International adoption of South Korean children

The international adoption of South Korean children started around 1953 as a measure to take care of the large number of mixed children that became orphaned during and after the Korean War. It quickly evolved to include orphaned Korean children. Religious organizations in the United States, Australia, and many Western European nations slowly developed the apparatus that sustained international adoption as a socially integrated system.

From the 1970s through the 2000s, thousands of children were adopted overseas every year. Over time, the South Korean government has sought to decrease international adoptions in favor of domestic adoptions. In 2023, seventy years after its start, South Korea still sent 79 children overseas, making it the longest-running international adoption program in the world.

Korean War and Holt

Korean War

A 1988 article which was originally printed in The Progressive and was later reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy stated that less than one percent of Korean adoptees who are currently adopted are Amerasian, but during the decade after the Korean War, most of the Korean adoptees were Amerasians who were fathered by American soldiers. The first wave of adopted people from Korea came from usually mixed-race children whose families lived in poverty; the children's parents were often American military men and Korean women.

Holt

The start of adoption in South Korea is usually credited to Harry Holt in 1955. Harry Holt wanted to help the children of South Korea, so Holt adopted eight children from South Korea and brought them home. In part due to the response that Holt got after adopting these eight children from the nationwide press coverage, Holt started Holt International Children's Services, which is an adoption agency based in the United States which specialized in finding families for Korean children.

Since then, South Korean media rather frequently reports on the issues regarding international adoption. Most Korean adoptees have taken on the citizenship of their adoptive country and no longer have Korean passports. Earlier they had to get a visa like any other foreigner if they wanted to visit or live in South Korea. This only added to the feeling that they were "not really South Korean". In May 1999, a group of Korean adoptees living in Korea started a signature-collection in order to achieve legal recognition and acceptance (Schuhmacher, 1999). In 2009, the number of Korean adoptees long-term residents in South Korea (mainly Seoul) is estimated at 500. It is not unlikely that this number will increase in the following decade (International adoption from South Korea peaked in the mid-1980s). A report from Global Overseas Adoptees' Link (G.O.A.'L) indicates that the long term returnees (more than one year) are predominantly in their early twenties or early thirties.

One factor that helped make the subject of Korean adoptees part of the South Korean discourse was a 1991 film called Susanne Brink's Arirang which was a film about the life story of a Korean adoptee who grew up in Sweden. This film made the subject of the international adoptions of Korean children a hot topic in South Korea, and it made South Koreans feel shame and guilt regarding the issue.

A 1997 article in The Christian Science Monitor said that Koreans in South Korea often believed that adoptive families in other countries had ulterior motives for adopting Korean orphans due to the Korean belief that parents can not love a child who is not their biological child.

North Korean media coverage

A 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy said that the director general of South Korea's Bureau of Family Affairs in the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs said that the large number of international adoptions out of South Korea had been an issue used as part of North Korea's propaganda against South Korea in the 1970s. As part of North Korea's propaganda against South Korea in the 1970s, North Korea decried the large numbers of international adoptions of South Korean children, and North Korea decried what it considered to be South Korea's practice of selling South Korean children. The South Korean director general wanted to decrease the numbers of South Korean children being adopted internationally, so North Korea would no longer have the issue to use for its propaganda against South Korea. The news article also said that North Korea did not allow couples in other countries to adopt North Korean children.

United States media coverage

A 2019 documentary, Geographies of Kinship, was written by a Korean adoptee (Deanna Borshay Liem) and tells the story of international adoption from the perspective of an adoptee.

PBS Frontline created a documentary exposé about South Korean adoption practices on 20 September 2024, soon before the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRCK) published that South Korea owed Korean adoptees an apology on 25 March 2025. PBS Frontline added several articles to confirm the facts in the documentary. The TRCK report also mentioned Brothers Home. Other articles from before the documentary confirm the facts in the documentary and report.

