Forced adoption

Forced adoption is the practice of forcefully taking children from their parents and placing them for adoption.

Removing children of ethnic minorities from their families to be adopted by those of the dominant ethnic group has been used as a method of forced assimilation. "Forcibly transferring children of [a] group to another group" is genocide according to the Genocide Convention.^[1] While this usually revolves around ethnicity, assimilating children of political minorities has also occurred.

The Stolen Generations in Australia involved Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children,^[2][3] where over 60 years from 1910, it is estimated that as many as a third of Aboriginal children were taken from their families.^[4]

In Canada, the Canadian Indian residential school system involved First Nations, Métis and Inuit children, who often suffered severe abuse.^{[5][6][7][8][9]} The Sixties Scoop is a period when Canadian child welfare agents had the authority to take indigenous children from their families for placement in foster homes so they could be adopted by white families.^[10]

As part of the persecution of Uyghurs in China, in 2017 alone at least half a million children were forcefully separated from their families, and placed in pre-school camps with prison-style surveillance systems and 10,000 volt electric fences.^[11]

In German-occupied Poland, it is estimated that 200,000 Polish children with purportedly Aryan traits were removed from their families and given to German or Austrian couples,^[12] and only 25,000 returned to their families after the war.^[13]

Among nomadic groups, particularly the Murle people, children are abducted in raids against other tribes to be raised as their own. The practice is thought to be intended to increase the tribe's numbers.^[14] This includes the 2016 Gambela raid and 2017 Gambela raid.

Hispanic eugenics was pioneered by psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo-Nájera who proposed a link between Marxism and intellectual disability, leading to the thefts of many Spanish newborns and young children from their left-wing parents.^[15]

In April 2023, the Council of Europe voted overwhelmingly, with 87 in favor, 1 opposed, and 1 abstention, to deem the "deportations and forcible transfers of Ukrainian children and other civilians to Russian Federation or to Ukrainian territories temporarily occupied" as an act of genocide.^[16]

Child welfare is often the rationale given for separating children from their parents. Family preservation is the perspective that it is better to help keep children at home with their families rather than in foster homes or institutions. How that should be balanced with the potential of harm to children is a matter of debate.^[17]

Separating children from parents is most commonly used today for parental abuse of children.

From the 1950s to the 1970s in the anglosphere, babies were frequently taken away from unmarried mothers without any other reason simply because unmarried mothers were considered unsuitable parents, in what was known as the baby scoop era.^[18][19] In 2013, the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard apologized for the forced adoption in Australia of babies born to unwed mothers that occurred mostly in the twentieth century.^[20]

In Belgium from the end of the Second World War to the 1980s, the Catholic Church took in pregnant unmarried women and, during childbirth, some women were given general anesthetia while others had to wear a mask to prevent them from seeing their children. Some women were sterilized. About 30,000 such children were sold to adoptive parents for between 10,000 and 30,000 Belgian francs (roughly between €250 and €750) and sometimes much more.^[21]

In Switzerland, between the 1850s and the mid-20th century, hundreds of thousands of children mostly from poor families, as well as single parents, were removed from their parents by the authorities, and sent to work on farms, living with new families. They were known as contract children or Verdingkinder.^{[22][23][24][25]}

In South Korea, during the military dictatorship, the government pursued a "social purification" program that forced thousands of people off the streets into government-funded, privately run welfare centres. If they gave birth, the children were taken away to be adopted.^[26]

A 2023 report from the South Australian Commissioner for Aboriginal Children and Young People warned of a new "stolen generation" finding Aboriginal children were increasingly being removed from their families with every other Aboriginal child in South Australia being subject to a one child protection notification in 2020-21 compared to one in 12 for non-Aboriginal children.^[4]

Norwegian Child Welfare Services are accused of disproportionately removing children of immigrant parents.^[27][28]

In the United Kingdom, former judge Alan Goldsack called for the UK Government to forcibly remove children from 'criminal families' at birth and to place them for adoption. His remarks have been criticized and he has been accused of "criminalising babies".^[29]

• Adoption fraud
• Human trafficking
• International adoption
• International child abduction
• Interracial adoption
• Transculturation

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