South Korean Adoptions and a Nation’s Painful Past

Mia Lee Sorensen’s Danish dad and mom used to inform her that her start household in South Korea had put her up for adoption. In keeping with her adoption papers, she was born prematurely in 1987 to a household that might not afford her medical payments and wished for her to have a “good future” overseas.

However when Ms. Sorensen discovered her start dad and mom in South Korea final yr, they might not consider she was alive. They informed her that her mom had handed out throughout labor and that when she wakened, the clinic informed her that the infant had died.

South Korea has the world’s largest diaspora of intercountry adoptees, with extra international adoptions total than some other nation. About 200,000 youngsters have been despatched overseas for the reason that finish of the Korean Struggle in 1953, largely to the US and Europe.

These adoptions have continued immediately, even because the nation suffers one of many world’s lowest birthrates. In 2021, the highest intercountry adoption hubs have been Colombia, India, Ukraine and South Korea. (Earlier than the coronavirus pandemic started in 2020, China had topped the record.)

Amid widespread accusations of corruption and malpractice up to now, South Korea opened its first official authorities investigation into its adoption business final yr.

South Korean households have lengthy been reluctant to undertake youngsters, regardless of authorities campaigns to encourage home adoptions. And within the many years after the Korean Struggle, when South Korea was an impoverished nation with poor medical companies and threadbare welfare budgets, there was a urgent want to seek out adoptive houses overseas for orphaned, deserted or disabled youngsters, in response to adoption consultants.

Many youngsters discovered the assistance and caring houses they wanted overseas. However in its rush to advertise abroad adoptions as an answer, South Korea had additionally spawned profound and widespread issues within the business that stretched for many years.

Revenue motives for adoption companies created an incentive up to now to falsify or obscure paperwork to make extra youngsters obtainable for adoption, generally with out the start dad and mom’ information. Many unwed moms have been coerced into signing away their infants even earlier than giving start. And generally there was little or no follow-up from the companies on instances the place youngsters struggled with adjustment troubles or abuse of their new houses.

Most of the issues have diminished in latest many years, as South Korea took steps to overtake its adoption practices, together with increasing authorities help for single moms who wished to maintain their youngsters and requiring abroad adoptions to be accredited by the courts. However quite a few accusations of malpractice from earlier many years went with out investigation.

The push for accountability has been led by a whole lot of adoptees who’ve returned to South Korea lately with the time and assets to hunt solutions. They’ve partnered with a brand new technology of researchers and politicians prepared to make clear a painful legacy that was, for many years, thought-about too shameful to brazenly focus on.

“It’s like human trafficking,” Ms. Sorensen stated of adoption in South Korea. “If this occurred to me, what number of others did they do that to?”

‘One Ethnic Individuals’

Through the pandemic, Peter Moller, a Korean adoptee raised in Denmark, requested fellow Korean adoptees around the globe to share their experiences. He anticipated to be taught of remoted instances of doc fraud. As a substitute, a whole lot of individuals got here ahead with accounts of fabricated knowledge, stolen infants and laundered identities, and of abuse in adoptive households.

“We solely scratched the floor,” stated Mr. Moller, who helped arrange the worldwide adoptee marketing campaign that prompted the federal government investigation.

The infant export enterprise in South Korea started with what critics referred to as a deep-seated xenophobia and prejudice towards biracial youngsters. In its postwar years, the nation’s first president, Syngman Rhee, pursued a coverage he referred to as “one state for one ethnic folks,” which inspired sending biracial youngsters born to American troopers and Korean girls to “their fathers’ land.”

Many destitute moms of biracial youngsters confronted a stark alternative: place their infants up for abroad adoption or increase them alone in poverty and shame.

When Boo Chung-ha, a retired adoption agent, joined Holt Kids’s Companies, the nation’s largest adoption company, in 1967, his first job was to steer girls working within the intercourse commerce round American army bases to put their biracial youngsters up for abroad adoption. “Our society didn’t take care of them and their moms,” he stated. “Their moms lived and labored in rooms barely giant sufficient to squeeze in a mattress.”

Meeky Woo Flippen was born in 1965 to a Korean mom and a Black American soldier. She stated that when she left the small alley the place she lived in a house together with her mom and biracial siblings, folks would hurl racist insults at her.

“We had no future in South Korea,” stated Ms. Flippen, who was adopted right into a household in Oregon as a teen after her mom died.

In South Korea, it was lengthy left to folks to report the start of a brand new baby, a observe that adoptees say made it simpler to go away new child infants unregistered with the federal government and to cross them off as orphans who have been then preyed upon by adoption businesses. Solely this June, South Korea’s Nationwide Meeting handed a legislation requiring start clinics and the authorities to register a baby’s start.

‘Mail-Order Infants’

By the tip of the Sixties, most youngsters despatched overseas weren’t biracial however born to unwed moms, one other goal of prejudice in South Korea. Round that point, as many as 20 infants would arrive at Holt from throughout the nation each Friday, stated Mr. Boo, who headed Holt’s Korea operation till 1978.

