The final report from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into abuse in care found forced adoptions were often organised by church institutions, state social workers, and medical professionals.

Commissioners found many women were either not allowed to meet their newborn babies or to bond with them. Read more

The 55-year-old Blenheim woman approached her daughter who had been standing at the front of the church, stood in front of her then took her infant son and passed the baby to someone else.

Sowman then slapped the victim across the face with an open palm which led to the pair having a physical tussle, with the 55-year-old pulling the victim's hair and scratching her arms, face and neck. Read more

Instigated by former Justice Minister Andrew Little, the Commission is recommending a new pathway to parenthood that doesn't require adoption for parents of a surrogate-born child.

At last week's launch of Kopu Whangai: He Arotake - Review of Surrogacy, the Commission said it is seeking feedback on the review's recommendations. Those wanting to contribute feedback have until 23 September to do so.

In the review, the Commission says adoption is inappropriate for surrogacy agreements.

‘The law fails to promote the child's best interests… does not respect the intentions of the surrogate and intended parents," it says.

"Surrogacy arrangements affect the child as well as the parties involved and we want to make sure the law is right for everyone," Law Commission principal advisor Nichola Lambie says.

If the Commission's proposal goes ahead, parents would be recognised legally from the birth of their child. There are two provisos: the surrogate must consent; the arrangement must have been approved by the Ethics Committee on Assisted Reproductive Technology (ECART), a requirement in some scenarios.

Otherwise, a Family Court application for legal parenthood would be required, as is the case at present.

As written, the new recommendations would help people like a US-based couple who had to adopt their own children from themselves to get New Zealand passports for them. Their case exposes the discriminatory pitfalls around the country's surrogacy laws.

The couple had fathered twin boys born via a surrogate while living in the United States six years ago.

Following a US legal process, they were marked as parents on the boys' birth certificate from the moment they were born, costing them about $30,000 in legal fees.

One father is a New Zealand citizen, the other US. However, New Zealand did not recognise them as legal parents.

According to New Zealand rules, the legal parents were the surrogate and her partner.

To change this, the fathers needed to bring the children home on a temporary visa and go through the adoption process here, including proving they were fit parents.

The couple found this insulting, degrading and impractical. Eventually they had to adopt the children from themselves, since they were legally parents in the US. This would enable them to be recognised as parents in New Zealand. It worked, but cost them another $7000 in legal fees.

Another set of parents say the Commission's proposed new surrogacy laws don't go far enough.

"In our scenario ... we avoided the ECART ethics approval, therefore we would be in pathway number two... pathway number two still includes a social worker assessment, still includes Family Court involvement and even in the report that they've just released they acknowledge that it's not much different than what it currently is."

The Commission review also includes recommendations surrounding Maori tikanga, the child's right to information, international surrogacy, Government funding for related surrogacy agreement costs and compensation for surrogates.

Source

• Stuff
• RNZ
• Image: Stuff

Reforming law in relation to hate speech offences is also on the agenda.

If the hate speech law passes, offenders will face a larger maximum sentence than if they were found guilty of rioting, assaulting a child or providing explosives to commit a crime!

Child-abuse

The Transforming Justice Foundation's petition focused on ensuring witnesses give evidence in child abuse cases.

Scott Guthrie led the petition. He says the silence around the 2006 deaths of 11-week old twins Chris and Cru Kahui show why the law needs changing to ensure witnesses give evidence.

The family initially did not cooperate with police investigations.

Although the twins' father was charged with murder, he was later acquitted. No other charges were laid.

Guthrie's petition asks the House of Representatives to:

"amend the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 to remove the right to refrain from making any statement for persons who are arrested or detained on charges relating to child abuse."

When presenting the 4548-signature petition to the Justice Select Committee, Guthrie said refraining from making a statement, or the right to silence, allows people to keep quiet when questioned by police.

Nor can a defendant be compelled to be a witness in the prosecution of any criminal law.

These rights shouldn't be allowed for any witness to cases involving child abuse, violence, or death, he argued.

If we can remove the right to silence in some cases of serious fraud, surely we can look at that for child abuse, he said.

Religious freedoms

In the petition she led for the Barnabas Fund, the Fund's Chief Executive's Steph Johnston told the Justice Committee that protecting religious freedoms needs reviewing as New Zealand becomes more secular.

