Are short stay homes hand in glove with adoption centres?

Activists smell 'baby booking' racket as authorities seek explanation from SOFOSH and short stay home Chaitanya Mahila Mandal upon finding pregnant 15-yr-old under care of adoption centre worker at Sassoon General Hospital

The Women and Child Development department has sought an explanation from the Society of Friends of Sassoon Hospital (SOFOSH), an adoption centre, and the Chaitanya Mahila Mandal, a short stay home, after it found a 15-year-old physically challenged pregnant girl was being looked after by a caretaker from SOFOSH during her hospitalisation at Sassoon.

 

For remaining article:http://www.mid-day.com/news/2012/jan/310112-pune-Are-short-stay-homes-hand-in-glove-with-adoption-centres.htm

Coerced adoption: Salvation Army launches review of maternity homes that housed unwed mothers

The Salvation Army says it is conducting an internal review into its historic maternity homes, just as a retired Calgary judge — who was once a high-ranking child welfare worker in the city — has come forward and corroborated some of the claims mothers have recently made about coercive adoption practices directed at unmarried mothers decades ago.

‘These people thought they were doing good – they thought these girls were sluts. They thought they were rescuing these children from a life of poverty,” said Herbert Allard, a former social worker, who said he was prompted to speak out upon reading the National Post’s story on forced adoptions over the weekend.

“At the time, I was divorced from the reality … It upset me in a way, but it’s just what went on.”
His account appears to confirm the coercion was systematic: He said the Salvation Army accepted teen mothers into their maternity homes on the condition they would surrender their baby, city social workers purposefully withheld information about revoking the adoption or the option of temporary wardship, and that unmarried mothers were punished in a Salvation Army hospital for getting pregnant out of wedlock.

For remaining article:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/03/13/coerced-adoption-salvation-army-launches-review-of-maternity-homes-that-housed-unwed-mothers/

Your baby is dead: Mothers say their supposedly stillborn babies were stolen from them

Sheri Sexton says her mother was told her younger sister was stillborn, but Ms. Sexton believes her sibling was actually adopted out. Ms. Sexton believes her own adoption is suspicious, too, partly because she says her adoptive grandmother was her natural mother’s nurse. She also said the same doctor is listed on both hers and her stillborn sister’s hospital records.

This is how the woman, then young, remembered the August day in 1963 on which she gave birth to her illegitimate daughter: She was in an Edmonton hospital; the doctor ordered she receive an injection. She blacked out, and when she started to come to, a male voice said: “knock her out.”
She claimed she woke up sometime later and was told she had given birth to a girl, but the baby had died.

Her baby girl did not die, though. She was adopted by a married couple.

“I never wanted to give up any child of mine for adoption,” the Edmonton mother swore in an affidavit before her recent death. “I went through my entire life believing that the baby I carried in 1963 had died…. I believe that I was lied to and my baby was stolen from me.”

For remaining article:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/03/23/your-baby-is-dead-mothers-say-their-supposedly-stillborn-babies-were-stolen-from-them/

Meet the Parents: The Dark Side of Overseas Adoption

A Midwestern kid's family believes his birth parents put him up for adoption. An Indian couple claim he was kidnapped from them and sold. Who's right?

Prior to 2002, for instance, Peterson had sent upwards of $150,000 to an Indian orphanage called Preet Mandir. The conditions were terrible—three babies died there while awaiting clearance for adoption by Peterson's clients. And when orphanage director J. Bhasin began illegally demand­ing thousands of dollars above and beyond the usual donation, and would not relinquish the children with­out the payments, Peterson severed the rela­tion­ship. (She later filed a complaint about Preet Mandir and its director with the Indian government.)

Four years later, reporters from Indian TV news network cnn-ibn approached Preet Mandir posing as adoptive parents, and Bhasin told them they could buy two children for $24,000. The resulting story led to revocation of the orphanage's adoption license, but the Indian government has since reinstated it on a probationary basis. "The profit motive exists on both sides," Peterson says. "One American agency I worked with just wanted to know that I could get them a certain number of babies a year, and wasn't concerned with where they came from."

