For as long as she can remember, Maria Diemar has known she was adopted. Her Swedish parents were always open about her Chilean heritage, and growing up in Stockholm in the 1970s and 80s with brown skin and dark hair, it was impossible not to notice she was different.

When she was 11, Diemar’s parents showed her the papers that arrived with her in Sweden as a two-month-old baby in 1975. The file on her parentage offered a brief, unflattering portrait of a teenage mother who sent her newborn girl to be raised by strangers on the other side of the world. “They said she was a live-in maid, that she had a son who lived with her parents, and that she was poor,” recalled Diemar.

In her mid-20s, Diemar went looking for her mother. She contacted the Adoption Centre, the Swedish NGO that had organised her adoption. Sweden has one of the highest per-capita international adoption rates in the world, and in the 90s, the agency had launched a programme that helped adoptees reunite with their biological families. But they had no information on Diemar’s mother.

In 1998, she flew to Chile, requesting help from various sources: child welfare services, the family court that approved her adoption, the hospital where she was born, the civil registry. But none of them provided any information. When she visited the courthouse in Temuco, the nearest city to her birthplace, a court clerk stood in front of her, holding her file in hand, leafing through the ageing papers, and refused to give her so much as a peek. She left Chile empty-handed, but still determined to find her mother. “I came home with more questions,” Diemar said, “but I felt I had got closer to my family. I just needed to find them.”

A few years later, in the winter of 2002, Diemar heard about a Swedish TV documentary series that featured two adoptees searching for their biological families in Chile. Shortly before, Diemar had been given a promising lead: Chile’s National Children’s Service had come up with a possible address for her mother. Seizing on this new possibility, Diemar contacted Ana Maria Olivares, a Chilean journalist who had contributed to the documentary, to ask for help.

Hollywood star Jane Russell’s adoption of an Irishwoman’s child in the 1950s nearly ended the actress’s career.

Russell had already adopted a girl with her husband, NFL quarterback and kicker Bob Waterfield, but wanted to expand their family, according to the Journal.ie. News of the star’s desire for another child reached Hannah McDermott, a Derrywoman then living in London with her husband and young son. Reportedly Hannah offered her custody of baby Thomas on condition that Jane and Bob provided him with a good home, love and education.

When the news made the papers the controversy rippled across the world and young Hannah suddenly found her home in London besieged by photographers.

Local historian Willie Deery told the Belfast Telegraph he believes Hannah was motivated out of love for her child, “Hannah came in for a lot of criticism, but I think what she did was out of love for her child.

“And the adoption caused Jane Russell all sorts of grief. Howard Hughes thought all the bad Press would finish her and he ordered her to return the boy, but she stood her ground and refused to give up the child.”

When Consul General Remco van Wijngaarden walks down the street with his family in his hometown of Shanghai, it sometimes happens that someone walks into a lamp post in surprise. It is therefore a special spectacle by Chinese standards: the tall, white Remco and his half-Vietnamese man Carter have three children: Ella (almost 4) has a dark skin color, the twins Lily and Cooper (almost 2). is mixed white-Asian.

It has been a few years since Remco and his husband Carter, together with daughter Ella, exchanged the 'safe Amsterdam-Center' for gay people for Shanghai. In China, a 'fascinating, beautiful country', according to Remco, homosexuality is not prohibited by law, but much remains to be done to ensure its acceptance. That is why Remco sometimes has to 'go back in the closet' to do his job properly.

'Every gay man experiences'

He puts that into perspective himself. "Everyone who is gay goes through that, I think, that you just hide that you are in a relationship with someone of the same sex. That certainly does not feel good, but then you have to think of the greater importance."

It also happens that he receives a gift 'for his wife' through his work. "But that also happens in the Netherlands. The first time I received an invitation in China for me and my 'husband', it felt like a small victory."

EurAdopt Conference

VIGTIGT - EurAdopt Conferences udsættes til 2022

The 14th international EurAdopt Conference with the theme: “Bæredygtighed i international adoption”, the oprindeligt var planlagt til at skulle være afholdt i maj 2020, blev udsat til april 2021 pga. COVID-19, he atter udsat!

Efter the anden bølge af Covid19 har ramt Europa, har arrangørerne meets the vanskelige beslutning endnu en gang at udskyde begivenheden til afholdelse torsdag 28th and Friday 29th April 2022 at Hotel Scandic Sydhavnen, Sydhavns Plads, 2450 København.

Læs mere her: https://www.d-i-a.dk/euradopt/

Olivia* was sat in her conservatory last May, looking out into the garden, when she realised she was ready to adopt. She’d been furloughed for three months, and the lengthy haze her abusive ex-girlfriend left behind had finally cleared. Feeling uncertain and hopeful, she caught sight of a sign, perched there on the fence. “A sparrow and a blue tit,” she beams. “I hadn’t actually seen birds in my garden for years because of construction work going on around the area. It just seemed to be a symbol of hope, really, in amongst the pandemic. That I was hoping to adopt two children and suddenly, there’s these two little birds outside.”