"People who have chosen a form of religion must not be marginalised or disadvantaged," she said.

Johnston's 4872-signatory petition seeks a formal government review of two issues:

• how well the seven fundamental aspects of freedom of religion are being protected in New Zealand today and
• whether any group, for example, Christians, may be falling through the cracks and their rights neglected, sidelined or undermined."

Adoption

Christian Newman's petition asks Parliament to "amend the Adoption Act 1955 to simplify and speed up the process for adoption".

Newman spoke to the Justice Committee about his 32,239-signature petition that covers a range of issues including amending the Act to:

• enable male-same-sex couples' eligibility to in vitro fertilisation treatment funding
• allow intending parents' legal rights to be automatically updated at the point the child is born
• include a child's right from birth to know their parents, birth and biological, and to recognise the rights of children to know their genetic origins.

Hate speech

Parliament has released details of a Cabinet Paper about hate speech law reforms.

The paper proposes hate speech offences be moved from the Human Rights Act to the Crimes Act.

Penalties could see offenders facing three years' imprisonment.

Protections against incitement and hate speech would be extended to include rainbow communities, religious minorities and those targeted for age or disability.

Source

• Newsroom
• RNZ
• Image: Wikipedia

Given the choice between a very normal and appropriate conversation about reproductive politics and a glass window, I will be in the bushes out front, picking glass out of my torso.

That is because when I was 17 I got pregnant by accident and placed my baby for adoption.

As such, I have two options during these conversations: Stay quiet about my intimate familiarity with unplanned pregnancy and the difficult choices that come with it, or speak up and make everyone uncomfortable.

If my conversation partner is pro-life, I get to watch their eyeballs spin as they think back over our discussion and try to remember if they said anything suggesting that people like me are irresponsible or immoral.

If they are pro-choice, I get to watch steam pour out of their ears as they wonder if it was rude to imply that my 9-year-old son was once a zygote.

The sudden appearance of a birth mother in conversations about reproductive politics makes people uncomfortable—and who can blame them?

Usually, if birth mothers get mentioned at all, they are people we talk about, not with.

By inviting birth mothers into our conversations, we risk complicating the stories we tell ourselves about adoption and the people who participate in it.

Left Behind

For nine years, I kept my adoption hidden from almost everyone in my life, and it was incredibly lonely.

"Coming out" as a birth mother has been a healing journey for me, but it has not made the loneliness go away.

In fact, it has made me painfully aware of the near-total absence of birth mothers in media, politics, religion, family, academics and medicine.

That absence can be traced back to some deep-rooted societal discomfort with the institution of adoption.

For a long time, stigmas about infertility, illegitimacy, genetics and sexuality drove all three members of the adoption triad—birth parents, children and adoptive parents—to keep adoptions a secret.

Then, attitudes shifted. Today, U.S. culture largely celebrates adoption as a way to form new family ties.

Religious communities, particularly Catholic and Protestant Christian, played an important role in normalizing and encouraging adoptive families.

Meanwhile, adoption was ensconced in contemporary pro-life rhetoric.

If women get abortions because they do not want to be parents, the thinking goes, adoption is a life-affirming alternative.

But there is a problem. The cultural acceptance we rightly extended to adoptive parents and children was never extended to birth parents.

Birth mothers still feel pressure to keep their experiences secret, and that pressure speaks volumes about where our goodwill starts and ends.

While adoptive parents may enjoy telling new friends or coworkers their family's origin story, I cannot talk about my adoption without sucking the air out of a room.

While most everyone can rattle off a handful of adoptive parents or children they know personally, few people can name a birth mother.

In fact, I have never met another in person, and I have been one for almost a decade.

Erasing Loss and Silencing Grief

Adoption's move from hushed-up transaction to mainstream ministry relied on its portrayal as a positive, happy thing. And it is a positive, happy thing.

Adoption creates entirely new families bound by a powerful love. But adoption is also a sad thing; a parent and child, whatever the circumstances, are separated.

Some birth mothers willingly relinquish children because they are not ready or do not want to be parents.

Others are coerced into relinquishing children because of social pressure from families or communities.

Still, others are unable to parent their children because they lack resources, lack support or are dealing with addiction or other hardships.

Reckoning with birth mothers in all their complexity is tough. So, we usually do not bother to do it.

