Workshop on Adoption
and Safe Surrender
On 18th November 2013 at 2:15 pm, workshop was conducted with
the nursing staff in Thane Civil Hospital‘s nursing college meeting hall on
adoption and safe surrender. The workshop was organized by Sakhya Women’s
Guidance cell and the resource person was Savita Nagpurkar from Indian Association
for Promotion of Adoption and Child Welfare (IAPA).The Social worker Kamini
introduced the resource person to the nursing staff by giving a brief view
about her work .The resource person started the workshop by showing two half
minute videos and asked the nursing staff to distinguish between the two. In
the first video the girl was sad because her family had thrown her child away
as she was an unwed mother .In the second video other girl was happy because
the unwed had given her child for adoption and had secured the child’s life.
With the example of the video Mrs. Savita tried to explain the plight of an
unwed mother .How some of the unwed mothers are forced to put their child away
by their families or are killed after birth or in some cases given illegally to
couples who cannot have their own child. She shared how some doctors in some
hospitals illegally give unwed mothers child to a couple who cannot have their
own. Back in time couples adopted children but later when the child became sick
and struck by some danger disease or became physically disabled or when the
couple have their own child later they used to give back the adopted child to
the ashram where they adopted the child from causing a trauma in the minds of
those children. Because of all these reasons the adoption process came into
picture. The resource person further explained the nursing staff if they come
across such cases where an unwed mother does not know what to do with the child
they can help them by referring them to the IAPA which will help them through
the process and help the child to be with a family through adoption. In this
way unwed mothers don’t have to abandon the child in some dustbin or near
litter areas. Safe surrender project was started by the IAPA to ensure that a
child gets to live in a family through adoption. The adoption process requires
proper documents of the family who wish to adopt pan card, address proof,
salary slip. The person who adopts must have adequate income and has to have an
insurance policy removed in the name of the child adopted to ensure the future
of the child so that he/she is not abandoned by the adopted family. Later the
resource person asked nursing staff to share their views on the topic. One nurse
shared that a relative in her family had adopted a child undergoing all the
legal process and now the child is as their own .Some nurses took the contact
number of the resource person and interacted with her sharing some cases. The
workshop came to an end at 4:00 with a song sung by the social worker and a
vote of thanks to the resource person and the nursing staff.
