Blog

Introduction

On the 4th of March, the Flemish Parliament reached a political consensus during a plenary session discussing a proposed resolution to phase out transnational adoption. Caroline Gennez, current Flemish Minister of Welfare and Poverty Reduction, Culture and Equal Opportunities, called it “a historic moment” during the session. Less than two months later, on 27 April 2026, the Minister announced an agreement on a phase-out scenario, with intercountry adoption set to be fully abolished in 2027. Yet reaching this point took decades of work to build the social and political awareness needed to first question transnational adoption and later end it. In this blogpost, I trace some of those key moments, several of which I was involved in as an adoptee activist and researcher.

Emerging critical adoptee voices

In 2009, a group of adoptees founded Geadopteerd.be, an organisation that brought together domestic and transnational adoptees, to draw attention to the rights and needs of adoptees in Flanders. Through their efforts, the right of access to adoption files was secured in the 2012 adoption decree, which came into force in 2013. This meant that adoption dossiers would be centralised at the central authority, retained for long-term preservation, and recognised as a right rather than something dependent on the goodwill of an adoption intermediary or agency.

A few years after this first victory, I entered the field myself. By that time, the Flemish adoption sector was preparing for a new reform of the 2012 decree, and hearings on transnational adoption were being held in the Flemish Parliament in 2016. While the dominant focus at the time was on how to reduce waiting lists for prospective adoptive parents, several adoptees – including myself – took the floor to shift the conversation. Building on the work of those who had come before, we emphasised the need for aftercare, support in searches for origins, and the importance of questioning the unequal global structures that underlie transnational adoption. We argued that the debate itself was misframed: the question should not be how to reduce waiting lists or how to bring more children to Flanders, but how to invest in sustainable care for families in countries of origin and, ultimately, how to make transnational adoption a finite story.

During the hearings, our critical voices were not welcomed by everyone. Still, they planted a seed, bringing more attention to a structural view of transnational adoption beyond the psychological dimension alone. In the years that followed, several shifts took place: press coverage increasingly took up these structural inequalities, transnational adoption was more openly discussed, and the voices of adoptees became more central. This created space for other stories to surface, testimonies in the press about irregular practices and abuses, brought forward by transnational adoptees themselves. Alongside this, public events and conversations gradually brought a wider range of critical perspectives to the foreground, making such perspectives more accepted in discussions about transnational adoption as well.

The Expert Panel and its aftermath

In late April 2019, a newspaper published testimonies from Ethiopian adoptees and their adoptive families about fraudulent practices in adoptions that had taken place after 2005, under a supposedly ethical and reformed adoption system in Flanders. These revelations prompted a parliamentary hearing in May 2019 and led the central authority to open a procedure through which Ethiopian adoptees and adoptive families could register for an investigation into possible malpractices. Later that year, following the example of the Netherlands, the Flemish Minister of Welfare appointed an independent Expert Panel on Intercountry Adoption to investigate past practices and propose policy recommendations.

From September 2019 to June 2021, the Expert Panel examined transnational adoption practices through psychological, socio-historical, ethical, and legal lenses. Its final report issued twenty recommendations addressing both the future of the adoption system and how to respond to malpractices. Most significantly, it proposed a two-year adoption pause during which the system would shift from an active to a passive model, and adoption agencies would be phased out. The then Minister of Welfare initially accepted this proposal but quickly withdrew it under pressure from coalition partners and the adoption lobby, including adoption agencies and adoptive parents, who dismissed the panel’s findings as outdated, even though the research had in fact also included an evaluation of the then-current adoption system.

In the years that followed, the Flemish government began implementing several of the panel’s recommendations. Three priorities were set out: strengthening partnerships with countries of origin, connecting foster care and adoption, and investing in aftercare and support. Since 2022, the central authority began screening countries of origin against six criteria, ranging from the ratification of the Hague Adoption Convention and the application of the subsidiarity principle within a broader child protection system to financial transparency, adoptees’ right to information about their origins, and the willingness to cooperate directly government-to-government.  This led to continued cooperation with some, further review for others, and the termination of cooperation with several countries.. Additional funding was made available to expand aftercare, peer support, and guidance in origin searches. At the same time, the government decided to reduce the number of recognised adoption agencies from three to one, which triggered a legal dispute between the remaining services. Faced with this unresolved conflict, alongside ongoing complaints and concerns about past practices, the Minister of Welfare decided in December 2023 that no new adoption agency would be recognised until a new decree was passed. What had been politically impossible as a formal pause in 2021 had, in effect, become reality.

