Kidnappings are in the news and on the minds of parents everywhere, nowhere more so than in Holland, where a Dutch family has reportedly learned that their son, adopted from India, had been kidnapped from his birth family and sold to a children's home with false documents that released the child for adoption.

Apparently, the child's biological parents want him back.

I can find only one original source for this story, as everything leads to one Dutch television program making the report and quoting one "adoption specialist", Rene Hoksbergen, a professor at Utrecht University, who is attributed a statement saying that 53 other children have been brought to the Netherlands from the same children's home.

It's a difficult story to figure out with the little information made available to date, but that's beside the point, and although it's getting heavy buzz on adoption-related websites, it's fading quickly in the media, which makes me wonder what's up. No matter ... although this child is this story, the issue is so much bigger.

Allegations of corruption, of child stealing and trafficking plague international adoption, and there are cases of this that have been proven beyond a doubt. (Many of which unfortunately point to the father or other relations as perpetrator rather than strangers, however.) Programs have been shut down and people have been sent to prison.

What has not happened, as far as I can find, is children being returned to the families they were taken from. A similar, yet very different case involving a little girl named Anna Mae He has been getting much attention. At the root, the story is about a child being returned to her parents after years in the foster care of people who want to keep her, but although some of the circumstances are as tragic, the story is not about kidnapping.

With the Maddy McCann kidnapping 26 days ago (see previous post), so much in people's thoughts right now, it provides the opportunity to ask: How likely would it be that anyone would suggest, should her kidnappers somehow manage to pass her off as an orphan and through some strange set of circumstances she was adopted by a family ... a well-meaning, caring family providing a loving home for a substantial period of time ... her parents would be obligated to leave her in that home if and when they managed to finally find her?

Is there any difference between the McCanns and the biological parents of the child in the Dutch family? If the circumstances would somehow turn out to be the same ... unlikely, I know, but for the sake of discussion and thought we'll assume the possibility ... would a British couple who had a child snatched while on holiday in Portugal have any more right to the return of their child than Indian parents whose child was stolen from their home?

Think of the scope of this ... the implications, the potential for heartbreak.

For more, see the next post.