Seoul, Sept 20: South Korea’s government, Western countries and adoption agencies worked in tandem to supply some 200,000 Korean children to parents overseas, despite years of evidence they were being procured through questionable or downright unscrupulous means, an investigation led by The Associated Press has found.Those children grew up and searched for their roots — and some realized they are not who they were told. Their stories have sparked a reckoning that is rocking the international adoption industry.
The investigation, in collaboration with Frontline (PBS), was based on interviews with more than 80 adoptees in the U.S., Australia and six European countries, along with parents, agency employees, humanitarian workers and government officials. It also drew on more than 100 information requests and thousands of pages of documents — including many never publicly seen before and some the AP got declassified.
In dozens of cases AP examined, it found: Children were kidnapped off the streets. Parents claim they were told their newborns were dead or very sick, only to have them shipped away. Documents were fabricated, leading adoptees to anguished later reunions with supposed parents — only to discover they were not related at all.
Government officials declined to answer questions about its past, saying it will let a fact-finding commission finish its work. But in a written statement, the Health Ministry acknowledged that skyrocketing adoptions in the 1970s-80s were possibly driven by an intent to reduce welfare spending.
The adoption agencies declined to comment on specific cases, but have long defended their practices as a way to search for foreign families for vulnerable children.
Korea’s adoption program grew out of the wreckage of the 1950-53 Korean War, when Americans took in the unwanted biracial children of Korean women and Western soldiers. It expanded to include the children of unwed mothers and poor families. Korea relied on private adoption agencies as its social safety net, bringing millions of dollars into the economy.
Korean officials fit their laws to match American ones to make children adoptable in the West, where access to birth control and abortion had caused the domestic supply of adoptable babies to plummet. The government endorsed “proxy adoptions” for families to adopt children quickly without ever visiting Korea. Korea also rewrote its laws to remove minimal safeguards or judicial oversight.