For remaining article:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/meet-parents-dark-side-overseas-adoption?page=3

Victims of Spanish baby-theft policy demand probe

Victims of a baby-stealing policy approved by Spanish General Francisco Franco's dictatorship have filed a formal demand for an investigation into more than 260 cases.
An association fighting for the stolen children and their families, Anadir, presented the demand at the Madrid attorney general's office with evidence including DNA tests and testimony from nurses who admitted stealing babies.

The demand was made on behalf of the victims and families of 261 snatched babies. Anadir lawyer Enrique Vila said many others are expected to join the complaint.

"We get more and more calls from people who have doubts about their origins, because they have no physical resemblance with their parents or grandparents, or because their parents had them at an advanced age and they are single children," he said.

Anadir estimates there could be as many as 300,000 cases during the 1939-75 dictatorship and up to the end of the 1980s.

For remainingn article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/8287586/Victims-of-Spanish-baby-theft-policy-demand-probe.html

Spanish woman reunited with daughter after 44 years

A Spanish woman has been reunited with the daughter who was stolen from her as a newborn baby 44 years ago.

Manuela Polo is one of hundreds of women who were told their babies died shortly after birth when in fact they were taken and given to childless couples in a stolen baby scandal dating back to the Franco era that has only recently come to light.

The 79-year old from Galicia never fully believed that her seventh child had died shortly after she gave birth in a hospital in La Coruna and after a long search and a DNA test she finally met her daughter last week.

Mrs Polo was told that she had a baby boy and held him only briefly before he was whisked away by doctors who later said he had died. Her husband was shown a tiny coffin meant to contain the corpse.

But the baby, a girl, had been sold to a couple unable to have children of their own. The child was brought up in Valencia with the name Maria Jesus Cebrian, who began the search for her birth mother 12 years ago.

For remaining article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/9173420/Spanish-woman-reunited-with-daughter-after-44-years.html

Tribe takes control of child welfare from state

KINGSTON, Kitsap County — Jessie Scheibner's eyes cloud with tears and her voice trembles as she talks about the day, almost 70 years ago, when a stranger's car pulled up to her parents' home on the Port Gamble S'Klallam Reservation and took her and her two sisters away.

The memories of that car ride when she was 3 and the years spent in one foster home after another are hazy. Foster care was difficult enough, but Scheibner, now 72, clearly recalls being ashamed of her dark hair, brown skin and Native American roots as she bounced from home to home off the reservation.

for remaining article:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2017861071_portgamble29m.html#.T3Qdm0F6Euk.facebook

Angelina begs Pax's birth mum: Please don't take my boy

The actress breaks down as Pax’s biological mother asks for his return.
Dwarfed by the two oversized teddy bears they were carrying, Zahara and Shiloh Jolie-Pitt giggled and stumbled their way through LA airport last week. But their superstar mother couldn’t even crack a smile. Angelina Jolie looked tense and exhausted after their flight from Amsterdam. Now Woman’s Day can reveal it wasn’t the long-haul journey with two young children that had the mum-of-six seemingly shattered...

For remainin article:
http://womansday.ninemsn.com.au/celebrityheadlines/8440206/angelina-jolie-begs-paxs-birth-mum-please-dont-take-my-boy

Meet Pax Jolie & Pitt's Birth Mother – Who is still alive

Talking of weird childhoods, some of the Brangelina offspring were out in New Orleans on Sunday. Wildman Pax- the 8-year-old son of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt was dancing in the streets and joined by mom Jolie, 36, and siblings Zahara, 7, and Vivienne, 3. I touched before on the shady adoption of Maddox, who probably isn’t even an orphan and was part of a human trafficking operation in his native Cambodia. And, like Zahara and Maddox, Pax isn’t an orphan either and still has family – including a mother, aunts, uncles and grandparents back in Vietnam...

