Tag: human rights in adoption

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One Adoptee’s Thoughts on the UN Joint Statement on Illegal Intercountry Adoptions

Resilience by CLAIR

On 29 September 2022, the United Nations (UN) published a press release titled: Illegal intercountry adoptions must be prevented and eliminated: UN experts which provides a Joint Statement from the UN Committees. While the majority around the world could not have pre-empted this statement, it was not news to me because our coalition Voices Against Illegal Adoption (VAIA) had been talking with the UN to ensure our input was included. I know other experts in illegal intercountry adoption around the world gave input too.

The UN Joint Statement created for me a day of mixed feelings. For many of us, myself included, who are the victims of the past and current practices that constitute illegal and illicit practices in intercountry adoption, we have been speaking up, shouting from the rooftops, demanding attention, help, and support. But usually to no avail. Most Governments around the world have continued to turn a blind eye to the reality that some of our adoptions have been questionable and some, outright illegal with prosecutions of perpetrators. As one adoptive mother and fierce advocate, Desiree Smolin essentially said on her Facebook post, why has it taken the UN so long given the decades of trafficking and illicit practices? Why have so many families and adoptees been left to suffer the same impacts when it has been known to happen for so many decades?

So on 29 September, I felt our voices have been finally heard and validated – that someone in power was listening to us. Thank you to those at the UN who worked tirelessly to make this happen. It felt a little vindicating but at the same time, the reality of this world crushes hope because I know the statement from the UN is not going to put any true pressure on governments around the world to act in our best interest, let alone help us in any practical sense.

I felt personally so empowered by the UN Joint Statement that I wrote another letter to our leader here in Australia, the Prime Minister. In my letter, I ask the Australian government once again, to please do something to help those who are impacted instead of the deathly silence we’ve experienced in the 25 years I’ve spent advocating for our rights and needs.

Have a read of my lengthy letter which highlights the many times I’ve attempted to raise this issue to our Australian government, asking for supports for the victims. I’m as yet to have any response from the Australian Prime Minister. I imagine that the post-COVID economic recovery of the country, the current floods that have hit Australia all year long, and the other more higher priority issues like domestic family violence will receive his attention first compared to my long letter about a topic that impacts only some of the 20,000 of us intercountry adoptees. We just don’t rank up there in importance and unless it was their son or daughter being impacted, there’s just no reason why our Australian government would care enough to act.

I’ve been asked by a few about what I thought the impact would be of this UN Joint Statement. I truly think the best outcome might be that States (governments) will realise the risks they bear in continuing to conduct and facilitate intercountry adoption with all its pitfalls in safeguarding the human rights of intercountry adoptees. When we consider the legal cases being fought around the world by various intercountry adoptees and the revolution in awakening that we can fight for our rights, I would caution any government against participating in intercountry adoption. Legal pathways are slowly but surely being found by adoptees around the world. Governments must realise that if they continue on as they have in the past, there will be a time of reckoning where the abuses to our human rights will finally be recognised and the injustices need to be compensated.

In the Netherlands, the fight for adoptee rights is led by Brazilian adoptee Patrick Noordoven who won his right to compensation due to his illegal adoption to the Netherlands. Dilani Butink also won her court hearing for her case of an unlawful adoption from Sri Lanka. Bibi Hasenaar is also mentioned as having liability claims in this joint report. Sadly, both Noordoven and Butink’s cases are still being appealed by the Dutch State who have unlimited funds and time which highlights the power imbalance and ongoing victimisation that adoptees face. Sam van den Haak has also sent a letter to the Dutch State about her own and 20 other Sri Lankan adoptees whose adoption files have errors that caused emotional damage.

