The Ministry of the Interior will this week promote the services of the Child and Juvenile Adoption Information Center, a facility that manages adoption information and helps adopted children reunite with their birth families.
The Children and Juvenile Welfare Law (兒童及少年福利法), which took effect in 2003, requires the government's child and youth welfare agencies to establish an adoption information center that retains information such as the identities and health records of adoptees, guardians and birth parents, as well as those of adopting parents.
The center was established last September by the ministry and the Child Welfare League Foundation. However, promotion for the center's work will only begin this month once the center's Web site is up and running.
Vice Minister of the Interior Yen Wan-chin (顏萬進) said on Tuesday that the center was a first for the nation. Previously, adoptees struggled to find their birth parents and their background information, how they were adopted and medical records.
In addition, records related to adoption kept by the courts were usually discarded one year after the completion of the adoption, so very little information has remained intact, Yen said.
More than 3,500 cases of adoption are processed by the court every year, mostly involving the children of single mothers or children in families with economic difficulties. Most are adopted within the country but more than a quarter of adopted children head overseas, according to center figures.
Yen said that with a society more diverse and complex than ever before, adopted children could be from broken families, victims of domestic violence, or have mixed parentage.
Adopters could live overseas (including China), be homosexual couples or single parents, he said, adding that the need to preserve adoption information was more urgent than ever.
For example, in Taipei City and Taipei County, 587 children were adopted within the country, while 220 were adopted overseas (38 were adopted by Chinese families) in 2004.
Huang Pi-hsia (黃碧霞), director of the ministry's Child Welfare Bureau, said adoptees had the right to know about their roots and the reasons behind the adoption, and that it was the government's job to keep the information safe.
Center representatives said that almost 10 years ago, a girl who was adopted by an Australian family returned to look for her birth parents despite having very little information on them. The attempt was successful, but after that, more requests were made to find information on birth families, and a need for the center had become more pressing, they said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching