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The Guardian - Back to homeThe Guardian

Adoption

August 2024

  • Jenni Fagan and Samantha Morton photographed at the Union Club in London, August 2024

    ‘The hardest thing is to forgive yourself’: actor Samantha Morton and writer Jenni Fagan on the trauma of growing up in care

  • Veronica Smith in the 1970s, when she was working as a nurse at Royal Free hospital in London

    Other lives
    Veronica Smith obituary

July 2024

  • man and woman wearing plaid shirts and glasses

    A Jewish couple were rejected as foster parents because of their religion. This is the future Project 2025 envisions

  • A middle-aged woman sits in a tidy kitchen and show off her passport from when she was an infant.

    Chile’s stolen children: a new effort offers hope to Pinochet-era international adoptees

June 2024

  • Alan Edwards shot at his office for OM

    Bowie and Spice Girls PR Alan Edwards: ‘Through punk I found another family’

    The music publicist was given up for adoption and always had a sense of not belonging but, in his job, he found his kindred spirits

May 2024

  • A baby awaiting adoption near Guatemala City. Photograph: Peter Casolino/Alamy

    The Audio Long Read
    Guatemala’s baby brokers: how thousands of children were stolen for adoption – podcast

    From the 1960s, baby brokers persuaded often Indigenous Mayan women to give up newborns while kidnappers ‘disappeared’ babies. Now, international adoption is being called out as a way of covering up war crimes. By Rachel Nolan
  • Sion Daniel Young in Lost Boys & Fairies.

    ‘We were all going through traumas under one roof’: the drag queen adoption drama inspired by real life

    Daf James’s life was upended when he and his husband adopted three kids – and he knew he had to write about it. As Lost Boys & Fairies hits the screen, the writer and cast talk about queer lives, Welshness and what makes a family click
  • Melissa Noble with brother Shawn, pictured 2023 at brother Michael's wedding

    ‘Same large forehead. Similar nose. Dad’s bulging calves’: the day I met my long-lost brother

    Melissa Noble was 18 when her father revealed he had given up a son for adoption. Meeting her eldest brother for the first time changed her family in unexpected ways

April 2024

  • Sean and Emily with their birth mother, Sara, outside her house in Santiago, Chile

    She was told her babies were dead. Instead they were sold abroad. What happened when she met them 40 years on?

  • ‘There is something ghostly about being adopted. A set of tiny details is not much to make into a whole person’ Jackie Kay.

    Poet Jackie Kay: ‘I could have been brought up by Tories!’

February 2024

  • Chris Maunders (right) and his biological grandfather Jack Phillips

    How a chance discovery revealed a new family connection, and unlocked my musical gene pool

    Chris Maunders
    A long-lost family connection helped me make sense of the role music had always played in my life

January 2024

  • Kana Verheul, centre, with her niece, right, and her long-lost sister Taslima, left.

    Bangladesh: the adoption crisis
    The stranger across from me was my sister: how one adoptee uncovered a tragic past

    A Dutch group that reunites children with their birth parents in Bangladesh is fighting to change the international adoption systemRead more: Bangladesh launches investigation into children ‘wrongly’ adopted overseas
  • Nur Jahan’s faded image of her son, taken from her when he was six months old.

    Bangladesh: the adoption crisis
    ‘I was told I could visit. Then she went missing’: the Bangladeshi mothers who say their children were adopted without consent

    Women living in camps for refugees of Bangladesh’s war of independence were told a local care home would look after their children. Decades on, many are still searching for them

    • Bangladesh: the adoption crisis
      Bangladesh launches investigation into children ‘wrongly’ adopted overseas

    • The Audio Long Read
      From the archive: ‘I just needed to find my family’: the scandal of Chile’s stolen children – podcast

    • The long read
      Guatemala’s baby brokers: how thousands of children were stolen for adoption

October 2023

  • A group of six women standing next to a statue of a young women with small children

    Mothers subjected to forced adoption of babies can apply for $30,000 compensation in Victoria

    Exclusive: About 3,500 women eligible under $138m state program, Australia’s first redress scheme

September 2023

  • Bokja Hansen holds the uniform from Holt Children’s Services, which she wore when she arrived in Denmark from South Korea aged five.

    Rights and freedom
    ‘Korea is hiding our past’: the adoptees searching for their families – and the truth

    Amid allegations of a corrupt adoption system in Seoul that falsified children’s records, those sent to Denmark as youngsters are desperate to find out their real stories
  • Floella Benjamin

    Adopted children also need help breaking the ‘care ceiling’

    Letters: Adopted children experience many of the same issues in education as children in care, notes Kimberly Clarke
  • Portrait of Bibi Hasenaar, holding a photo of herself and her brother. Bibi was adopted by Dutch parents at the age of four. Her mother in Bangladesh never agreed to the adoption and was looking for her daughter for years, but never found her. By chance, Bibi found out that her mother was looking for her when it was already too late. Then in her mid-forties, she realised the adoption had never been voluntary and sued the Dutch government and adoption companies. Muiderberg, The Netherlands. Photography by Judith Jockel. Birangona women of Bangladesh

    Today in Focus
    The mystery of Bangladesh’s missing children – part three

    What would you do if everything you believed about your childhood was wrong? Rosie Swash and Thaslima Begum investigate an international adoption scandal that is still shattering lives today
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