In Sweden, Carlos Andrés Queupán Huenchumil filed an appeal to change his name back to his original, having been illegally adopted from Chile. In France, a group of Malian adoptees are taking legal action against the adoption agency for its role in their illegal adoptions. In New Zealand, Maori adoptee Bev Reweti has mounted a class action against the State for being displaced and adopted out of their Maori whānau. In South Korea, Korean-Denmark intercountry adoptee and lawyer Peter Regal Möller and his organisation Danish Korean Rights Group have submitted just under 300 cases to the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission seeking to know the truth about their identities that were falsified in order to be intercountry adopted. Peter openly talks about the legal cases against agencies Holt and KSS that are coming in the future. I also know of other intercountry adoptees who haven’t had published media articles yet but who are progressing in the early stages of their legal cases against States and agencies for their illegal adoptions.

The momentum is growing around the world as adoptees become more aware of the human rights abuses they’ve lived that have been facilitated via intercountry adoption.

It’s not just adoptees who are taking legal action. Some incredibly courageous parents are, and have, also taken action. Recently in France, adoptive parents Véronique and Jean-Noël Piaser who adopted a baby from Sri Lanka have filed a complaint in 2021 for the fraud that involved the stealing of their baby from her mother in Sri Lanka. In the USA, adoptive parents Adam and Jessica Davis have been successful in assisting the US government to press charges against the adoption agency European Adoption Consultants (EAC) for its role in fraud and corruption of theirs and many other adoptions.

In a landmark first, both adoptive parents and biological parents of Guatemalan-Belgium adoptee Mariela SR Coline Fanon are taking civil action in Belgium as victims of human trafficking. The case is currently under judicial investigation. This is not the first time biological parents fight for their rights in intercountry adoption. In 2020, biological father from Guatemala, Gustavo Tobar Farjardo won at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for his sons to be returned to him who had been adopted to separate families in America.

So ultimately, I believe the UN Joint Statement acts two-fold: firstly, it goes some way towards validating the traumas some live in our adoptions and encourages intercountry adoptees and families around the world to stand up and demand action and legal vindication of our truths; and secondly, it makes it clear to States the risks they undertake if they continue on in their current practices of intercountry adoption.

I would personally be glad and celebrate if adopting countries assess the risk of participating in intercountry adoption as too high to continue it into the future. We are long past the time of being blind to the colonial practices and harms of intercountry adoption. We must do more to help all countries become more aware of the responsibility they hold to their own born-to-children. Remember that some of our biggest sending countries in intercountry adoption are our richest – China, South Korea and the USA. It is time we moved past the easy solution intercountry adoption provides to countries who don’t wish to take care of their own and challenge countries to understand there is an inherent cost if they ignore their children by casting them aside, when it suits. Intercountry adoptees do grow up, we become well educated, we are empowered by Western mentality to demand our rights be respected and injustices no longer be ignored.

The UN Statement is long overdue given the decades of generations of us who are impacted by illegal and illicit adoptions. I celebrate that we have been heard at the highest level internationally, but I’m fairly certain that States will not step up to deal with this issue in any practical way. I know they will remain silent for as long as possible, hoping it blows over and meanwhile, as in the Netherlands, they will continue on in their trade of children but in a slightly different way, despite conducting a full investigation; because that’s what countries do. I’m a pragmatist and I will continue to raise awareness and push for much needed change, because I know despite the UN Joint Statement, we are still at the beginning. It will take a huge en-masse movement from impacted people to get governments to act in support of us because for too long, they’ve been able to get away with doing little to nothing. At some point, the cost for governments and participating entities of doing little, will outweigh the cost to stopping the practice.

I believe in its current form and as practiced under the 1993 Hague Convention, governments are unable to prevent and stop the illegal and illicit practices aka trafficking that include human rights abuses in intercountry adoption. Therefore it needs to be stopped. The UN Joint Statement is simply a reflection of where we are at today. Victims no longer need to plead to be heard, we HAVE been heard at the highest level internationally. What we are waiting on now, is for appropriate responses from governments and facilitating organisations — which might be a long time coming.

