It is important that the child does not feel alone, says the organization Adoption og Samfund.

Adoptees may be affected by the fact that international adoptions to Denmark have ceased for the time being.

This is what the organization Adoption og Samfund says, after Denmark's only adoption agency, Danish International Adoption (DIA), stopped mediating adoptions from abroad to Denmark earlier this week. This means in practice that it is currently no longer possible to adopt from abroad.

The closure takes place after doubts have arisen about conditions surrounding international adoptions to Denmark. For example, some countries are suspected of committing fraud , while other examples show children being taken from their biological parents without consent .

Chile is no longer conducting a criminal investigation into possible child theft and illegal adoptions by a Dutch 'fake nun'. After the death of Truus Kuijpers last year, the Chilean investigating judge no longer decides whether she was guilty of this. His spokesperson told this site.

Adoption victims and interest groups are disappointed. They call on the Dutch government to conduct its own investigation, because new abuses continue to come to light about Kuijpers' adoption practices.

In Chile, a criminal investigation has been going on for years into the illegal adoptions of 20,000 children during the dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. Kuijpers, who ran a children's home there and falsely posed as a nun, was one of the suspects. Chilean mothers and adoptees accuse her of stealing children for adoption in the Netherlands. This would involve at least a hundred children.

According to investigating judge Jaime Balmaceda, five hundred cases are in a final phase and six hundred have been dismissed, including Kuijpers' case. She died exactly a year ago. "Due to her death, she is no longer a suspect and no statement will be made about her possible criminal liability," said a spokesperson for Balmaceda.

The Impilo Partners

Danish International Adoption (DIA)

Naledi Asbl Luxembourg

Eltern fur Kinder Osterreich (EfKO)

National Adoption Coalition South Africa (NACSA)

Genesis of the project:

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Over the last decades a significant number of international adoptions have taken place from abroad to France. More and more people adopted in the 80s, 90s or early 2000s feel the legitimate need to research their origins and access their right to identity.

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This research is a complex journey and not without risk. So being able to support them is today the great challenge to take up for the central authorities and all those involved in adoption as evidenced by recommendation number 31 of the special commission of July 2022 on the practical operation of the Hague Convention. 1993 on the protection of children and cooperation in matters of international adoption .

Many adoptees have a trauma behind them and feel different while growing up. When the outside world does not recognize their experiences, they join together and make each other aware - it's time they get society's support, writes Susanna Johansson.

They started adopting children from non-Western countries to Sweden in the 1950s. Sweden is one of the countries that has adopted the most children in the world per capita. Most adoptions have taken place via Adoptionscentrum and some have been done privately.

For about 7-8 years, adoption issues have been raised in the public conversation and in social media via research, books and articles by adoptees who have addressed the subject. In 2021, there was an impact with a series of articles in DN about adoption.

This is precisely why I make the comparison with the consciousness-raising political conversations of the 60s, when these radical feminist women's groups needed to share their individual experiences with each other in order to understand the extent of sexualized violence in heterosexual relationships and see that it was a structural problem.

In the same way, it is only when you as an adoptee talk to other adoptees, and when adoptees raise the issue from our perspective in the public conversation, that we become aware and take a closer look at our own experiences. Precisely because our experiences can then be problematized, mirrored, understood and reflected in conversations with others with similar experiences. The experience of living apart from other adoptees in our white families can be equated to being in the grip of perpetrators, like abused women in the 60s. A situation that has often made us blind to our own living conditions, which is also reinforced by the fact that our experiences are made invisible in the Swedish discourse on adoption. Our situation has become normalized for us as individuals living in our adoptive families.

A Thessaloniki appeals court has handed a lawyer a four-year suspended jail sentence on condition that he pay 3,000 euros to a children’s charity after finding him guilty of brokering illegal adoptions.

The case involves five illegal adoptions – one in 2014 and four in 2016 – where financially vulnerable women from Bulgaria were lured to come to Greece to give birth in private clinics and hand their babies up for adoption in return for a small fee.

The court found that the lawyer made over €32,000 from the adoptions, receiving payments ranging from €2,000 to 18,000 to his bank account.

