Activists seek a central adoption registry
Activists seek a central adoption registry
M Ramya, TNN, Jan 28, 2010, 04.49am IST
CHENNAI: When they gather enough strength to confront the most basic of questions — who am I, where did I come from — time would have consumed their childhood. The emotional pull to find answers grows with those who have been put up for inter-country adoption that one day they embark on a journey to an alien land, scouting for their parents, clenching a pack of sketchy letters and greying pictures, and placing their bets on luck.
To make parent-hunting a much more smoother affair, activists have been rooting for a central adoption registry that will maintain the names of the biological parents giving their child for adoption to foreign parents. Esther, who was adopted by a Belgian couple, would have been spared of the wanderings in Chennai in search of her mother and sister had there been a registry. A comprehensive central adoption registry will allow children to trace their roots later if they are so inclined, and enable their biological parents to reconnect with their past.
"Esther was given up for adoption in 1985, much before the guidelines for adoption were drawn up. But there are more recent cases where tracing biological parents have been futile. When I tried to help trace a person's biological parent, I failed for want of available records. The adoption agency concerned, which could have had the details, had closed down," says Andal Damodaran, former chairperson of the Central Adoption Resource Agency and current honorary general secretary of the Tamil Nadu Indian Council for Child Welfare.
It helps even if the particular private adoption agency shuts down, and also records the actual source of the children put up for adoption, she said. "It's not in three or four years that a child will come searching for his or her parents. It's after they become adults that they start thinking about it. The records should be available to them then, irrespective of whether the respective adoption agency is still functioning or not," she said.
The current process for putting up a child for adoption requires the biological mother to appear before the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) and sign papers to surrender the child. The CWC can try counselling the parent into keeping the child. Activists feel that when a mother surrenders the child, she should be given the option of allowing the child to trace her when the child is older and her contact details recorded for the purpose. "There have been cases where the mother has been coerced into giving up the child for adoption. She may be illiterate and signed the surrender papers without knowing the contents. In many cases, the parents are made to believe that they could visit the child regularly, maintain links with the child or receive news of him or her after adoption," says Vidya Reddy, former secretary of the Tamil Nadu Voluntary Co-ordinating Agency.