Resources

Governments finally recognising illicit and illegal adoption practices

Lived experience suggestions for responses to illicit adoptions

Lived experience of illegal and illicit adoption (webinar)

Stop intercountry adoption completely because abuses can never be ruled out

Unbearable how the minister deals with adoption victims

The case for moratoria on intercountry adoption

Child Laundering: How the intercountry adoption system legitimises and incentivises the practice of buying, kidnapping, and stealing children

False Narratives: illicit practices in Colombian transnational adoption

Irregularities in transnational adoptions and child appropriations: challenges for reparation practices

From Orphan Trains to Babylifts: colonial trafficking, empire building and social engineering

Double Subsidiarity Principle and the Right to Identity

Intercountry adoption and the Right to Identity

Exploitation of in intercountry adoption: Toward common understanding and action

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I Support #NotAThing

#NotAThing founders: Allison Park, Kara Bos, Brenna Kyeong McHugh, Cameron Lee, Kevin Omans, Patrick Armstrong, and Richard Peterson. Media artists Valerie Reilly (Graphic Designer) and Sarah Monroe (Videographer), and petition Korean translator Jullie Kwon.

I am not a Korean intercountry or domestic adoptee but I am an intercountry adoptee and this is not just a Korean adoption issue – it is a global issue for all who are impacted by adoption. I stand with the Korean adoptees who are demanding President Moon apologise and meet with them to discuss how to better protect vulnerable children.

I am against the murder and abuse of any child who gets placed into an adoptive family.

I am also against any rhetoric that minimises what has happened and attempts to push the responsibility onto the child – as if they were the cause, not good enough, and needed to be “swapped out” to better suit the needs of the adoptive family.

It is time the governments of the world, who participate in, promote and look to the current plenary adoption system be upfront and realistic about the downsides this system creates.

My first argument is that the current plenary system of adoption does not respect the child’s rights and too easily becomes a commodity in a market for adoptive families to pick and chose the child of their choice. President Moon’s poorly chosen words simply reflect this reality. His words tell us what we already know: children are a commodity in today’s economy – matched theoretically to suit the needs of prospective parents, and not the other way around! If there were any semblance of equality in this system, we children would be able to more easily rid ourselves of adoptive families when we deem them equally unsuitable! But the reality is, we are children when adoption happens and like little Jeong-In, have no power or say in what happens to us. We are adopted into the family for life, our rights to our birth origins irrevocably denied, our adoption as Pascal Huynh writes, “is like an arranged child marriage”. The majority of the world somehow understands how unethical an arranged child marriage is, yet we still talk about plenary adoption as if it’s a child’s saviour.

Thanks to the recent publicity of Netra Sommer’s case, the public around the world have recently become aware of how hard it is for us adoptees to revoke our adoptions. It took Netra over 10 years to be able to undo her adoption! As for any equal rights in the current system, the mothers and fathers of loss get even less than us adoptees. They are discouraged from changing their minds if they no longer wish to relinquish their child, yet President Moon is publicly encouraging a process that allows adoptive / prospective parents to change theirs. This is the one sided nature of the adoption system!

Jeong-In’s death highlights some other core issues I have with the plenary adoption system:

  • The lack of long term followup, research or statistics on adoptees after the adoption and post placement period.
  • The selection and assessment of prospective parents by the adoption agency and their lack of accountability in their role.
  • The blind belief within the child welfare system, that an adoptive parent would never harm a child. But with all the indicators shown in this video of the recount by child care workers who tried multiple times to flag that things weren’t right for this child, no action was taken to suspect the adoptive parents of harming this child. This reflects the one sided view of first families who are demonised and seen as the only perpetrators of violence or abuse against their children. In contrast, adoptive parents are seen as saviours/rescuers but yet many adoptees will give evidence of the abuse that happens too often within adoptive families.
  • The lack of rights for any first family/kin to be notified or able to access the child’s body after death.

One has to wonder how such leniency and almost apparent empathy for the adoptive parents as expressed in President Moon’s words could not be equally applied to first families in Korea. In the large majority of cases, Korean women have to relinquish their children due to single motherhood status and the lack of supports – not because of any dark, violent, drug filled history.

