SOME SURVIVORS OF mother and baby homes and county homes want financial compensation, access to medical care, counselling and housing supports as part of a redress scheme that will be drawn up by the government.

Others want a national day of remembrance to be established, as well as memorials at the sites of former institutions and a national archive where their personal stories can be accessed for educational and research purposes (once consent is given by individuals).

Some survivors have also called on the government to take legal action against the religious orders who ran the institutions if they refuse to pay financial compensation.

A number of religious orders have apologised for their role in running the institutions in question. The government has asked them to contribute to the redress fund.

“Engagement with religious orders is ongoing in relation to how they can contribute,” a spokesperson for the Department of Children told The Journal.

Atide of emotion swept over Claire Martin as she stood alone in the concrete stairwell of a bland residential block off a busy Kowloon intersection. Then, just as she did almost 60 years earlier, when she had been left there by her mother as a newborn, she burst into tears.

“Being on that staircase was an extraordinary moment,” she says. “I thought of my adoptive father. He always wanted to help me find my birth family but he couldn’t, and it would have been wonderful if he had been there with me.”

After a lifetime of wondering, Martin had finally found the place where she’d last felt her mother’s touch. The discovery that she had been left on the first-floor landing of a block of flats gave her a measure of comfort.

“Some babies were found in graveyards,” she says, “but my mother was expecting me to be found quickly.”

Martin considers herself one of the lucky ones, and with good reason. Hundreds of babies, most of them girls, were abandoned in Hong Kong as mothers, desperate and starving, fled across the border from China to escape the Great Famine that killed tens of millions of people between 1959 and 1961.

Ulla Essendrop, who has put "Aftenshowet" on pause and has hosted DR Nyhederne, was born in Calcutta and came to Denmark as an adopted child when she was almost three years old. Only after she herself has become a mother does the past she does not know begin to call.

Ulla Essendrop has one image.

That's all she has from her first three years of life, or exactly: From her first two years and ten months, which is the part of her life she spent in an orphanage in Calcutta until she was adopted by a pair of musicians from Aalborg district Skalborg and came to grow up in Denmark.

A picture showing herself as a little girl in a black and white picture.

With thin legs. A small, dear face that looks seriously into the camera. And wearing a short, nice dress with braces.

Should adoption records be open? Several adoptees, birth parents and others offer their personal, often moving stories.

To the Editor:

Re “I Was Denied My Birth Story,” by Steve Inskeep (Op-Ed, March 28):

I was so moved by Steve Inskeep’s story because it was in many ways similar to my own. I, too, was born in 1968 and adopted as a 3-month-old baby but never knew who my biological parents were. Alabama’s records were closed until 2000. I was unaware that they had been opened until I went to order extra copies of my birth certificate and was given the option of obtaining my original birth records.

Needless to say, I was not prepared for the experience of opening those birth records. After a first hungry perusal I sobbed uncontrollably for a good five minutes. Here she was, named on a piece of paper, and only 16 at the time. How awful it must have been for her to be sent from her home in one city to another city where there was a Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers.

Every few years, Levvel, who provides specialist youth care in Amsterdam and surrounding municipalities, has to deal with a newborn foundling. After the discovery of a child has been reported, Levvel (formerly Spirit and de Bascule) immediately calls in crisis foster parents and care providers to receive the foundling.

Behavioral scientist Monicque van Kemp, also a child and adolescent psychologist, and Nathalie Schlattmann, clinical psychologist at Levvel have more than twenty years of experience in guiding and treating children and (foster) parents. They cannot comment on the situation of the baby who was found in a container in Southeast a few weeks ago for privacy reasons. They do want to say that they were touched by the article they read in Het Parool containing the reaction of the firefighter who saved the baby and bumped it against him.

Van Kemp: “That is the best response you could wish for. A baby that has been abandoned will initially receive a negative message: I am not wanted. It is very good for a firefighter to immediately bump a baby into his body, because he immediately feels that it is welcome, that it is allowed to be there. A child feels that. "

Schlattmann: “A remote child gets a false start to life. You hope that someone will immediately embrace such a child. The negative feeling of its start thus becomes less dominant. You hope that the positive will predominate, followed by an embrace by nurses and foster parents. You hope that a new story will begin. ”

What does a child hear about the difficult start to his life?

