In March, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) released its report on the country’s international adoption system. After a three-year investigation, the committee found evidence that, among other widespread abuses, adoption agencies fabricated documents, misrepresented children as orphans available to be adopted, and sent children overseas without the consent of their biological families. Concluding that the human rights of adoptees and birth parents were violated, the TRC has recommended that the Korean government issue an official apology.
For many, these findings are shocking but not surprising. Adoptees who have searched for information about their birth families and academics who have studied international adoption have long known of cases in which one child was substituted at the last minute for another—or of birth mothers who were coerced or tricked into relinquishing their children. Adoptees have located birth parents they were told were dead. The agencies that arranged their adoptions have lied to adoptees and withheld information. Activists in Korea, many of whom are international adoptees who returned as adults, have been fighting to draw attention to these cases for years.
South Korea has been winding down the practice of international adoption, but the practice continues there and around the world, even if at a much slower pace than in previous decades. But even if it stopped tomorrow, the system that has moved hundreds of thousands of children around the world was built on the foundations of Korean adoption, which have been revealed as deeply problematic.
International adoption is not as old as some might think. Americans had adopted internationally on an ad hoc basis and in small numbers in the years before and after World War II, but systematic international adoption is rooted in the aftermath of the Korean War (1950-1953) when Americans began adopting children from South Korea. Originally, these adoptions were used as a…
