past one week and is expected to submit its report in June. Last year, Parliament had sent the Prevention of Child Marriage Bill, 2021 to the Standing Committee after the Opposition parties expressed concerns over raising the age of marriage for women and demanded greater scrutiny of the proposed law.

The ICPF told the panel that the Prevention of Child Marriages Act, 2005 had failed to stop child marriages in the country, which was evident through the National Crime Records Bureau data which show that only 2,530 cases were registered under the Act between 2016 and 2020, while the National Family Health Survey-5 (2019-2021) indicated that 23.3% of women surveyed were married before attaining the legal age of marriage of 18.

Marieke Simons

Legal Adviser on Children's Rights and Juvenile Law

Lately there has been a lot of talk about out-of-home placements of children. Especially in the wake of the Allowance scandal. The Defense for Children's Children's Rights Helpdesk has seen for some time that – apart from the Allowance scandal – many things are not going well with regard to out-of-home placements. What's going well? What can be done better? And what does the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child say about this?

As a last (rescue) remedy

Every child has the right to grow up with his parents. This right is included in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. An out-of-home placement should therefore be seen as a last resort and must be necessary for the child's unthreatened development. A child may only be removed from home if there is no less invasive remedy. This is so because it makes a huge encroachment on the lives of parents and children. For example, help must first be made available in the home situation that is necessary to allow the child to grow up at home, in their own family. The parents have that right, but more importantly, the child has that right. Because growing up at home is often the best thing for a child.

A COURT ruling has held up the adoptions of ten Dorset children – although all will, or have now, been concluded successfully.

The case involved neighbouring Somerset Council and the way full medical reports on children being adopted are considered.

Executive director for Dorset’s children’s social services, Theresa Leavy, has told councillors that because of the legal finding there had been a ‘pause’ in ten Dorset cases but while their placement process had been interrupted, all had concluded successfully. She said that throughout the process the potential adopters had been kept fully informed about the court finding and how their cases were being progressed.

She was speaking about the Aspire adoption agency, which runs adoption services for both Dorset Council and neighbouring Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole.

Ms Leavy said the service had performed incredibly well during the past two, Covid, years managing to maintain a steady flow of adoptions despite the difficulties presented by the restrictions which had led to a slight fall in overall numbers.

Abstract

In their article on ‘Investigating historical abuses’ Yannick Balk, Georg Frerks and Beatrice de Graaf (2022) present an applied history of intercountry adoption to the Netherlands over the past 70 years and conclude that a moratorium on intercountry adoption is necessary because of the many adoption abuses. In this paper we comment on their aims, methods, results, and conclusions. Applied historical analysis without considering the numerous empirical studies on the effects of (de-)institutionalization is problematic if the application is to impact policy. Furthermore, using inaccessible archival material and opaque triangulation hinders replication. An estimate of the overall frequency of adoption abuses is absent. Any adoption abuse is a serious violation of children’s rights and needs to be addressed. However, we argue that their findings do not necessitate the recommendation to (temporarily) stop intercountry adoption at the expense of children in institutions for whom intercountry adoption would be the last resort.

Keywords: international adoption; abuses; institutionalization; policy; translational research; Dutch Committee Investigating Intercountry Adoption (CIIA)

1 Introduction

A recent estimate of numbers of children left in institutions worldwide was estimated in 2020 to be 7.5 million.1 The number of children who became orphans during the COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to be around 5 million since 2020, and still counting.2 In many cases the wider social network will take care of these children, but many others run the risk of ending on the street or in institutional care. The recent war raging in Ukraine might add to these numbers.3 From our recent meta-analyses commissioned by The Lancet Psychiatry, covering more than 300 studies in more than 60 countries across 70 years, we had to conclude that institutional care has a devastating impact on children in all developmental domains, ranging from physical and brain growth to socio-emotional development.4

Abstract

In their article on ‘Investigating historical abuses’ Yannick Balk, Georg Frerks and Beatrice de Graaf (2022) present an applied history of intercountry adoption to the Netherlands over the past 70 years and conclude that a moratorium on intercountry adoption is necessary because of the many adoption abuses. In this paper we comment on their aims, methods, results, and conclusions. Applied historical analysis without considering the numerous empirical studies on the effects of (de-)institutionalization is problematic if the application is to impact policy. Furthermore, using inaccessible archival material and opaque triangulation hinders replication. An estimate of the overall frequency of adoption abuses is absent. Any adoption abuse is a serious violation of children’s rights and needs to be addressed. However, we argue that their findings do not necessitate the recommendation to (temporarily) stop intercountry adoption at the expense of children in institutions for whom intercountry adoption would be the last resort.

Keywords: international adoption; abuses; institutionalization; policy; translational research; Dutch Committee Investigating Intercountry Adoption (CIIA)

1 Introduction

A recent estimate of numbers of children left in institutions worldwide was estimated in 2020 to be 7.5 million.1 The number of children who became orphans during the COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to be around 5 million since 2020, and still counting.2 In many cases the wider social network will take care of these children, but many others run the risk of ending on the street or in institutional care. The recent war raging in Ukraine might add to these numbers.3 From our recent meta-analyses commissioned by The Lancet Psychiatry, covering more than 300 studies in more than 60 countries across 70 years, we had to conclude that institutional care has a devastating impact on children in all developmental domains, ranging from physical and brain growth to socio-emotional development.4

Our Reporter

Dimapur, May 18 (EMN): The Ministry of Women and Child Development on Wednesday stated that there are 474 Specialised Adoption Agency (SAA) in the country, including four in Nagaland.

The Ministry in its Central Adoption Resource Information and Guidance System (Carings) portal revealed that among the Northeast states, Assam has the highest number of SSA with 20, Arunachal Pradesh has two, Manipur has nine, and Meghalaya has six, Mizoram has seven, Sikkim has three and Tripura has nine.

Maharashtra has the highest SSA in the country with 56 followed by Rajasthan with 35, and Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa with33 each. Himachal Pradesh has the least number of SAA in the country with just one SSA and 19 children.

As per the report, in the state-wise number of children in Specialised Adoption Agency, Maharashtra has the highest number of children with 1172 children in the 56 SAA, followed by Tamil Nadu which has 471 children in the 23 SAA, and Madhya Pradesh with 465 children in 33 SAA.