Despite mixed results, foster children from South Asia are resorting to DNA testing. For many Indian and Sri Lankan adoptees looking for biological relatives, genetic testing offers hope - and challenges.
Anand Kaper was born in Bombay in October 1976 in a small private hospital to an unmarried mother. His birth was never officially registered. When he was nine months old, a Dutch couple adopted him from an orphanage, making Kaper one of approximately 1,100 children adopted from abroad to the Netherlands that same year.
Privateer, now an elementary school teacher, spent a happy childhood in the small Dutch town of Apeldoorn, but as he grew older he began to have more questions about his roots. Since 2002, he has returned to his hometown, now called Mumbai, almost every year, in search of details of his adoption. But the orphanage did not give him anything. Officials told Kaper that mothers who opted for anonymity while abandoning their children could not be disclosed and denied his requests.
In October 2017, Kaper ordered a home DNA testing kit from FamilyTreeDNA, a Texas-based company popular with genealogy hobbyists. He had few expectations: testing companies have a small presence in India and other South Asian countries.
However, for many South Asian adoptees such as Kaper, the more traditional search for their roots quickly runs into bureaucratic hurdles. As a result, more and more South Asian adoptees are turning to genetic testing, hoping that as the genetic databases expand to include more people similar to them in terms of race and ethnicity, they can provide answers, if not now, then for years to come. However, these genetic searches come with their own set of challenges, including ethical questions about finding mothers who may not want to be disclosed, and genetic databases that critics say have long been Eurocentric.
The privateer knew that there was little chance that a person born in India and raised in the Netherlands would be able to find their genetic relatives in the American data bank. However, he rubbed the inside of his mouth and sent the kit.
Private genetic companies have flourished in the United States for over a decade. By January 2019, the MIT Technology Review estimates that more than 26 million people have passed pedigree tests at home. Using saliva samples, companies such as 23andMe claim to offer clients a breakdown by ethnicity and the opportunity to learn about potential health risks. Clients can also use these tools to search for genetic relatives who have chosen to be included in the DNA database.
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