I get angry each and every time a vulnerable child like little Jeong In-Yi gets mistreated and hurt by the very system that is meant to protect and support them. Let’s use this anger to demand change that is long overdue but also, let’s not forget Jeong-In herself for although she only remained on this planet for a short 16 months, she has impacted many of us!

The mothers of KUMFA have stood up and rallied to demand the agency involved, Holt Korea, be held accountable for their role in this death. The Korean adoptees around the world have created this campaign #notathing to demand the President of Korea meet with them to hear their voices. We need government to invite us to the table to discuss options other than plenary adoption.

I and other members of ICAV have shared about alternatives to plenary adoption but I question if Jeong-In would still be alive today if she had not been placed into the adoption system. The irony is no doubt she would have been much safer with her single unwed mother!

The shame is on Korea for not doing more as a first world nation to support mothers and children to remain together! The same is applied to any country, especially first world nations who have the resources yet continue to have their children adopted out via the plenary adoption system. In the USA there has been a very similar child murdered within adoptive family that mirrors Korea.

This is not a system I aspire to for vulnerable children of the future!

In Memory of Jeong-In, died 16 months old, Oct 2020

I want to end by honouring Jeong-In for the massive impact and legacy she has left behind. I hope she has not died in vain. I hope the extreme pain she must have endured was not for nought! I hope that each time an adoptee dies at the hands of their adoptive family, the world community will stand up and demand the we adoptees are #NotAThing and that more needs to be done to make our system safer and more aligned to the needs and rights of us – for whom it is all meant to be about! We are that vulnerable child grown up, who could not speak for themselves and needs our protection and our action!

Please consider signing the petition #NotAThing and find ways in which you can take action, to demand governments and authorities do more to make changes away from the current plenary adoption system to something far more respectful of adoptee and first family rights and needs.

#imsorryjeongin
#notathing

Other adoptee voices who share about #notathing

Kara Bos
Moses Farrow
Mila Komonos

Media Coverage

Adoptees say “we are not a thing”

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The Right to Identity

by Maria Diemar, born in Chile raised in Sweden. You can access her blog at I Own My Story Maria Diemar where she published this on Aug 23.

The right to one’s identity,
is it a human right?
Is it a human right for everyone?

Where you belong,
the circumstances you come from,
is this important to know?

Is it possible to delete a person’s background?
Would you consider deleting another person’s background?

What is illegal?
What is unethical?
What are irregularities?

In last few years, I have discovered more and more of my history.
From discovering that I am Ingegerd Maria Olsson in the registers in Chile,
to realise that I can vote,
and renew my passport from 1975,
to understanding that it seems like I never left Chile the country where I was born.

According to my Chilean passport,
I live on a street in a business district in Rancagua.
According to other documents,
I live with a social assistant in Santiago.
We are probably more than 400 children living at that address:
Monseñor Müller 38.

I “live” in Chile, and I live in the United States.
I am in the electoral register in Chile,
and in Sweden I have a Swedish passport and can pick up a Chilean passport when I like.

My birth was never registered at the hospital where I was born.
I’m a child of no-one.
Instead of a birth certificate,
a protocol was written in which strangers testified that I was born on my birthday.

In Chile, I am registered as an orphan
because a Swedish woman, Anna Maria Elmgren, arranged and enrolled me in the register in Chile.
I have a Swedish name in the Chilean register.
I’m Ingegerd Maria Olsson in Chile.

I am a orphan
but I have a mother in the documents from the court in Temuco.
In the documents from the court, I have a mother.
A mother who gives me away.

I was 44 years old when I did a DNA test,
then I realised that I’m Mapuche.
I’m from an indigenous people.

To be a child of Indigenous people,
this detail is something that someone forgot to mention.
A detail that isn’t too important.
Or is it?

Is the right to one’s identity a right for everyone?
Who decides this?