The 34-year-old decided to take the leap after the pandemic wrung all notions of what if from her head. “Nobody expected this time last year for the pandemic to get as bad as it did, and as it is now. You can spend your whole life saying, ‘Well, I’ll just wait until...’ And then ‘until’ never comes,” says Olivia. “With plenty of time to apply to adopt and go through the process without the pressure of having to do it around work, I thought, ‘When am I going to get another opportunity to do this?’”

Adoption interest rates are buoyant for the first time in half a decade. Since lockdown was first implemented in March, Adoption UK has seen traffic on prospective adopter web pages surge by 63 per cent. For agencies such as One Adoption West and Adopt South West, interest has doubled since the pandemic began, with other agencies across the country observing similar waves of applicants. It comes as a welcome shock to a sector grappling with a sharp decline in adoptions since 2015.

“We went into 2020 with an adopter shortfall,” Sue Armstrong Brown, chief executive of Adoption UK tells British Vogue. “So children in care waiting for adopters, and not enough adopters. The pandemic started, and everybody was deeply concerned about that. But what we actually saw was really surprising, and extremely encouraging.”

Brown suspects that a slower societal pace has allowed more scope for reflection. “It appears that the lockdown and the disruption to the world caused by coronavirus has actually been prompting people to think about what really is important in their lives. I think people have, for better or for worse, been forced to step out of their normal lives, and think about what they would really value doing.”

MUMBAI: A city couple on Friday alleged the child welfare committee (CWC) took away their “adopted” infant and kept her in “illegal detention”. They have sought orders to be reunited with the baby, now aged two.

The childless couple said they had adopted a newborn from a single woman under provisions of Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act (HAMA) through an adoption deed in January 2019. That June, CWC filed a criminal case against them and “immediately took” the child from their legal custody, they alleged. Currently, the child is being looked after by a trust that runs a “specialised adoption agency”, said their petition.

CWC is a statutory body set up under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection ) Act as an authority to deal with children in care of protection. The petition alleged CWC has acted “arbitrarily” and “high-handedly” out of “mere ignorance of law” six months after the child was “adopted”. Parting the child has deprived her of her fundamental right to life as well as “love and affection of the adoptive parents,’’ said the couple.

The couple filed a habeas corpus petition (to seek production of somebody from illegal detention or custody) through advocate Siddharth Jagushte and senior counsel Raja Thakare. The advocates mentioned it before a Bombay high court bench of Justices S S Shinde and Manish Pitale at a virtual hearing on Friday. The biological mother, represented by advocate Tusshar Nirbhavane, used to work as a domestic help and had entered into the ‘adoption deed’’, is the contention. The couple said they performed a handing over ceremony for the child.

Thakare said two important legal questions are involved, including whether adoption under HAMA can be “trifled with’’ when JJ Act recognises it and if Section 80 can be invoked when a valid adoption deed exists.

Mumbai: A city couple on Friday alleged the child welfare committee (CWC) took away their “adopted” infant and kept her in

“illegal detention”. They have sought orders to be reunited with the baby, now aged two.

The childless couple said they had adopted a newborn from a single woman under provisions of Hindu Adoption and

Maintenance Act (HAMA) through an adoption deed in January 2019. That June, CWC filed a criminal case against them and

“immediately took” the child from their legal custody, they alleged. Currently, the child is being looked after by a trust that runs

Kim Ju-won (left) and Park Sun-min (right) say same-sex couples in South Korea are excluded from incentives to start families.

Lee Hyeon-ju and her husband Choi Kyu-ho have been helping out at her grandmother’s dried fish business on weekends.

The couple married in 2019, and live in Pohang on South Korea’s east coast. They’re already making plans to travel overseas once the pandemic is over.

Lee and Choi, both 29, have a secret that they are keeping from some members of their family — they don’t plan to have children. Lee said that revelation would be very disappointing to her husband's parents who expect her to produce a grandson for them.

South Korea has the world’s lowest fertility rate, and in 2020, its population shrank. The government plans to increase financial incentives for married couples to have babies, but that excludes nontraditional families such as same-sex couples and single parents.

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Cites 4 docs

Section 37 in The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000

Section 36 in The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000

The Children Act, 1960

In a case regarding the custody of a 13-year-old boy, heard as a habeas corpus petition by his biological parents accusing his uncle and foster father of kidnapping and keeping the child in illegal custody, a division bench of the Gujarat High Court gave priority to the child’s desire and directed that the child may continue in the custody of his foster father, in an order dated January 19.

The boy, born to a Botad couple in 2006, was adopted by his father’s sister and her then husband. The adoption was formalised by December 2008. However, the couple who adopted the boy divorced by mutual consent in July 2019 and it was agreed upon that their child will continue with the foster mother and the adoption deed would be revoked.

Read |CBI nabs 2 for selling child sexual abuse material through social media

The custody was thus handed over to the foster mother and biological parents. The child was residing at Patdi in Surendranagar since the age of two years until 12 years. He was attending school and had friends in the locality. However, he was taken to his foster mother’s native place in Botad where the child found it difficult to adjust. His schooling was interrupted with no school admission processed by the biological parents.

“The biological mother and the foster mother voluntarily called up the foster father and asked him to take away child… as he was not able to adjust to the new place,” advocate Amrita Ajmera, representing the foster father, submitted before the court, in response to the habeas corpus petition moved by the biological parents in December 2020, seeking that their child be produced before the court.