Adoptions in India

Hi Katie,Your thoughts about wanting to find your birth family are shared by many other inter-country adoptees. As for searching for your birth family in India, perhaps you might like to try [URL="http://www.icasn.org/"]Inter-Country Adoptee Support Network[/URL] - there are some resources listed for Indian adoptees. You might also like to have a look at the book, "The Colour of Difference: Journeys in Transracial Adoption", published by Federation Press, which includes contributions by 18 inter-country adoptees and 9 Australian-based transracial adoptees. Here's an excerpt from the Federation Press about the book."The aim of the project was to draw together the experiences of both Australian-born transracial adoptees and intercountry adoptees ... Of the nine Australian-born adoptees, there were those of Aboriginal, Chinese, Maori, African, Spanish descent. The countries of origin for the 18 intercountry adoptees were Vietnam, Bangladesh, Fiji, New Zealand (Maori), Burundi, Korea, Colombia, Sri Lanka, India and Canada (North American Indian). The writing of The Colour of Difference has been about discovery and openness and not about blame. The adoptees who gave their stories to us so generously and honestly, with all their various experiences of adoption, wanted the book to be a positive and true reflection of their lives in Australia. Some of them, as you will read, had experienced unkindness or abuse in their adoptive families. The majority had been treated with love and real efforts had been made to incorporate them and their culture into the adoptive family. The participants, as a group, said that they were 'just trying to be honest' in writing their stories, not trying to blame their adoptive families, who were generally perceived to be 'doing their best'. ... The participants of this book are keenly aware of how their lives might have been. They bear the burden of gratefulness, often to parents who would be appalled to think that their children feel such an emotion. In the public eye, this kind of adoption was, and perhaps still is, a 'good thing' to have done, an altruistic gesture. The New South Wales Law Reform Commission, in their Report 81: Review of the Adoption of Children Act 1965 (NSW) state: [INDENT]Approaching intercountry adoption as a form of aid carries with it a danger of placing on the child an implied burden of being grateful for having been 'saved'. This can lead to a situation in which the child may feel that his gratitude can never equal what has been done for him and the debt becomes impossible to repay."[/INDENT] Regards,Ripples