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This article from the Guardian tells the story of an adult adoptee, adopted from Chile to Sweden, whose search for her biological mother revealed that she had been "stolen" from birth. The article describes how many women in Chile in the 1970s and 80s, mostly from poor and minority backgrounds, had been tricked or coerced into giving up their babies for international adoption, as part of a national strategy to eradicate childhood poverty which began during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Elisabet Purve-Jorendal was born in India and given away for adoption in 1973 when she was less than six months old. A Swedish couple adopted her when she was two-and-a-half years old. Forty-two years later, she tracked down her biological mother.
Elisabet's mother was 21 years old when Elisabet's father killed himself. When the family discovered Elisabet's mother's pregnancy, they took her to a charity in Pune where she delivered a baby girl in September 1973.
Elisabet began actively looking for her mother in 1998 and nearly two decades later, her search ended in a…