Korean patrilineal blood culture

A 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy said that South Korean culture is a patrilineal culture that places importance on families related by blood. The importance of bloodline families is the reason why Koreans do not want to adopt Korean orphans, because the Korean adoptee would not be the blood relative of the adoptive parents. Korean patrilineal culture is the reason Korean society stigmatizes and discriminates against unwed Korean mothers and their kids, making it so the unwed mother might not be able to get a job or get a husband.

The Fall 2012 journal of The Journal of Korean Studies said that anthropologist Elise Prebin said that Korean adoptee reunions can be more secure and are easier maintained along the birth father's line (patrilineal) than along the birth mother's line (matrilineal) in her study of Korean adoptee reunions with birth families. The journal said that "Korean patrilineal kinship ideologies" still have a strong societal influence in South Korea.

A 2014 article in NPR said that unwed mothers suffer a social stigma in South Korea, because having a child out of wedlock is an act that goes against Korean patrilineal bloodline culture. The 2014 news article also said that Korean adoptees suffer a social stigma in South Korea, because Korean adoptees have been "cut loose from their bloodlines".

A 2015 news article said that there is still a strong social stigma against unwed mothers and illegitimate children in South Korea. The 2015 news article said that this social stigma applies to the unwed mother and even her illegitimate children and her whole extended family, causing a child who was born out of wedlock to suffer lowered marital, job and educational prospects in South Korea.

A 2015 article in The Economist said that Koreans in South Korea mostly adopt female Korean children to avoid issues involving ancestral family rites which are usually done by bloodline sons and to avoid issues involving inheritance. Supporters of the system claim that adoption agencies are only caring for infants who would otherwise go homeless or be institutionalized.

Korean adoption agencies support pregnant-women's homes; three of the four agencies run their own. One of the agencies has its own maternity hospital and does its own delivery. All four provide and subsidize child care. All pay foster mothers a monthly stipend to care for the infants, and the agencies provide all food, clothing and other supplies free of charge. They also support both independent-orphanages, and or self-run ones. The agencies will cover the costs of delivery and the medical care for any woman who gives up her baby for adoption (Rothschild, The Progressive, 1988; Schwekendiek, 2012).

A 2011 article in the Institute for Policy Studies estimated each adoption cost US$15k, paid primarily by the adopting parents. This generated an estimated US$35M/yr to cover foster-care, medical care, and other costs for the approximately 2,300 Korean international adoptions.

In a 2010 book, Kim Rasmussen said that the "root cause" of the number of adoptions out of South Korea in 2010 was South Korea's lack of spending on its social welfare system. Rasmussen said that the other OECD-30 countries spent an average of 20.6% of their GDP on social welfare benefits while South Korea only spent 6.9% of its GDP on social welfare benefits. Rasmussen said that South Korea promoting domestic adoption would not address the heart of the problem and that South Korea should raise its spending for social welfare benefits.

Birth mothers and orphans

Birth mothers

In the 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy, a South Korean orphanage director said that according to his orphanage's questionnaire data 90% of Korean birth mothers indicated that wanted to keep their biological child and not give them up for adoption, but the South Korean orphanage director said that only maybe 10% of birth mothers eventually decided to keep their biological child after his orphanage suggested to the birth mothers that unwed mothers and poor couples should give their child up for adoption. The 1988 news article said that the Korean birth mothers felt guilty after giving their child up for adoption, and it said that most of the Korean birth mothers who gave their child up for adoption were poor and worked at factory or clerical jobs in South Korea.

In a same 1988 article, an INS officer at the Embassy of the United States, Seoul, said that social workers were hired by adoption agencies to perform the role of "heavies" to convince South Korean mothers to give their children up for adoption. Although the officer said that he felt that the adoption business was probably a good thing for birth mothers, adoptive parents and adoptees, he said that the adoption business troubled him due to the large number of children who were being adopted out of South Korea every month. The INS officer said that these numbers should make people question how much of the international adoption of South Korean children was a humanitarian cause and how much it was a business.