#adoptee #adopted #stolen #Ilegal #adoption #Chile #victim #trafficking #Sverige #Adoptionscentrum #Sverige #adopterad #chileadoption #nomassilencio #humanrights #justice #mapuche #Wallmapu

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Lived Experience Suggestions for Responses to Illicit Adoptions

On 8-10 July, ICAV was invited as an Observer at the HCCH Working Group on Preventing and Addressing Illicit Practices in Intercountry Adoption.

Attached is our latest Perspective Paper that provides our lived experience input on suggestions for How Authorities and Bodies could Respond to Illicit Adoptions in English and French.

Huge thanks to all our 60+ participating adoptees and adoptee organisations, 10 adoptive parents & adoptive parent organisations, and first family representation!

Extra special thanks and mention to two amazing people:
Nicholas Beaufour who gave a huge amount of time to translate the entire English document into French!
Coline Fanon who assisted our one and only first family member to contribute! We so need to hear more often from the voices of our first families!
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Bitten and Suffering

by Lily Valentino, Colombian adoptee raised in the USA.

We adoptees are absolute masters at compartmentalizing, I am no different. I can go on my way, not acknowledging, ignoring and stuffing my shit in the back of the closet. But it never fails that eventually something will trigger me into facing my feelings, and downward I usually go for a few days, and sometimes weeks and months.

Yesterday was one of those days, it was like walking through a field and getting bitten by a snake! It happened fast, yet while it was happening it was playing out in slow motion. But now it is nearly 24 hours later and I can quite sharply feel those words coursing through my veins like the poison of a snake.

“….they were brought to this country, were stripped of their names, language, culture, religion, god and taken totally away from the history of themselves”

These were words I heard in passing yesterday, that were the initial sting, bite, if you will, which left me literally stunned. These words came out of Luis Farrakhan, and as I was listening to him speak them, it hit me, he was talking about the slaves brought to America and I too, I too, was sold and brought to this country away from my birth land, for money.

As these words slipped down my throat, I thought of being minority, being Hispanic and how my white adoptive mother pushed and tried to get me to date white guys. How she often spoke about how she wanted me to marry an Italian man. This thought always makes me sick and the term, “whitewash” comes to mind as being her motive. Memories of how she spoke of Hispanics by referring to them using the racial slur, “spics” rush to the forefront of my mind.

It left me shrinking into my seat for the rest of the day. Choking on thoughts of all that I have lost and continue to lose, my culture, my language, my native food, my name, my family and mi tierra (my land). Thinking of how my world is literally cut in half (because I have my birth family that live in Colombia and my husband and kids here in the US), how true happiness of having my world combined will never be had, true belonging is a shadow that I’m forever chasing just like time lost.

I sit here uneasy, fighting the tears from filling my eyes. I’ve been in deep thought about this sudden cry for human rights that does not seem to include adoptees, yet we are walking a near similar path to the slaves of 300 years ago. The difference, we were not bought to fulfill physical labor but to fulfill an emotional position for many white families. Some of us were treated well, part of the family like nothing “less than” while others remained outsiders, forced to fit into a world not our own and punished emotionally and physically when we could not meet their needs. When we stood up for ourselves and decided that we no longer wanted to fulfill that emotional roll to another human for which we had been bought or withstand the abuse, we have been cast out and off of the plantation and told never to return.

The crazy thing is that it is 2020 and my basic human rights to know my name, to know my culture, to grow up in the land that I was born in, to speak my native language, though violated mean nothing, as nobody other than other adoptees are concerned, or have a sense of urgency about this violation.

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Wearing Your Fate

by Bina Mirjam de Boer adopted from India to the Netherlands, adoption and foster care coach @ Bina Coaching.

Recently it was announced there is a surrogate company in Ukraine which will remain with hundreds of ordered but undelivered babies due to the coronavirus. They can’t be picked up during the lockdown by their foreign parents. In RTL 4 news post we see upset nurses and hear the lawyer of the adoption company talking about the importance of these babies going to their foreign parents as soon as possible.