“Some had no data on them, and docs needed to guess their age from their enamel,” he stated. Others had been deserted and starved for days and died quickly after arrival. They have been buried in a plot owned by Holt, with neither their start nor dying registered with the federal government, he stated. He stated that in his time at Holt, the company did nothing unlawful.

“We despatched youngsters abroad so they might have higher medical care and houses,” Mr. Boo stated.

One other goal, at the very least for the federal government, was to alleviate the nation’s bloated, postwar welfare rolls.

To streamline the adoption course of, South Korea allowed 4 personal businesses, together with Holt, to earn charges by sending adopted youngsters overseas. Moderately than requiring adoptive dad and mom to journey to South Korea, the businesses delivered the infants straight.

Abroad vacationers have been usually employed by the businesses to escort the infants to their new households at a low price. In 1970, a day by day newspaper in South Korea reported that 10 youngsters sure for France by Holt have been tied collectively in pairs with clotheslines as they made their option to an airplane. The American who was escorting the youngsters along with his spouse was quoted as saying that he did so to forestall them from scattering.

Whilst South Korea’s war-torn economic system started to enhance, the nation continued to advertise adoption. Within the Seventies, the nation briefly thought-about phasing out abroad adoptions after North Korea accused it of promoting infants to foreigners. However within the Nineteen Eighties, it additional liberalized intercountry adoptions, this time within the identify of selling “emigration and personal diplomacy.”

References to South Korea as a “child exporter” and to “mail-order infants” grew to become popularized in worldwide media, and have since caught.

A Booming Enterprise

In 1985, 8,837 South Korean youngsters have been despatched overseas for adoption, 6,021 of them to the US.

For every child, adoption businesses collected a $3,000 to $4,000 “facilitating charge” from the adoptive household, in addition to airfare and a separate $1,450 adoption charge, in response to inner authorities paperwork from the nationwide archives, which have been reviewed by The New York Occasions. (South Korea’s per-capita nationwide revenue in 1988 was $4,571.)

To assist maintain enterprise buzzing, the businesses ran or backed shelters for unwed pregnant girls, the place the ladies have been requested to signal agreements to relinquish their infants, in response to a report printed in January by the Nationwide Human Rights Fee.

Lawmakers on the time started to fret that adoption businesses had turn out to be “human trafficking” facilities, in response to one of many authorities paperwork that described a gathering between welfare ministry officers and the businesses. One other doc quoted the presidential workplace as warning that the businesses “targeted on making revenue” and handed out “money and items” to clinics and orphanages that served as adoption brokers.

Holt stated its adoption charges have been accredited by the federal government. It additionally stated that it processed adoptions based mostly on data offered by orphanages and different establishments. When it acquired infants straight from dad and mom who had not registered their youngsters’s births, the company stated it was allowed by legislation to deal with the youngsters as orphans.

Korea Social Service, one other adoption company, declined to reply questions for this text. However in letters to adoptees that have been reviewed by The Occasions, the company admitted that a few of its paperwork had been invented. “You’d be very confused,” the company stated in a single such letter to Anja Pedersen, admitting that her adoption paper had been falsified.

When Ms. Pedersen was despatched to Denmark in 1976, she was an orphan named Lee Eun Kyung. Three many years later, the company informed her that her precise Korean identify was Son Eun Joo and that when she was put up for adoption by her uncle with out her father’s permission, a useless woman’s identify and papers had been used.

Ms. Pedersen ultimately discovered her organic household in South Korea, however when she requested the company about the actual Lee Eun Kyung, she was simply informed that the infant had died. There was no document of her dying or her organic dad and mom. She solely existed in Ms. Pedersen’s Danish center identify: Lee.

“I carried her round with me,” she stated.

Trying to find Solutions

The information media in South Korea usually highlights the successes of Korean adoptees overseas, however those that have returned lately describe being haunted by questions of id and belonging.

William Alan Vorhees stated when he was adopted by an single American businessman, his papers listed him as an orphan. However he says he now struggles with lingering childhood reminiscences of visiting a rural market in South Korea along with his mom and being dragged away instantly by a stranger.

When some returning adoptees requested the federal government to analyze corruption within the business in 2005, their grievances have been dismissed for not rising to a stage of nationwide significance. Their searches have been additionally stymied by incomplete and falsified data and native legal guidelines that prioritized start dad and mom’ privateness over the rights of adoptees.

“We’ve at all times been significantly deprived right here due to tradition and language,” stated Han Boon Younger, an adoptee who returned 20 years in the past. “It’s actually robust to outlive right here, to simply get a daily job and really combine.”

Investigators plan to launch their findings by the spring. They don’t have the facility to prosecute any of the businesses, however the authorities is required by legislation to comply with their suggestions.

Jin Meyerson, a Korean adoptee who grew to become an artist, identified that South Korea is often obsessive about addressing historic wrongs, like looking for apologies from Japan for its sexual enslavement of Korean girls throughout colonial rule.

However in terms of proudly owning as much as its painful adoption historical past, the nation has failed, he stated.

“As a rustic, as a tradition, as a neighborhood, what proper do we’ve to demand an apology from Japan once we can’t even maintain this example in our own residence, with our personal youngsters?” Mr. Meyerson stated.