Alongside these institutional shifts, the question of past malpractices remained pressing. In November 2023, the preliminary findings of the earlier investigation into Ethiopian adoption files, launched in 2019, confirmed that dossiers often diverged from reality: parents wrongly declared dead, relinquishments that had not been voluntary, and undisclosed family members. In response, a broader call was launched inviting anyone with doubts or concerns about their adoption file to come forward, regardless of country of origin. By March 2026, 241 people had registered. Each registration is followed by a personal conversation with the central authority, after which an individual investigation can be opened if the person wishes to proceed. To prepare the investigative phase, the central authority appointed International Social Service as a partner to screen research partners per country of origin. Once a research partner is appointed for a given country, an investigation into an individual file can begin, drawing both on information provided by the person who registered and on archives held by the central authority.

Moving towards adoption abolition in Flanders

Throughout these developments, and in light of similar shifts in other European countries, politicians began to raise a question that adoptees and adoptee organisations had been asking for years: does transnational adoption still have a place today, and should it be phased out? In recent months, these conversations took concrete form. In February 2026, the political party GROEN submitted a resolution calling for a phase-out plan for transnational adoption, drawing on consultations with stakeholders, experts, academics, and organisation from the adoption and youth care sector. The proposal included finalising ongoing procedures with a definitive suitability assessment while no longer accepting new applications, carrying out historical research into illegal adoptions between 1960 and 2005, and investing in child protection in countries of origin. Shortly after, during a plenary session on 4 March 2026, parties from across the political spectrum agreed that the best interests of the child could no longer be guaranteed within the current system, and that a phase-out of transnational adoption had to be seriously considered. On 27 April 2026, the Flemish government decided to end transnational adoption. New legislation, expected to enter into force by mid 2027, will terminate all ongoing transnational adoption procedures, except those for which a matching proposal has already been received by the central authority. “Time to close this chapter,” said the responsible Minister, framing the decision as a definitive turning point after decades of debate, irregularities, and reform attempts. After seventy-five years, following the examples of the Netherlands and Denmark, transnational adoption as a practice is coming to an end in Flanders.

What adoption abolition entails, however, means different things to different people. I myself draw on family policing abolition movements, a tradition that critiques how the child protection system often separates children from their families rather than supporting them to stay together. This framework has been central to my own thinking, because in the debates of recent years on ending transnational adoption, the situation in countries of origin risks being forgotten. Yet it is precisely there that much harm continues to take place within the child protection system, where children are unnecessarily separated from their families, end up institutionalised, and in some cases adopted abroad. In my own research on transnational adoption from Bolivia to Belgium, I traced how families were sometimes needlessly pulled apart by child protection interventions, with transnational adoption as the final outcome. For this reason, adoption abolition in the Global North cannot be thought of in isolation: it must go hand in hand with a thorough revision of child protection systems in countries of origin, so that children are no longer unnecessarily removed from their families in the first place.

Following this abolitionist tradition, abolition is not only about dismantling systems; it is also about asking how humanity can be restored for all those who have been harmed by them. This brings us to the question of what reparation might look like for transnational adoptees and their first families. Reparation is not a single act but a long process. It begins with acknowledging the historical injustices caused by child protection and adoption systems, and unfolds through truth-finding, healing, and various forms of redress. Nevertheless, these are conversations that will continue in the years and decades to come. They will take time, but the path forward is being made.

Getting to this point, however, has been a collective effort that stretches across generations of adoptees, researchers, and allies in Flanders and beyond, each building on the work of the other. With the possible end of the era of transnational adoption, I hope an era of reparation can now begin.

Photo credits: Belga.