A large number of adoption files that are still managed by the Child Protection Board (RvdK) should have been transferred to the National Archives (NA) years ago. In accordance with the Archives Act 1995, these files have been designated as permanent storage.

The Government Information and Heritage Inspectorate investigated this and published a report .

The files generally contain the documents that show the process of a mother giving up her child. They are formed as family files, so that the file always contains personal – and sometimes very sensitive – information from and about several people. In any case, information about the child, the biological mother and the adoptive parents and possibly also about other family members such as brothers and sisters.

Partial inspection

The Child Protection Board itself now grants partial inspection of these adoption files on the basis of permission, in particular from the biological mother. In order to prevent an invasion of privacy, the National Archives carefully implements the provision in the Archives Act regarding 'respect for privacy', but does not make parts of the file available for inspection to those involved, but always the entire file. . This working method prevented the RvdK from complying with the transfer obligation.

Taipei, April 1 (CNA) In order to seek a change in existing laws which forbid same-sex couples from adopting children, three gay couples and rights groups pledged to take their cases to court Thursday.

Currently, the same-sex marriage law only allows a homosexual person to adopt the biological child of their partner, said Jennifer Lu (???), executive director of the Taiwan Equality Campaign (TEC), at a press conference Thursday.

Married homosexual couples do not have the legal right to adopt non-biologically-related children, unlike heterosexual couples, Lu said.

Gay rights groups are seeking a change to this "unreasonable" treatment of gay couples by taking legal action, added Lu.

In addition to TEC, Taiwan Tongzhi (LGBTQ+) Hotline Association and Taiwan LGBT Family Rights Advocacy also expressed solidarity.

February 2021 was an awful month for intercountry adoptions. First, the Netherlands suspended them, then social development declared that children are better off in institutional care in South Africa than in family care outside the country. Without evidence, both decisions have been deemed in children’s best interests. But, has anyone asked the children?

It’s been almost two months since the Netherlands’ shock decision to halt all intercountry adoptions. The unilateral decision by then Minister of Legal Protection Sander Dekker, in response to the Joustra Committee’s report on the issue, is temporary and will not affect adoptions currently in process.

But experts warn that in an election year it may be months before a new government is able to re-evaluate the ban, and that because intercountry adoptions are so lengthy, delaying the screening of new adoptive parents may result in children spending much longer in institutional care.

The committee uncovered massive adoption abuse between 1967 and 1998 in five sending countries – Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka – including corruption, falsified documents, officials forcing birth parents to give up their children in return for payment or through coercion, child trafficking, baby farming and obscuring children’s identities.

It also drew the startling conclusion that the Dutch government and Dutch intermediaries were aware of and involved in the abuses, that the government did not effectively tackle them and that the abuses (unsurprisingly) had a negative effect on birth families, adoptive parents and, most importantly, adoptees.

Authority

Court of Amsterdam

Date of judgment

10-12-2020

Date of publication

With the adoption assistance law , new regulations for adoption mediation come into force on April 1st. The law, which is based on findings from adoption research, largely implements the demands of the federal states and adoption placement practice. Many of the improvements that promote openness in particular during adoptions and strengthen the position of parents of origin also correspond to the recommendations of the 9th Family Report .

Federal Minister for Family Affairs Franziska Giffey:

"The new adoption assistance law takes a closer look at the needs of families and modernizes the adoption system: All adoptive families, the families of origin and above all the children can finally get the help and support they need more easily. The innovations improve advice and education of the child and the structures of placement. And there are now more binding guidelines for adoptions abroad in order to protect children from human trafficking. Many families and specialists in adoption placement have been waiting for all of this for a long time. As Federal Family Minister, it is particularly important to me: The new adoption assistance -The law ensures that adopted children grow up well, can go their own way and get to know their roots. "

The four building blocks of the Adoption Assistance Act

The Adoption Assistance Act consists of four components :