Orphans

A 2014 article in NPR said that it was "effectively impossible" for Korean orphans who aged out of institutions at 18 years old to attend a university in South Korea due to lacking the money to pay for all of the associated costs, so most Korean orphans ended up getting low-paying jobs in South Korean factories after aging out of the institutions. The 2014 news article said that many Korean parents in South Korea refuse to allow their children to marry Korean orphans.

A 2015 article in The Economist said that in the past 60 years two million or about 85% of the total orphans in South Korea have grown up in South Korean orphanages never being adopted. The 2015 article said that from the 1950s to 2015 only 4% of the total number of orphans in South Korea had been adopted domestically by other Koreans in South Korea.

A 2015 video by BBC News said that orphanages in South Korea had become full as a result of the South Korean government making it more difficult for Korean orphans to be adopted overseas.

Baby box

In a video which was published on March 27, 2014, on the France 24 YouTube channel, Ross Oke, the international coordinator of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK), said that baby boxes like the one in South Korea encourage abandonment of children and they deny the abandoned child the right to an identity.

A 2015 article in Special Broadcasting Service said that in 2009 South Korean pastor Lee Jong-rak put a "baby box" on his church in Seoul, South Korea, to allow people to anonymously abandon children. The article said that since the abandoned children have not been formally relinquished, they cannot be adopted internationally. The article said that the children will most likely stay in orphanages until they become 18 or 19 years old.

Korean Adoption Services database

A 2014 article in The Korea Herald said that the Korea Adoption Services was digitizing 35,000 documents regarding international adoptions that took place in South Korea since the 1950s to further the efforts of Korean adoptees locating their birth parents.

A 2017 article in The Hankyoreh said that Seo Jae-song and his wife who used to run the Seonggajeong orphanage in Deokjeokdo and later the St. Vincent Home in Bupyeong District had 1,073 Korean adoption records. In 2016, these 1,073 Korean adoption records were scanned by Korean Adoption Services (KAS) and the Ministry of Health and Welfare. In 2016, KAS had 39,000 records from 21 institutions.

Korea's domestic adoptions

A 2015 article said that the South Korean government is trying to have more domestic adoptions due, in part, to people around the world becoming aware of the large number of Korean adoptees who were adopted by families outside of South Korea since the mid-1950s. Because the South Korean government does not want to have the reputation of a "baby-exporting country", and due to the belief that Koreans should be raised with Korean culture, the South Korean government has been trying to increase domestic adoptions.

However, the numbers of domestic adoption fell in 2013 due to tighter restrictions on eligibility for adoptive parents. The number in babies has also gone up with the forced registration of babies, also a new law, leading to more abandonment.

The primary reason as of 2015 for the majority of surrenders within South Korea is single mothers are still publicly shamed within Korea, and the South Korean mothers who give their kids up for adoption have been mostly middle or working-class women since the 1990s.

Even in its capacity as a global economy and OECD nation, Korea still sends children abroad for international adoption. The proportion of children leaving Korea for adoption amounted to about 1% of its live births for several years during the 1980s (Kane, 1993); currently, even with a large drop in the Korean birth rate to below 1.2 children per woman and an increasingly wealthy economy, about 0.5% (1 in 200) of Korean children are still sent to other countries every year.

A 2005 opinion piece in The Chosun Ilbo said that South Korean actress Shin Ae-ra and South Korean actor Cha In-pyo publicly adopted a Korean daughter after already having a biological son together, and the article said that by publicly adopting a Korean orphan this the couple could cause other Koreans to change their views about domestic adoptions in South Korea.

Quota for overseas adoptions

To stem the number of overseas adoptions, the South Korean government introduced a quota system for foreign adoptions in 1987. Under this system, the nation reduced the number of children permitted for overseas adoption by 3 to 5% each year, from about 8,000 in 1987 to 2,057 in 1997. The goal of the plan was to eliminate foreign adoptions by 2015. But in 1998 the government temporarily lifted the restrictions, after the number of abandoned children sharply increased in the wake of growing economic hardships.

