Pope Francis said Wednesday that people who adopt pets instead of children were exhibiting “a form of selfishness” as he presided over his first general audience of the new year.

“How many children in the world are waiting for someone to take care of them,” the pontiff said in a speech at the Vatican. “And how many spouses wish to be fathers and mothers but are unable to do so for biological reasons; or, although they already have children, they want to share their family’s affection with those who have been left without.”

Francis’ catechism lesson focused on the figure of Joseph, who Francis said was the “foster father” of Jesus.

Repeating his call for couples to have more children to address the “demographic winter” in much of the West, he said those who can’t have children should be open to adoption.

Today “we see a form of selfishness ... We see that people do not want to have children,” he said.

If biological babies are not on the cards – sometimes it’s a choice one makes – adoption could be. But, taking on a child not biologically yours can prove challenging. We asked the experts about things to consider before making that commitment. Here’s what they had to say.

1. Why do you want a child? Lavina Ahuja, clinical psychologist at the German Neuroscience Center, says both partners need to think about this. Why do you want to adopt? Is it because you want a child or because you want to be parent? Or is it because you feel it will change your dynamics or relationship with the world?

2. Mourning: Asma Geitany, Clinical Psychologist at Openminds center, says: “In case of infertility, have you and your partner, grieved the chance of having a biological child?” Finding closure isn’t easy, but it is important when it comes to de-clogging your mind and heart and making space for a new person.

3. Biological hang-ups: she adds, “Can you share your love with a kid who is not biologically yours?”

4. Consider past traumas: Can you provide a safe and stable environment? Ask yourself, says Geitany, “How are you as a person, psychologically? Do you have any trauma from your past which have a huge negative impact on your life? Is your relationship with your partner stable? You have a welcoming family-oriented relationship?”

Opaque international adoption procedures have led to a family drama: children separated from their parents, siblings scattered all over the world and lives wrecked. Corrupt networks facilitate these illegal adoptions. Today, the law has been revised to better protect children and families, and separated children are trying to reunite with their families.

By Nadia Raonimanalina and Elise Nandrasanela

2017-014 Law of 6 July 2017 defines the procedures, general terms, conditions, financial contributions related to adoption. The rationale for this law states that “Adoption is a measure of child protection when a child cannot grow up in his or her family of origin or cannot be entrusted to a member of his or her extended family or to a substitute family, such as a foster family.”

In the child’s best interests and with respect for his or her fundamental rights, adoption provides a child deprived of family and parental care with a permanent and definitive solution for growing up in a family environment. However, the response to the child’s right must be first and foremost a national solution so that the break with the child’s environment of origin is limited as much as possible.

Can we still talk about the best interests of the child and the respect of his or her rights if the latter has been taken away from his or her biological parents with a view to adoption and the related procedures have been ambiguous? Between national or international involuntary adoption and child trafficking, there are only narrow boundaries.

Over four decades, he worked as a celebrity faith healer in Abadiânia, a small town in central Brazil.

It was there - conducting bizarre and unproven medical procedures - that João Teixeira de Faria became known as John of God, building a legion of believers across the world, including a band of loyal followers in Australia who were happy to open their wallets for his supposed miracle-giving touch and ethereal blessings.

Each week, people from all corners of the globe flocked in their thousands to John of God's compound, Casa de Dom Inacio, 130km south-west of Brasilia.

There, dressed in all white, many hoped to find a cure for cancer, blindness or to stand and rise from their wheelchairs.

Faria's rising fame was elevated to a new trajectory, courtesy of some Hollywood star dust, when Oprah Winfrey came calling in 2010 for a series titled "Do You Believe in Miracles?"

We were noticed. We were ignored. We were stared at. We were talked about. We were asked questions. We asked questions. We were welcomed. We became involved and participated. We became friends. We learned about India, its diversity, its people, its traditions, its culture, and its religions. We traveled around India. We celebrated being an Indian American family. We were two white American parents with one, then two, then three kids from Calcutta, and eventually with one through birth and one from China (which then made us an Indian-Chinese-American family). We were a transracial, transcultural family and we were unlike the majority of families that we saw every day. That was an important piece of our familial identity, one we could not and chose not to ignore.

From the day my then-husband and I decided to adopt from India, I was excited and began reading and researching everything I could about this country I’d only heard about through television and a few stories I’d read as a young girl. I had never met anyone from India, but when we decided that our first child would be from there, I started noticing every family in which the children did not look like the parents (i.e., white parents with non-white kids), and I especially was on the alert for anyone who might be from India: people with darker skin than me, women with that little dot on their forehead and wearing a lot of fabric wrapped around them like a dress, men who maybe wore a tunic top. Whether I was at the grocery store or on the university campus or at an art show, or anywhere in public, I was watching. I wanted to run up to each person I thought might be from India and ask them if they were and share with them my excitement that we were adopting a child from “their” country. But I didn’t. I stayed quiet, just observing, listening, and reading.

Honor Their Country of Birth

I especially focused on books, magazines, and newspaper articles having anything to do with India. Record albums and cassette tapes of musicians from India (mainly ragas and Ravi Shankar at first) found their way into my music collection. At that time, there were no Indian restaurants within 90 minutes of our home, and I was not even aware of Indian food, anyway. However, the orphanage staff in Calcutta did their best to educate us about the city our kids would be coming from. One of the most important pieces of advice we received from the adoption agency in Oregon and the orphanage in India was that we owed it to our children to honor their country of birth and to learn as much as we could about their country of origin. I took that to heart, but I wasn’t sure at first what else we needed to do. The orphanage staff also sent waiting adoptive parents a list of Indian names with their meanings and asked that we consider giving our children either a first or middle name from India.