For remaining article:
http://bohomoth.com/2012/03/12/celebrity-meet-pax-jolie-pitts-birth-mother-who-is-still-alive/

Fly Away Home

Last year Foreign Correspondent exposed deep flaws and appalling practices in the international adoption industry operating in Ethiopia and the United States. Our story Fly Away Children generated a massive viewer response, triggered an industry investigation in the US and propelled the American media to probe the system. CBS News recently broadcast an investigation into the activities of an American adoption agency at the centre of Fly Away Children.

Fly Away Children drew an extraordinary response and demonstrated a deep concern about the way some international adoption agencies are operating and dramatically affecting the aspirations of many Australians looking to adopt overseas.

Our story unearthed a great deal but we knew there was so much more to examine, so much cause for concern and urgent reform...
For remaining article:
http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2009/s2834100.htm

Adopted or abducted?

Most women describe giving birth to a child as a life changing experience – in a word – “challenging”, “joyous”, “miraculous.” But generations of young, unwed women describe their experience of giving birth to a child as a nightmare – and decades later their suffering has yet to end.

From Australia to Spain, Ireland to America, and as recent as 1987, young mothers say they were “coerced”, “manipulated”, and “duped” into handing over their babies for adoption. These women say sometimes their parents forged consent documents, but more often they say these forced adoptions were coordinated by the people their families trusted most...priests, nuns, social workers, nurses or doctors.

Last month, a Dan Rather Reports producer and crew were in Canberra, Australia as Parliament released the findings of an 18-month-long investigation revealing illegal and unethical tactics used to convince young, unmarried mothers to surrender their babies to adoptive homes from the late 1940s to the 1980s. And we interviewed some of the victims -- adoptees and mothers separated at birth.
For remaining article:
http://news.yahoo.com/forced-adoptions-for-unwed-mothers-around-the-globe.html

Korea to Haiti: Lessons in Overseas Adoption Corruption

Arrested by Haitian authorities for trying to cross illegally into the Dominican Republic with 33 so-called orphaned children, whose parents were later found to be alive, U.S. citizens and Idaho Baptist missionaries Laura Silsby and Charisa Coulter remain imprisoned in Port-au-Prince pending investigation of alleged child trafficking. Seeking to save the children in the wake of Haiti’s earthquake, Silsby and Coulter intended to place the children for adoption in the United States with Christian families despite Haitian law, which requires all adoptions to be finalized in the country. Dr. Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, a Korean adoptee and staff member of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK), presents how adoption from Korea can offer a perspective about this scandal.

For remaining article:
http://www.conducivemag.com/2010/03/korea-to-haiti-lessons-in-overseas-adoption-corruption-2/

Bought in villages, sold in cities

Maharashtra: Touts of adoption agencies love to tour villages in Maharashtra. Here babies from poor families and from unwed mothers can be bought cheap and then sold at adoption homes as orphans.

"In rural areas in particular, the chances of this happening is quite high. Babies can be found in certain villages in the eight districts of Marathwada and Jalgaon," says Chairman Child Welfare Committee (CWC) Aurangabad, Dr Wankhede.

The CWC in Aurangabad gets approximately 40 abandoned children annually.

CWC member from Solapur Devayani Tumma often gets calls from adoption agencies making a sales pitch for abandoned children. “Adoption agencies call us and tell us to send the babies to their institutions,” she says....

for remaining article

32-year old man commits suicide in creswell home

This newspaper article relates when Harry and Bertha Holt's Korean-born adopted (Joseph Tae Holt) committed suicide in 1984.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19840619&id=X2sVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=keEDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5586%2C4781019

Scandal of 'unqualified' experts who advise our family courts: Decisions about the care of thousands of children routinely flawed

Life-changing decisions about the care of thousands of children are routinely being made on flawed evidence from poorly qualified ‘experts’ in the family courts, a damning study reveals.
More than a fifth of these vital reports are being produced by people who are completely unqualified, the Channel 4 News investigation found.
‘Experts’ used in hundreds of family court proceedings are frequently unqualified or unreliable, the study reveals.
In some cases, reports on parents or children are being given to courts by doctors who have not even seen the individuals concerned.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2114173/Child-care-scandal-The-unqualified-experts-advise-family-courts.html#ixzz1p9mdxQ93