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.

PHOENIX (AP) — A former Arizona politician must report to prison Thursday to begin serving the first of three sentences for running an illegal adoption scheme that paid pregnant women from the Marshall Islands to come to the U.S. to give up their babies.

Paul Petersen, a Republican who served as Maricopa County assessor for six years and also worked as an adoption attorney, was sentenced to six years after pleading guilty in federal court in Arkansas to conspiring to commit human smuggling.

Petersen, who has acknowledged running the adoption scheme, is awaiting sentencing in state courts in Arizona for fraud convictions and in Utah for human smuggling and other convictions. Sentencing dates have not yet been set for those cases.

Prosecutors have said Petersen illegally paid women from the Pacific island nation to give up their babies in at least 70 adoption cases in Arizona, Utah and Arkansas. Marshall Islands citizens have been prohibited from traveling to the U.S. for adoption purposes since 2003.

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From: MBX Euro-Ombudsman

Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2021 at 20:08

Subject: Complaint 202100127?- Acknowledgement of receipt [CMSEO]:0034754

To: Arun DOHLE

European Ombudsman

---------- Forwarded message ---------

From: ACT

Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2021 at 13:30

Subject: Fwd: reply from ambassador

To:

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court Thursday said it would hear next week a plea seeking a direction to the Centre to remove "anomalies" in the grounds of adoption and guardianship and making them uniform for all citizens.

The plea came up for hearing before a bench, comprising Chief Justice S A Bobde and Justices A S Bopanna and V Ramasubramanian, which said that the matter be listed next week.

The plea, filed by advocate and BJP leader Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, has sought to declare that the "discriminatory grounds" of adoption and guardianship are violative of Articles 14, 15, 21 of the Constitution and also to frame "uniform guidelines" for adoption and guardianship for all citizens.

Article 14 of the Constitution deals with equality before the law, Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth and Article 21 deals with protection of life and personal liberty.

The plea, filed through advocate Ashwani Kumar Dubey, has alleged that current practice of adoption is blatantly discriminatory as Hindus have a codified law of adoption but Muslims, Christians and Parsis don't.