The bizarre thing is that by commissioning the surrogacy and / or the adoption company, these babies are taken from their mother, their origins and their birth country and end up in a family in which one, or none, of the parents are genetically their parent.

On Monday 18 May, the lawsuit by adoptee from Sri Lanka, Dilani Butink was aired whereby she is suing the adoption organization / permit provider Stichting Kind en Future and the Dutch State. Her case shall hold both parties liable for her fraudulent adoption. This is because the Dutch state and adoption organisations and / or licensing holders, have known about the fraudulent practices and trafficking of children from the sending countries for many years. Nevertheless, thousands of children have been legally adopted (and without agreement) from their motherland to the Netherlands after discovering the trafficking. Yet we are still focusing on putting the wish for a child first.

Currently, the Dutch government is working on adjusting the law for surrogacy. Under its guise and around the wild growth of baby farms, the surrogate and child need to be provided protection from surrogacy abroad, but Ukraine does not offer this. It is pretty weird because the cause of this law ie., creating children in a “non-natural” way affects this child’s right to exist. Whoever reads this bill soon sees that the child’s rights and safety of the mother is not sufficiently protected and / or respected. The reason for this law is that we still have international adoption and conception of children through a donor surrogate mother and it is not a fairy tale or an altruistic thought.

Thinking about what my adoptive parents used to say when asked if I was grateful to them for my new life, namely they answered that I didn’t have to be thankful. This is because they wanted a child so badly and were so selfish, they let me come from abroad.

In most cases, the wish for a child is not a wish to make a child part of your life but a biologically driven desire to reproduce or to have a child of your own. If it were really only about the child, the thousands of forgotten children who live in children’s homes would be collected by childless couples. That we live in a world where the wish of having our “own made” child is exalted above the child’s wishes and health, ensures the financially driven market continues to function that dominates the adoption, donor and surrogacy world.

To realize this wish for a child at all costs, ways are being used that cannot be done without medical or legal surgery. Overseas mothers are helped to give up their child instead of breaking taboos or helping the mother raise the child herself, or leaving the legal family ties intact, which is best for the child. The influence of distance (legal parenting to be elevated above genetic parenting) on a human life is still compartmentalised, denied and ignored, with all the consequences.

Despite all the stories of adult adoptees and adult donor children about the influence of distance and a (partly) hidden past or the low performance rates of composite families, the wish for a child remains elevated above the child’s wishes.

In 2020, we are apparently still not aware that these actions not only relieve wishful parents of the unbearable fate of a childless existence, but also dismiss them from their responsibility to carry their own destiny. At the same time, we ensure that these children are burdened unsolicited, with an unbearable fate. Namely, a life with a hidden and a made identity. I don’t want to say that a childless couple has no right to a child in their lives but there are other ways to let a child be part of their lives without giving a mother and child an unbearable fate.

Adoptees often don’t know who they are, when they were born, what their age or birth name is, which family systems they originated from or what their operative story is. They are raised with the idea that they belong to a different family from which they originated genetically. However, this legal disinheritance does not cut the adopted from his original family system (that is impossible) but they have to discover in their adult lives that the foundation on which their lives was built is not the right one. Donor children are looking for the father and find out that they have dozens of (half) sisters and brothers or that they are twins but come from different donor fathers. Both times, it’s a question of demand for a child and making it available.

Many adopted people come to the discovery at some point in their lives that they live with an unbearable fate, they live in a surreal story that they missed the essence of but experience their emotions in their bodies. This also makes you hear adoptees often say they feel like they have to survive instead of thriving.

I hope that the legal trial of Sri Lankan adoptee Dilani Butink will contribute to an increasing awareness and cessation of child trafficking in any way and that we leave fate and responsibility where it belongs. As a Korean adoptee once said, “Do you prefer to die of hunger, or death from sadness?” .. a sentence that I still regularly observe during group meetings with adoptees.

