GAYATRI ABRAHAM, PADME

Before we get into the theme of Adoption, we would like to introduce you to Gayatri Abraham. The first time we spoke, I instantly connected with Gayatri and the passion for the topic of adoption was palpable.

Gayatri has worked in a variety of industries including public relations, hospitality, retail, holidays and leisure and education. But alongside her work experience, she has always been interested in women’s issues and child related societal concerns. In the mid-90s, she was part of a study on women’s reproductive healthcare, conducting interviews with commercial sex workers in Chennai, led by a professor from the University of Swansea. Later she volunteered for a while with Tulir, Centre for the Prevention and Healing Child Sexual Abuse in Chennai.

Over the last 12 years, Gayatri has been involved with adoption as a cause, counselling prospective adoptive parents as well as adoptive parents on dealing with adoption and adoptees. She set up Padme in 2017 as a site that will function as a go-to resource for adoptive parents, adoptees and society at large to initiate and change the tone of conversation on the topic of adoption in India is the crystallization of a dream that she has been carrying around for more than a decade.

More about Padme in the next post, but in reply to my question on ‘how it all began’, Gayatri  said, “While dating my husband prior to even thinking we would be married later, we had discussed the option of having children through the biological and the adoption route. When we decided to have children and the biological route was not an option, it seemed to us that this was predestined in our lives to have children through the adoption route. Both of us agreed that adoption was not a fall back option, but was always an alternate way to start a family.”  Having personally gone through the entire process and observed the alarming gap in awareness, resources and assistance in the space of Adoption, Gayatri got into action mode and thus Padme was born.

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