SEOUL, South Korea (news agencies) — As the plane descended into Seoul, Robert Calabretta swaddled himself in a blanket, his knees tucked into his chest like a baby in the womb. A single tear ran down his cheek.
The 34-year-old felt like a newborn — he was about to meet his parents for the first time since he was 3 days old.
Most of his life, he thought they’d abandoned him for adoption to the United States. When he finally found them, he learned the truth: The origin story on his adoption paperwork was a lie. Instead, he said, his parents were told in 1986 that their infant was very sick and they thought he had died.
“I am so sorry,” his birth father had written when they found each other, his words interrupted by fits of weeping. “I miss you. How did you endure this cruel world?”
Calabretta is among a growing and vocal community of victims of an adoption system they accuse of searching out children for would-be parents, rather than finding parents for vulnerable children — sometimes with devastating consequences only surfacing today.
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 media 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, which was built in South Korea and spread around the world. European countries have launched investigations and halted international adoption. The South Korean government has accepted a fact-finding commission under pressure from adoptees, and hundreds have submitted their cases for review.
The news agencies investigation, done 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 news agencies got declassified — from courts, archives, government files and adoption papers.
In dozens of cases news agencies examined with Frontline, it found: Children were kidnapped off the streets and sent abroad. Parents claim they were told their newborns were dead or too sick to survive, only to have them shipped away. Documents were fabricated to give children identities that belonged to somebody else, leading adoptees to anguished reunions with supposed parents — to later discover they were not related at all.
The agencies and governments each played a part in keeping the baby pipeline pumping. Adoption agencies created a competitive market for children and paid hospitals to supply them, documents show. The South Korean government not only knew of fraudulent practices but designed laws to speed up the exportation of children it deemed undesirable. Western governments turned a blind eye, sometimes even pressuring South Korea for children, while promoting the narrative that they were saving orphans with no other options.
Calabretta doesn’t believe he was saved; he believes he was stolen. And many in his network of adult adoptees believe they were, too.
Advocates say the vast majority of adoptions are honest and end well. But it is impossible to know how many adoptions are fraudulent because unreliable documents prevent adoptees from finding their birth families and learning the truth. Government data obtained by news agencies shows less than a fifth of 15,000 adoptees like Calabretta, who have asked South Korea for help with family searches since 2012, have managed to reunite with relatives.
In 2019, a Korean government agency told Calabretta they had found his father. He pictured himself as a rock on a beach, with two waves crashing over it. The first was joy — he had been loved. The other was fury that something profound had been taken from him.
“You’re constantly in flux between two worlds,” he said, “the one you could have and should have been in, and the one where you are.”
Adoptions from South Korea peaked in the 1980s, fueled by the government, just as Calabretta’s parents arrived at the hospital with a blanket in which to carry their firstborn son home.
The adoption industry had grown out of the wreckage of the Korean War in the 1950s, when Americans took in the unwanted biracial children born of Korean women and Western soldiers. As it clawed its way out of post-war poverty, South Korea continued to rely on private adoption agencies as its social safety net, bringing millions of dollars into the economy and saving even more by never building its own child welfare program.
Meanwhile, in the West, the number of adoptable babies plummeted because of access to birth control and abortion. The desires of two cultures collided: couples in wealthy nations desperately wanted babies, and South Korea desperately wanted to rid itself of mouths to feed.
As the supply of biracial babies dwindled, South Korea turned to those it saw as unwelcome citizens: fully-Korean children of poor families and unwed mothers.
Korean officials fit their laws to match American ones to make children adoptable for what some deride as “baby diplomacy” to satisfy Western demand. The government endorsed “proxy adoptions,” for families to adopt children quickly without ever visiting Korea, meeting them by the planeloads at American airports.
In an internal memo from 1966 obtained by news agencies, International Social Service, a Geneva-based organization, wrote that it suspected the Korean government assessed agencies not by child welfare standards, but by the money they brought in.
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