I can’t understand how her own mother did this to her, being a mother herself.

Would she have given her own child away? Then why did she do it to her own daughter? How ignorant they were back in those days.

They gave more importance to what other people think of them than they did to human life and happiness.

You are an excellent caring woman.

This has serious emotional and psychological consequences and also hinders an adopted person’s ability to find out about any possible medical conditions within his/her biological extended family that he/she would ideally need to research and mitigate in order to protect himself/herself and any possible offspring/descendants.

When the child was going to be given for adoption they were not allowed to see the child,not even hear the child cry, and also they were not told the sex of the child.

I know, because I was there.

It must have been very emotional for all the members of the family. Such programmes do more harm than good.

That said, birth parents aren’t listed on the certificates and that is because open adoptions are not yet legal in Malta, therefore, the adoptive family cannot know details of the birth family.

It is only the child, on reaching 18, who can request the courts to ‘unseal’ the documents.

As an adoptive mum, who has told her child the story of his origin from day 1, I’m glad that the extract is different because this actually protects the child’s right to privacy, particularly in a country the size of Malta.

Once my child is old enough to make his own decisions, I wouldn’t mind broadcasting it to all and sundry but till then, my primary goal is for him to know his personal story and do with it what he will, when he is ready to.

On another note, while expert consensus today is that it is detrimental to hide the truth of their origins from children who are adopted, this wasn’t the case in the not-so-distance past.

A few decades ago, the advice given to adoptive parents was to never reveal the truth to adopted children, something that seems so counter-intuitive to us nowadays.

For long days I had felt their unspeakable anguish. Seeing it again in Roberto’s face and seeing his mother’s grief made me live again those days in an emotional powerlessness wanting to do something for these children.

Such dramatic revelations are traumatizing and they should never be exposed as a show. I feel the same about our own TV shows of a similar kind.

She was probably put to so much shame, that she probably wasn’t allowed to mention it to anyone. She must have been traumatized all her life.

In a way, this episode might have given her a sense of relief, albeit possibly precipitating her death.

It is said no one dies of a broken heart per se, but she must have had so many pent-up feelings which would have contributed to health problems.

May she rest in peace, and may Roberto find peace too. He’s been through such a lot.

I can imagine how he feels, having lost his adoptive parents, and now, after finally finding his biological mother, losing her too. He’s probably feeling a lot of guilt too, miskin.

I really hope that his half-sisters will keep good contact with him. That’s the only good I can see coming out of this story.

As for sensational prime-time programmes like this, it’s really all about the money, isn’t it?

Il-hajja xi kultant kiefra, pero’ taqtax qalbek – mhux kulhadd xorta. Ma nafx kemm ghandek zmien issa, pero’ hawn postijiet li jistghu forsi jghinuk, skond x’ikun il-kaz tieghek, bhal Suret il-Bniedem http://suret-il-bniedem.aidengine.net/contact u Dar Merhba Bik http://www.wave-network.org/organizations/dar-merhba-bik