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Adoption information accessible

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.
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