Instead, we take the beautiful dynamics of adoption, with its sadness, joy, gain and loss, and package them into simple, one-note stories: A heroic teenager spurns abortion and gives her baby a chance at life.

A pitiful, fallen woman abandons her child.

A weak-willed teen in an oppressive religious community has her choice made for her.

In all of these cases, to introduce a flesh-and-blood birth mother—her grief, her love, her courage—would ruin the story. Continue reading

The Adoption Act - which has not been updated since 1955, has been criticised by the Human Rights Commission, which wants to make the adoption process more accessible for people and relevant to society. Read more

Marriage is not a secondary vocation for those who are not strong enough to embrace celibacy, but instead offers an icon of love that the entire church is called to contemplate.

The married couple's self-gift, embodied in the secular activities proper to the married life, offers us a glimpse of what God's own love is.

Further, the married couple is divinized, taken up into God's own life as they come to embody the same self-giving love manifested by Christ to the church.

As one of the prefaces for the eucharistic prayer for the rite of marriage dares to say, "In the union of husband and wife you give a sign of Christ's loving gift of grace, so that the sacrament we celebrate might draw us back more deeply into the wondrous design of your love."

The vocation of marriage draws the entire church to participate in the logic of love manifested on the cross.

As a sacramental theologian, I have often considered how remarkable it is that something as ordinary as marriage could become a sign of God's own salvific plan of love.

My domestic commitment to sometimes making the bed in the morning, to sharing meals with my wife, of taking long walks in the summer, is necessary for the narrative of salvation to continue to unfold in the church.

I thought about the salvific nature of the married vocation when my wife and I adopted a newborn.

If indeed marriage is sacramental, drawing all of humanity to participate in the self-gift of Christ to the church, then perhaps the process of adoption reveals something unique about the Christian life as a whole.

Adoption is a sacramental sign that gives us unique insights into the wondrous design of love that God has for all humanity.

The Stigma of Adoption

Before attending to the sacramentality of adoption, one needs to recognize that within U.S. culture there remains an unexamined, albeit significantly decreased stigma regarding adoption.

On sitcoms, older siblings continue to taunt their younger brothers and sisters, telling them that they are adopted.

When my wife and I decided to adopt, we were surprised to learn from our social worker that many birth mothers cease considering adoption as an option when their parents express disgust at the possibility that another couple would raise the child.

Catholicism, a faith that is wholeheartedly pro-life, has often done too little to counteract this stigma.

For years I have attended a pro-life dinner in which the presenters have addressed the need for prayer and political activism (often using violent rhetoric) but have remained silent regarding the promotion of adoption within the various faith communities of our area.

Even the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which speaks with poetic beauty regarding procreation and parenthood, treats adoption as a last option for infertile couples to care for abandoned children.

Such language implies that mothers who choose to give up their children for adoption are performing an act of parental negligence rather than witnessing to the very logic of self-gift at the heart of the church.

Yet adoption is not a half-way house between the ideal form of parenthood and infertility.

What eventually drew us to use Lutheran Social Services as our adoption agency was their recognition that adopting a child was not a last resort for infertile couples and not a careless act by a birth mother who really should raise her own child.

For this agency, the process of adopting is an act of human love, of self-gift, between strangers who are bonded together in the mystery of divine love for the very same child.

And in this mutual self-gift, a child does not simply come into physical existence, but instead dwells in a family of love that stretches biological bounds. Continue reading

• Image: Countryside Church

Sister Konsalia Balsa and social worker Anima Indwar were arrested after allegedly trying to sell a baby for UK£1,325 (about NZ$2,500).

They have also been accused of having already sold three babies from the home they work in. The home provides shelter for pregnant, unmarried women.

The adoptive parents of the fourth infant were told the proposed adoption was legitimate and that the money was for hospital expenses.

The Missionaries of Charity say the order condemns the actions of the individuals involved and says they are unrelated to the order.

"We are fully cooperating with the investigations and are open to any free, fair and just inquiry," Sister Mary Prema Pierick, superior general of the order says.

She says "false news" "and "baseless innuendos" are being spread.

At the same time, she says "While we place our full trust in the judicial process that is underway, we wish to express regret and sorrow for what happened."

Pierick says the order condemns "in unequivocal terms" the individual actions "which have nothing to do with the Congregation of the Missionaries of Charity."

"We are completely shocked by what has happened in our home in Ranchi," a statement from the order adds.

"It should have never happened. It is against our moral convictions. We are carefully looking into the matter."

Police say Balsa has confessed to her role in the trafficking case.

However, the local bishop says the confession was extracted under pressure. He has accused the police of "treating the whole of Mother Teresa's organisation as a criminal gang."

Saint Mother Teresa of Kolkata founded The Missionaries of Charity in 1950.

Source

• The Guardian
• CruxNow
• The Tablet
• Image: Catholic Herald

P

The child will not be raised in the Catholic faith.

Both the child's birth parents are Catholics.

The child was removed from her mother's care when she was only a few days old.

He mother is a drug addict, has a manslaughter conviction and was deemed unable to care for the infant.

The New South Wales Supreme Court heard the birth mother was "a practising Catholic and she is not comfortable with [the child's] placement with the proposed adoptive parents because of her upbringing and religious values".

The adoptive parents are a lesbian couple.

The couple have had the girl in their care since she was six months old and began proceedings to legally adopt her.

They told the court they couldn't raise the child as a Catholic given the religion's longstanding opposition to homosexual relationships.

The judge ruled that while cultural and religious traditions should be "preserved as far as possible", they should not impact on the child's wellbeing.

He said religion was only one aspect of the many factors the court needed to consider.

Source

• The Sydney Morning Herald
• Pink News
• Image: Public Domain Pictures

Similar experiences have been recorded in other parts of the world, including Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

The Catholic Church was not alone in its zeal to remove babies from their (mostly unmarried) mothers.

Others, including the Church of England and Salvation Army did the same.

Several decades later, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales has apologized for its role in the adoptions.

Many of the women whose babies were adopted say they were coerced.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster and President of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, said the practices of adoption agencies at the time were "sometimes lacking in care and sensitivity.

"We apologize for the hurt caused by agencies acting in the name of the Catholic Church,"

In a new ITV documentary women are breaking their code of silence about this injustice.

About 60 women were interviewed for the documentary.

Many said they thought they did not have much of a choice at the time as they were considered to be unfit as mothers.

Some were told "if you love your baby, you will give it up". Others described the shame and guilt they had to face.

In New Zealand during the 30 years from the 1950s to the 1980s thousands of young women were forced to give up their children.

There was a huge social stigma attached to being a single mother.

In recent years, women and advocates in the UK have called for an official apology on behalf of Parliament for the pain and grief caused by the adoption practices over the 30-year period.

Australian and New Zealand women are also looking for apologies from their governments and churches.

As one English mother now aged 75 said: "I feel angry with my mother, the church, myself for being so compliant.

"I was on this conveyor belt, you know. Once the decision was made, you couldn't get off."

Source

• Washington Post
• ITV
• BBC News
• Image: www.abc.net.au

In a submission to an Australian parliamentary sub-committee's inquiry, the bishops said it would be "intolerable" to argue "harm minimisation" as justification for commercial surrogacy.

"Children are not commodities and should not be bought," said Bishop Peter Comensoli, the bishops' delegate for life issues.

"Legalising commercial surrogacy would allow the introduction of market values into the intimate and loving role that women have of carrying and giving birth to their child."

The bishops criticised the concept of surrogacy, both commercial and altruistic.

The bishops acknowledged the pain and sadness couples face when they cannot have children because of infertility or the inability to carry a child to full term.

But the bishops pointed out surrogacy can transfer sadness from the infertile couple to the surrogate mother.

"Surrogacy allows for the exploitation of the women who act as surrogate mothers," Bishop Comensoli said.

"It requires a woman to deny many of the significant, integral parts of the experience of pregnancy, which could have a long standing psychological impact on the surrogate mother.

"It gives priority to the childless woman, man or commissioning parents over the woman who is the surrogate mother."

Bishop Comensoli added: "Surrogacy is not undertaken with the priorities and interests of the child in mind, but rather the interests of the adults who want a child."

Bishop Comensoli praised adoption, but said a child should never be produced for the purposes of adoption.

"Surrogacy is different to adoption," he said.

"Where children are adopted by a mother and a father, this matches the model a child should expect of a mother and a father in marriage as a good alternative for when a child cannot be brought up by her or his natural parents."

Sources

• Australian Catholic Bishops Conference
• Image: Emaze

Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart and CatholicCare have called for protection for faith-based groups that do not want to give adoption services to same-sex couples.