I am aware that not being able to have children is an unbearable fate while at the same time I notice and work daily with the effects of the consequences of distance and adoption. And this is also unbearable for many, unfortunately we adoptees and donor children cannot put away our fate and the responsibilities we have received and this is a burden that we must bear unwanted as a life sentence.

I also hope that the legal trial will contribute to getting assistance. In 2020, governments still do not take full responsibility for looking away from these forms of child trafficking in intercountry adoption and its consequences. In the end, in my opinion, the question remains: do you dare to take responsibility and carry the fate you received? It is a choice to live without “homemade” children or you charge another person with the fate to live without his or her original identity, family and culture.

Please let’s learn from history and not use children as enlightenment of fate but carry our own destiny.

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Who am I now?

By Maria Diemar from her blog at I own my Story Maria Diemar

Who I am now, after my life story changed

I always thought that my mom gave me up for adoption
I was an abandoned child
I learnt to believe that adoption is something beautiful
Even though it hurt
Even though I felt abandoned
Even though I felt alone

I searched for my mom for so many years,
it was almost impossible to find her
until I got in contact with Ana Maria in Chile

When Ana Maria found my mom
I learnt the truth
I was stolen from my mom
at the hospital
right after she gave birth to me
My mom wasn’t allowed to see me or hold me
People at the hospital, a social assistant really tried to force her
to sign papers that she wanted to give me up for adoption
my mom refused to sign any papers

84 days went by,
from the day they separated me from my mom
in the small town on the country side in Chile
until I arrived in an airplane to Stockholm in Sweden.

I came to Sweden with documentation
it said I didn’t have any family that could care for me
it said my mom had left me for adoption
I never question that
But I felt abandoned and alone

Today I know the truth
I was stolen and
forcefully separated from my mom

Few people want to see the truth
as society has taught us that
adoption is something beautiful

I have learnt that adoption is filthy
business, and that
people make money
I have learnt that adoption
is an industry

And I am not sure,
who I am anymore
if I am not that abandoned child

I have been forced to go back
to face all my fears and
to look at my choices and experiences

Today when I see the picture of that little girl
in my Chilean passport
I see a sad girl,
all alone in the world
with no legal rights because
no-one took the time to make sure
I came from the situation
that was stated in the documents

After 6 moths I was adopted,
according to the law in Sweden
despite the law in Chile

What does adoption mean to you?

And please, before you answer that question,
Who are you?

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Human Rights for Intercountry Adoptees

It fills me with hope and inspiration to see intercountry adoptees growing in our understanding of the wider context of intercountry adoption to include the politics, ethics and rights of intercountry adoptees.

Years ago, I started off having very little understanding of my own adoption journey, let alone the bigger picture.  As the years went by, I explored my own issues and then through reaching out and connecting to many adoptee peers, I started to realise the similarities within our journeys, regardless of birth country.  Finally, I came to understand — I am but one of hundreds of thousands around the world, impacted by the policies and governing international agreements that indelibly re-shape our lives forever via intercountry adoption.  My journey of understanding is reflected around the globe as we adult intercountry adoptees mature enmasse and start to speak out and question the fundamentals of intercountry adoption.

To illustrate this point, I want to share an essay by Sri Lankan adoptee, Gabbie Beckley, also adopted and raised in Australia.  She is a social worker and has submitted this essay to fulfil the requirements of her MSW Masters in Social Work.  She has reunited with her Sri Lankan family and was adopted by an Australian family who always supported her and enabled her to embrace and learn about her birth culture.

Gabbie has also journeyed and explored what adoption has meant for her individually and has travelled beyond that now, to understand the larger picture of what intercountry adoption means for many of us worldwide.  I loved her ending paragraph in which she rightly questions why our human rights as adoptees are not considered beyond childhood.

Have a read of what Gabbie has to say and let us know your thoughts.

GBeckley Human Rights in ICA

Coming shortly will be our newest Perspective Paper on Adoptee Citizenship which will highlight the lack of human rights for adult intercountry adoptees in the USA.

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