After our first child, Dana Tarun, joined our family, I got busy figuring out, along with another adoptive mom whose child came the week before mine, what other things we had to start doing. Thus began an amazing journey as a mom and as a young woman, a journey that created, and continues to create, immense joy in my life.

Improving the adoption process and long-term outcomes for everyone impacted by adoption will require legislative action by Congress to address key issues. In the January 2022 issue of the Adoption Advocate, we break down NCFA’s legislative priorities for the year to explain four pending and future bills that can make adoption better and how advocates can take action to understand the issues and engage with their members of Congress.

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In any given session of Congress, thousands of bills are proposed, and of those, hundreds are reviewed, marked up, and voted on. While these bills address a variety of critical issues, we believe that Congress should prioritize the expedient passage of laws that cultivate a society that affirms the human right of every child to thrive in a permanent, loving family and removes unnecessary barriers to adoption. For hundreds of thousands of children in the U.S. and around the world, adoption is the only pathway to the family they deserve. As a longstanding national adoption advocacy organization, the National Council For Adoption (NCFA) has identified four critical pieces of legislation that we believe Congress should pass in 2022 to effect positive changes in the adoption system and move more children to permanency in a timely manner.

None of these bills on their own will create the type of reforms and policy changes that are needed to address the full scope of the problem. But taken together, with bold Congressional leadership, engaged grassroots advocates, and actionable commitment from policymakers and regulators to removing the barriers to adoption, we can make significant progress for the children and youth who are counting on us.

Restore Integrity to America’s Promise of a Permanent Home

I shouldn’t ever take my adoptive parents for granted. Life hasn’t been perfect since I was adopted. But I wouldn’t change how it has played out for anything.

Thanks to advances in DNA testing and a dash of Hollywood theatrics (I’m looking at you, “Lion”), there has been an increased discussion and focus among Indian adoptees wanting to find their biological parents and other family members.

However, I have never been or will ever be one of those adoptees. While I completely understand and support the desire to know and possibly reconnect with biological relatives, in my mind my adoptive family is my one and only family.

Truth be told, the only time in my life I’ve wondered about my biological parents was in elementary school when I still had dreams of being a professional basketball player. I just wanted to know how tall my parents were — in hopes that maybe I’d grow a few inches taller. Alas, that was not meant to be.

A large reason for my lack of interest in searching for my biological family is because my adoptive parents did one thing very well: they did their best to keep me and my siblings aware of and connected to my heritage.

The Swedish government is opening an investigation into thousands of forced adoptions during the Chilean dictatorship

BARCELONA “You will never see your child again. It's somewhere in Europe. " With these words, Clas Lindholm's mother learned that she had been deceived and that her newborn son had been stolen. Lindholm, who arrived in Sweden in 1975 at just a few weeks old, discovered when she was 43 that her mother had not abandoned her, but that behind her adoption was a darker story. He is one of more than 2,000 victims of a perverse diplomatic campaign by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet to improve his international image, which, four decades later, also makes Sweden blush.

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From 1 January 2022, adoptive parents can no longer submit a request to have data from before the adoption removed from the personal list of the adopted child. Only the adopted child (aged 16 or older) can make such a request. This change ensures that the 'pedigree data' of the child (BRP data from before the adoption) can no longer be removed from the BRP by someone else.

It is therefore no longer possible for adoptive parents to have data from before the adoption removed from the personal list of the child. This concerns, among other things:

the (previous) name;

one or both parents;

the nationality and/or historical address details lost during adoption.

Highlights

Across the European Union (EU), hundreds of thousands of children live in residential institutions. Children with disabilities are among the groups of children over-represented in the still existing large institutions in Europe. The impact of institutionalization is severe and can last a lifetime. The EU and its Member States are commited to supporting the transition from institutional to care that is family and community-based, also known as deinstitutionalisation (DI). Supporting this transition requires evidence-based and informed DI policies and enhanced child protection monitoring and evaluation frameworks and data systems.

UNICEF’s Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia (ECARO) has identified the transition from institutional care to family and community-based care (de-institutionalization) as a regional flagship area of intervention. Part of this work focuses on strengthening the measurement of progress towards deinstitutionalisation and of outcomes for children in care and careleavers across Europe. This requires strengthening the evidence on these groups of children to support the EU and Member States in making informed decisions around key policy priorities such as the European Child Guarantee, focused on breaking the cycle of poverty and social exclusion.

In an effort to further understand alternative care data systems in Europe and the statistics that these systems produce, and help governments and the EU make informed decisions, UNICEF and Eurochild jointly carried out the DataCare project to map alternative care data and data systems across the 27 Member States of the European Union (EU-27) and the United Kingdom (UK). Over 50 experts across Europe collected data and information which was analysed by the research team comprised of UNICEF, Eurochild members and the Eurochild Secretariat.

This was informed by learnings and the ongoing work with Transformative Monitoring for Enhanced Equity (TransMonEE); a research programme initiated and managed by the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre and transferred to UNICEF ECARO in 2007, with the aim of strengthening research-policy work linkages. The database contains over 500 social and economic indicators including indicators on child protection. Data covers the period from 1989 to the present day, with disaggregated data for many indicators available since 2005. The database is updated yearly due to collaboration with national statistical offices in 29 countries (including 11 EU Member States) and other international databases. In recent years, child protection indicators have been reviewed and refined in consultation with TransMonEE members and regional experts.