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.
Former adoption workers told AP that agencies paid to have every corner of the country scoured for children. One worker, employed at an agency from 1979 to 1984, said the agencies had no process to verify the backgrounds of children and invested “zero effort” in confirming the child was orphaned.
Private counseling records in a 1988 document prepared by the country’s largest adoption agency, Holt Children’s Services, show that some parents who relinquished their children soon pleaded for them back, with no success. The document, obtained by AP, describes how agency’s workers told parents that their children would thrive in good Western families and may return home someday rich or “with Ph.Ds.”
Humanitarian workers openly worried about what they were seeing. Francis Carlin, who then ran Korea’s Catholic Relief Services, said there weren’t enough legitimate orphans to feed Western demand, which led to “a lot of the compromises, a lot of the hanky panky” involving larger agencies.
Children were stolen from parents, bought from hospitals and falsely described as abandoned
By the 1980s, agencies were procuring most of their children directly from hospitals and maternity homes, which often received illegal payments for babies, according to records seen by AP. Though the stated intention of adoption was to spare children from orphanages, they gathered more than 4,600 children from hospitals in 1988, 60% of their supply.
A government audit in 1989 shows that Holt Children’s Services, the biggest agency, made nearly 100 illegal payments to hospitals during six months in 1988, worth about $16,000 now. Eastern Social Welfare Society gave even more, worth about $65,340, to hospitals over that period.
Despite the agencies’ common practice of labeling children as “abandoned,” records from 1980 to 1987 show that more than 90% of the Korean children sent to the West almost certainly had known relatives, said Philsik Shin, a scholar at Korea’s Anyang University. It was “almost customary” to document children as abandoned, said Helen Noh, who matched hundreds of children with U.S. parents at Holt from 1981 to 1982.
As complaints mount, South Korea is under pressure
Robyn Joy Park, who was adopted by parents in Minnesota in 1982, traveled to South Korea in 2007 to meet a woman her agency, Eastern, said was her biological mother. She developed a deep bond with the woman over several years, but was devastated after a DNA test in 2012 showed they weren’t related.
Park is among more than 360 adoptees who have asked South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding their adoptions.
MDT/AP