But, under the Victorian government's bill, faith-based groups will not be granted exemptions to refuse services to same-sex couples seeking to adopt.

A CatholicCare submission stated it risked breaching equal opportunity laws if it declined to provide adoption services to people based on sexual orientation.

"Adoption is about the best interests of the child, not about the rights for same-sex couples. It is not just or fair to impose such an agenda on adopted children," the submission said.

Continue reading

The babies were illegally given away to be raised by married couples in "traditional" Catholic families.

The motivation was the social stigma attached to being an unmarried mother in middle-class families in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s.

In some cases, the biological mothers were persuaded that it was for the best.

But in other instances, the mothers were anaesthetised during delivery, and were later told their children had died, The Guardian reported.

Funerals with empty caskets were allegedly held in churches.

Priests were said to have pressured the mothers to give their newborns up for adoption.

Most of the cases took place during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

But some were reported as late as 2005.

The network involved wealthy families, gynaecologists, lawyers and social workers, but at the heart of the scheme was Fr Gerardo Joannon.

He admitted working with 10 doctors who helped coordinate adoptions.

The priest said did this to try to prevent back-street abortions.

But he insisted his role was limited, in that he only put families in contact with doctors.

Fr Joannon also said he only took part in adoptions the birth mother agreed to, and he denied saying funeral Masses for living infants.

But when pressured by media on the latter point, he said doctors had assured him the infants were dead.

One woman has accused him of pressuring her and allegedly helping in the disappearance of her newborn daughter.

Fr Joannon has been suspended from celebrating weekly Mass by Church authorities.

Several other priests were reportedly involved in the baby snatching ring.

Chilean Catholic Church leaders have promised to co-operate with secular authorities in their investigations.

Church leaders admit they have known about the network for at least 10 years. It was believed to have operated in six Santiago hospitals.

A Church spokesman said that injustices have been committed and human rights violated.

Sources

• The Guardian
• Huffington Post
• Image: 24horas.cl

The daughter of a well known policeman, to the son of a well known Catholic school principal.

The shame. The embarrassment. The scandal.

Well, that was me, the 15-year-old girl, and from the moment I snuck to the doctors to have my suspected pregnancy confirmed, my life changed forever.

For me the decision to adopt out my baby was fairly black and white.

My mother, who offered to bring up my baby for me, had already had her children (me and my sister), and the father of my baby's family, likewise.

The father of the baby and I could have gone on to bring up our baby ourselves, but seriously, how do a 15 and 17-year-old look after themselves in the world, let alone a precious wee baby?

Against some wider family's wishes, I made my decision.

And my decision was to offer this precious life, the best life I could, and for me that was to give her to a family - an amazing family.

Now it wasn't as simple as that, in fact, it was incredibly difficult and heart-wrenching, however, I knew in my heart of hearts I was doing the right thing. Continue reading.

Source: Stuff

Image: Stuff

The shocking statistics mean that more than 22,000 would-be adoptive parents vanish from the system every year.

The figures were made public for the first time by the schools and children inspectorate Ofsted. They were released just three weeks after the government-sponsored National Adoption Week called for thousands more people to come forward to adopt.

The Ofsted count showed that in the year which ended in March, 25,380 couples and individuals made inquiries about adopting a child.

Of these, only 4,145 (16 per cent) went on to make applications to adopt a child. Even fewer - 3,048 - were actually approved as prospective parents by council or agency social workers.

The drop-out rate has been revealed at a time when ministers have promised to sweep away the barriers to adoption put up by social workers over the past three decades.

Parents have been regularly turned down because social workers insist on precise racial matches, and white parents are routinely rejected as adopters of black or Asian children. Potential parents are also turned down because they smoke, or are too old, or social workers say their health is not good enough.

The Ofsted breakdown, based on returns from councils and voluntary adoption agencies, gave the same figure as Whitehall for the number of children adopted from the care system last year - 3,450.

Refused: Many would-be parents have been turned down because social workers insist on precise racial matches (file photo)

About 65,000 children live in state care, either in children's homes or with frequently changing foster families.

Children who grow up in care are likely to grow up with poor education and have a high chance of falling into drug abuse, crime or early pregnancy.

