West Accused of Turning S. Korea Into Adoption Mill

Western governments eagerly approved and even pushed for the adoption of South Korean children for decades, despite evidence that adoption agencies were aggressively competing for kids, pressuring mothers, and bribing hospitals, an investigation led by the Associated Press has found. Now adults, many of those children have since discovered that their adoption paperwork was untrue. Their quest for accountability has spread far beyond Korea's borders to the Western countries that claimed them, and is upending international adoption.

• The AP, in collaboration with PBS' Frontline, spoke with more than 80 adoptees in the US, 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.

• South Korea's adoption program started with the unwanted children of Korean women and Western soldiers from the 1950-53 Korean war, and then included the children of single mothers, the poor and others. In the West, access to birth control and abortion had caused the supply of domestically adoptable babies to plummet, and Western families were desperate for Korean children.
• The United States pioneered the adoption system in South Korea, when an evangelical Christian farmer from Oregon named Harry Holt believed he'd received a calling from God to save Korean War orphans. He soon began flying children from Korea to the United States by the planeload for adoption by Christian American families. Holt's program grew into the largest adoption agency in South Korea, sending thousands of children to the West. Other nations, particularly in Scandinavia and throughout Europe, also took part.
• In the 1970s, humanitarians on the ground expressed alarm that adoption was becoming a competitive business, that agencies were foraging for children. But US officials processed visas allowing them to leave South Korea by the hundreds a month. A concerned social worker wrote in a 1976 document that US officials were processing adoptions in a "callous" and "assembly line type method."
• The first full story in the series is here.
• The second story in the series is here. (Both stories have first-person accounts of affected families and individuals.)

(More South Korea stories.)