The lawyer maintained his innocence throughout the trial and appeal. [AMNA]

By Vivian J. Salles Vieira Pinto

Introduction

The right to know is the core of the right to identity of adoptees, as it allows them to pursue their own biological information. The identity of one`s biological parent – a simple, straightforward information for many – is a significant missing piece in adoptees’ history. Questions such as: who are my biological parents? Where did I come from? Why was I put up for adoption? What is my family's medical history? These inquiries, though seemingly commonplace, underscore the profound impact of the right to know on adoptees' self-identity. While the legal definition of the right to know is still a matter of debate, this right seems to function as a mechanism for exercising the right to one's own identity. By exercising the right to know, the adoptee should be able to collect pertinent data to construct their own identity, which can be significantly compromised in adoption scenarios. The right to identity is a comprehensive and all-encompassing right that ensures individuals have the right to exist and enjoy their rights within society, including the right to have a name and surname, nationality, gender, and date of birth.

Unravelling the complexities, this blog post aims to shed light on the intricate interplay between the right to know of adoptees and the right to privacy of biological families in adoption scenarios, particularly concerning the role of the Australian Contact Veto Provision (CVP) in this context. In this regard, the Australian CVP in New South Wales is especially noteworthy. It is one of the few jurisdictions that enforce legislative measures to prevent adoptees from contacting their birth parents. This type of provision was also previously enacted in Tennessee and subsequently repealed in 2022, rendering it ineffectual due to its shortcomings. In 2001, Ireland attempted to implement a CVP in the Draft scheme of a bill on adoption information and post-adoption contact, which was later removed.

The right to know

On 16 January, Dansk International Adoption (DIA) announced that they are closing . For many years, they have been the only help for Danish parents who wanted to adopt children from abroad. Now they are gone, and the reasons for their closure are many. Consideration for the children's biological parents has, among other things, weighed heavily, as it has not been possible to ensure that the children were adopted away voluntarily. 

Whether the decision to close DIA is correct is up to the organization itself and the politicians to assess. But the closure has major consequences, especially for us Danish gays, who now lose our last opportunity to have children legally . We must therefore look for other solutions.

The childless have many opportunities for help in today's Denmark. We have one of the world's best health systems, where massive investments are made to help the childless realize their dream of a family. This is also of great socio-economic importance, as we as a country are dependent on the population multiplying. In the public health system, we therefore offer fertility treatment to heterosexual couples, lesbian couples and single women, including treatments with both egg and sperm donation. 

The news of a final stop to international adoptions has hit many hard.

A dream has been shattered for a family in Ågerup in Roskilde.

Lotte and Morten Skov Christensen have been waiting for five years to register as applicants for international adoption. 

But on Tuesday, the news came that DIA, the country's only mediator of international adoptions, has turned the key. This has happened following a series of sanctions from the Danish Appeals Agency and the Ministry of Social Affairs, Housing and the Elderly.

- We are very affected by it right now. I started to cry when I read the news, says Lotte Skov Christensen and continues: 

Last week, I shared about a childcare agency here in Negros Occidental who facilitated an adoption. A friend messaged me about the adoption process here in the Philippines and it made me realize that it will also be nice to write about this.

I had the chance the chance to interview Ms. Bahiyyih Ruth G. Robinson, also called Ms. Bai, the Social Welfare and Development (SWAD) Negros Occidental Team Leader, who has experience in adoption processes and other childcare protection programs in the Province of Negros Occidental.

She introduced me to the new adoption law, approved and signed by then President Rodrigo Duterte on January 6, 2022 and took effect on January 28, 2022.

Republic Act No. 11642, also known as the Domestic Administration Adoption and Alternative Child Act, authored by Senators Risa Hontiveros, Pia Cayetano and Grace Poe, will allow domestic adoption proceedings simpler and less costly. The law seeks to streamline alternative childcare services. This law continues to protect the best interests of the Filipino child and the process will be lessened from six years to approximately six months to three years.

The law declares that every child shall remain in the care and custody of his or her parents and should be provided with love, care, understanding and security towards the full and harmonious development of the child’s personality. When it is proven to be insufficient and no one can take the child from the extended family, adoption by unrelated person can be considered. (Complete information is available at Official Gazette of the Philippines website).