Despite regular warnings that adoption placements often break up, the Ofsted figures showed that there were only 115 'unplanned endings' of adoption placements during the year. Continue reading

Image: Priests for Life

The court also ordered the release of Sr Mary's passport and all documents of the Prem Nivasa (House of Love) convent seized for the purposes of an investigation into alleged irregularities at the home for pregnant mothers.

Allegations surround suspicions that the sisters harboured girls who had become pregnant aged under 16 - the age of consent - and also that money may have corruptly changed hands for the adoption of babies.

The sisters strenuously denied the allegations, however the head of the convent, Sr Mary Eliza was imprisoned pending the outcome of and investigation.

The allegations came after a raid on Prem Nivasa last month organised by the National Child Protection Authority (NCPA), also involving the Criminal Investigation Department.

Prior to the court's ruling, Father Cyril Gamini, the parish priest of the nearby St Joseph's Church described the allegations as "rubbish".

Hiranthi Wijemanne, a former chairperson of the NCPA, however said that the raid on the convent took place because of a tip-off from somebody who has not been publicly named.

Throughout the ordeal the sisters continue to spend much time in prayer, and said they want to continue their ministry to the poor.

Sr Mary Eliza is the first sister of Missionaries of Charity to ever be imprisoned. She enjoyed the support of the head of the order who came to Sri Lankaha during the distress.

Sources

• BBC
• Sri Lankan Guardian
• Image: Sri Lankan Guardian

Paul Vallely says. "Think different is the Apple slogan. Ironically, there was a pretty undifferentiated consensus in the tributes being paid to him. Eulogies likened him to Edison and Einstein. He was 'the Leonardo da Vinci' of our time.

"More tellingly, his death was compared with that of Elvis Presley or John Lennon as marking the end of a cultural era. All this tells us more about ourselves than about the untimely-taken Mr Jobs," says Vallely.

No saint, maybe, but a remarkable man as is revealed in a remarkable commencement address he gave at Standford University in 2005, which even PC lovers would enjoy reading. In the speech he tells three stories:

• His first story: "connecting the dots" - Birth to a single mother and adoption
• His second story: "about love and loss" - being dismissed from the company he founded
• His third story: "about death" - his experience of cancer

On the other hand Paul Vallely shines some light into the shadow side. He says, for example, "Capitalism, Marx argues, conceals the human relationships behind commodities. That is why there is not much mention in the Jobs tributes of the dark underbelly of the iPad, which is produced in factories where conditions are so unrelenting that last year 14 young workers killed themselves. Most of them jumped from the roof of the Foxconn factory in Taiwan manufacturing iPads - as well as kit for Dell and Sony".

Source

• New Zealand Herald
• Image: Hark

At least one Bishop thinks there is a possibility that the Church will no longer be free to preach the truth from the pulpit or to present Catholic teaching.

Bishop Samuel J. Aquila of Fargo, North Dakota cited two recent examples where he believes religious liberty is being undermined: the closure of Catholic adoption agencies in states that have legislated for same-sex marriage and the new government health mandate requiring private insurers to provide women with coverage for contraception and sterilization.

"It's very, very important for us to realize that we are in a very real clash between the culture of death and a culture of life," said Bishop Aquila, summing up the former culture as one where "rights are eroded and where lies are being presented as truth."

And last week in the the Supreme Court, the US government is arguing before a panel of six Catholic and three Jewish Supreme Court justices that religious institutions should be treated like any other institution in matters of hiring.

"This is extraordinary—extraordinary," Justice Antonin Scalia said to the government's lawyer during oral arguments Wednesday. "There's nothing explicitly in the Constitution that prevents the government from mucking around in a labor organization. But there in black and white in the Constitution are special protections for religion."

Source:

• CNA
• World- Today's News -Christian Views
• Image: FaithWorld

The bill would replace the Adoption Act, which is more than 50 years old.

"The current Act fails to recognise that more than three-quarters of children adopted today are not adopted by 'strangers' but by wider family, including relatives and long-term partners of the biological parents," Ardern said.

• Justice Minister Simon Power says he is aware of the need to review current adoption laws, but he has other issues to look at first
• Family First NZ says the purpose of adoption is to provide a family to a child. "The purpose of adoption is not to provide a child to adults," national director Bob McCoskrie said.

Source

• NZ Herald.co.nz
• Radio New Zealand News
• TVNZ
• Image: New Zealand Open Adoptions Network