The Baby Exporter: South Korea’s Adoption Enterprise Hurt Kids

The South Korean government fabricated birth records, faked child abandonment notices, and failed to properly vet prospective adoptive parents in order to become the world’s “baby exporter,” according to a new investigation released Wednesday, CNN reported.

Struggling to recover from World War II and the Korean War, South Korea sent more than 200,000 babies overseas for adoption starting in the 1950s, paving the way for a large and lucrative adoption industry that peaked under consecutive military regimes in the 1970s and 1980s, the Associated Press wrote.

But the government-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded the government bears responsibility for facilitating a foreign adoption program rife with fraud and abuse, driven by efforts to reduce welfare costs and enabled by private agencies that often manipulated children’s backgrounds and origins, the newswire added.

The allegations include the lack of parental consent for adoption, inadequate screening of adoptive parents, neglect of the children, and instances where foreign parents were pressured to pay to receive a child.

The landmark report followed a nearly three-year investigation into complaints from 367 adoptees in Europe, the United States, and Australia, who accused adoption agencies of coercion and deception, including forcibly taking them from their mothers in some cases.

The commission said it confirmed human rights violations in 56 of the complaints and aims to review the remaining cases before its mandate expires in late May.

However, some adoptees and a senior investigator on the commission, Sang Hoon Lee, criticized the report for being too cautious, admitting that investigative limitations prevented the commission from more clearly showing how much the government was actually involved.

For example, most of the babies were registered as abandoned even when that was not the case,  which made it difficult to trace the roots of the adoptees.

Lee criticized the panel’s decision to delay evaluating 42 other cases, implying that some committee members were reluctant to consider instances where adoptees couldn’t fully prove the falsification of their adoption papers.

The commission said that it found that decades ago, the government believed sending babies abroad to be adopted was cheaper than building a social welfare system for children in need.

Moreover, Lee noted that most of the adoptions were run by private agencies that had extensive guardianship rights over children, were not overseen by the government, and depended on donations from the adoptive parents, which likely pressured the agencies to continue the foreign adoptions to fund their operations.

While there was extensive evidence that the adoption process was questionable, Western countries ignored the signs and even sometimes pressured South Korea to continue the adoptions to satisfy domestic demand for children.

The commission recommended that the government issue an official apology, conduct a thorough survey of adoptees’ citizenship status, and provide remedies for victims whose identities were falsified.