Yooree Kim marched into a police station in Paris and told an officer she wanted to report a crime. Forty years ago, she said, she was kidnapped from the other side of the world, and the French government endorsed it.
She wept as she described years spent piecing it together, stymied at every turn to get an answer to a simple question: How was she, a bright, diligent schoolgirl, with known parents whom she loved, documented as an abandoned orphan in South Korea in 1984 and sent to strangers in France? She believes the government of France — along with many Western nations — allowed families to “mail order children” through international adoption, and did nothing to protect them.
“They were reckless,” she said. “They never questioned anything. They never checked where I was from. They never checked whether my parents existed or not.”
Kim was caught in an adoption machine that sent hundreds of thousands of Korean children to families in the United States, Europe and Australia. Now adults, many have since discovered that their adoption paperwork was untrue, and their quest for accountability now has spread far beyond South Korea’s borders to the Western countries that claimed them.
Those governments turned a blind eye to rampant fraud and sometimes pressured the South Korean government to keep the kids coming, an investigation led by media has found. Documents show that at the peak of adoptions from South Korea, Western diplomats processed papers like an assembly line, despite evidence that adoption agencies were aggressively competing for babies to send abroad, pressuring mothers and paying hospitals. Governments focused on satisfying intense demand from Western families desperate for children.
The news agencies, in collaboration with Frontline (PBS), spoke with more than 80 adoptees in the U.S., Australia and Europe and examined thousands of pages of documents to reveal evidence of kidnapped or missing children ending up abroad, fabricated names, babies switched with one another and parents told their newborns were gravely sick or dead, only to discover decades later they’d been sent to new parents overseas.
The seismic consequences are ricocheting around the world and challenging the entire international adoption industry, which was built on the model created in South Korea.
The Netherlands in May announced it would no longer allow its citizens to adopt from abroad. Denmark’s only international adoption agency said it was shutting down, Sweden stopped adoptions from South Korea, and Norway is investigating. Switzerland apologized for failing to prevent illegal adoptions. France in March released a scathing assessment of its own culpability.
The U.S., the pioneer of this system and long the country to adopt the most foreign orphans, has not analyzed its own accountability, and some have questioned why. The State Department said questions from news agencies over several months have prompted it to begin trying to piece together its history from archives. An early review found that widespread practices in South Korea at the time “may have resulted in adoptions based on falsified documentation” but no indication yet that U.S. officials were aware of it.
Kim believes Western governments clung to the narrative that they were saving needy children and ignored evidence that suggested otherwise. Foreign diplomats in the country surely would have noticed that Seoul’s streets weren’t packed with abandoned babies and street children, she said.
“We were commodified like a good to be sold,” she said. “They made fake orphans and fed the market.”
This story is the second in an ongoing investigation led by media in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS). The first story is here. The investigation includes an interactive and the upcoming documentary South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning, premiering Sept. 20 on PBS and online.
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The Korean adoptee diaspora of around 200,000 children is thought to be the largest in the world. At the peak in the 1970s and ‘80s, South Korea was sending out babies by the hundreds per month.
It’s impossible to tell how many adoptions involved fraud, and advocates argue most went well. But France, the country that took in Yooree Kim, acknowledged in March that its own government had long known of “the existence of illicit practices of a systemic nature.”
“The public authorities were alerted early and were late in taking action,” the report said. “In France, diplomatic archives and the archives of associations effectively showed these practices existed in countries over long periods of time and they were alerted at times at the highest levels, often in isolation, without any political reaction to put an end to them.”
Access to birth control and abortion in the Western world had caused the number of domestically adoptable babies to plummet, and families clamored for children. The system was designed for the convenience of consumers, and most adoptive parents didn’t even have to visit South Korea.
“To put it simply, there was supply because there was demand,” said Park Geon-Tae, who leads a team with South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission now investigating its adoption practices. “Were there so many abandoned children in South Korea? We have yet to see this.”
In 1974, South Korea tried to stop adoptions to Scandinavia, after its political rival, North Korea, charged that children were “being sold like animals in the foreign land.” South Korean government records from the time show that diplomats from Sweden, Denmark and Norway began begging for babies.
“The adoption of Korean orphans by Swedish parents is not because Korea is neglecting its orphans, but because Swedish couples without children are desiring to adopt them, so it would be good to continue the transfers of orphans,” the Swedish ambassador said in a meeting with South Korea’s deputy foreign minister in January 1975.
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