The Children's Bureau under the Ministry of the Interior is planning to centralize information about adopted children next year to assist in the search for biological parents by adoptees.
Last week the ministry's regulations board passed a preliminary review of the proposed regulation on children and juvenile adoption information management and usage (兒童及少年收養資訊管理及使用辦法), which will employ a non-governmental children's welfare agency to be responsible for gathering and storing relevant information.
"Right now, information about adopted children is very scattered. Some pieces of information are with the courts, some are with registration offices and some are with regional governments," a bureau representative said yesterday.
The proposal to centralize information was initiated by the Child Welfare League Foundation, which provides adoption services.
"We came up with this proposition back in 1992. In the past, many overseas adoptees have gone through a lot of difficulties locating their biological parents in Taiwan later in life. Having all information centralized would make their search a lot easier," foundation executive director Alicia Wang (
Wang said that an adoptee who wishes to locate his or her biological parents must first undergo a DNA matching before holding a press conference to publicize the search.
"It is very hard on these children to have to go through all this trouble, and it also uses up a lot of resources," Wang said.
Article 17 of the Children and Juveniles Welfare Law (
The bureau said that information centralization would commence by next October. The information management office is to be located in Sindian, Taipei County.
The bureau plans to outsource this project and interested agencies may participate in the bid held by the ministry.
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
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