Notable is a focused effort of the 2009 South Korean government to seize international adoption out of South Korea, with the establishment of KCare and the domestic Adoption Promotion Law.

Incentivizing domestic adoptions

A 1997 article in The Christian Science Monitor said that South Korea was giving incentives in the form of housing, medical and educational subsidies to Korean couples who adopted Korean orphans to help encourage domestic adoption, but the Korean couples in South Korea who did adopt tended to not use these subsidies, because they did not want other Koreans knowing that their children were not their biological children.

A 2015 article in the Washington International Law Journal suggested that the Special Adoption Act may have been a factor in more babies being abandoned after the enactment of the Special Adoption Act on August 5, 2012.

Revised Special Adoption Act

The Revised Special Adoption Act which was enacted in South Korea in 2012 made domestic adoptions in South Korea recorded as the biological children of the Korean adoptive parents.

A 2014 article in NPR said that the Revised Special Adoption Law did not make adopting Korean children equal to adding a blood relative in the minds of Koreans regardless of how domestic Korean adoptions would now be considered for legal purposes.

A 1988 article originally published in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy said that there were 2,000,000 couples who wanted to adopt children in the United States, but only 20,000 healthy children were available for domestic adoption in the United States. The 1988 news article said that the lack of children for domestic adoption caused couples in the United States to look to other countries to adopt children, and the fastest increase of American couples' adoptions from other countries at this time was from South Korea.

Psychological effects

Pronunciation of Korean

A 2017 article in BBC News said that an article published in Royal Society Open Science said that Dutch-speaking Korean adoptees who were retrained in the Korean language were able to pronounce Korean better than expectations. Korean adoptees who were about 30 years old and who were adopted as babies to Dutch-speaking families were used in the study. The Korean adoptees were compared to a group of adults who had not been exposed to Korean as children. Following a short training course, the Korean adoptees were asked to pronounce Korean consonants for the study. The Korean adoptees did better than expectations after training.

Sex work

In her Ph.D. thesis, Sarah Y. Park cited Kendall (2005) and Kim (2007) when Park said that female Korean adoptees are commonly told that they may have become a prostitute if they were not adopted out of Korea.

A 2002 study in The Lancet of intercountry adoptees in Sweden of various ethnic backgrounds, most of whom were of Korean, Colombian or Indian (from India) extraction, who were adopted by two parents who were born in Sweden found that intercountry adoptees had the following increased likelihoods relative to the rest of the children who were born in Sweden to two parents who were themselves also born in Sweden: intercountry adoptees were 3.6 times more likely to die from suicide, 3.6 times more likely to attempt suicide, 3.2 times more likely to be admitted for a psychological disorder, 5.2 times more likely to abuse drugs, 2.6 times more likely to abuse alcohol and 1.6 times more likely to commit a crime.

Abandonment

A 2006 article in New America Media said that an increasing number of South Korean parents were paying elderly American couples to adopt their children for the purpose of having their child receive US education and US citizenship. However, the article said that according to Peter Chang, who led the Korean Family Center in Los Angeles, Korean children who were put up for adoption for the purpose of receiving US education and US citizenship frequently felt betrayed by their biological parents. The article said that getting US citizenship this way required the adopted child to be adopted before their sixteenth birthday and stay with their adoptive family for at least two years.

In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, the majority of the adult Korean adoptees struggled with the thought of how their birth mother could have given them up for adoption.

In a 2005 article, a 38-year-old Korean adoptee who was adopted in the United States said that social workers told her adoptive parents to not raise her with ties to South Korea, because the social workers said that doing that would confuse her. The 2005 article said that adoptive parents were no longer trying to cut ties with the culture of their adopted child's birth country as of 2005, and adoptive parents were instead trying to introduce their adopted kid to the culture of their birth country. In 2005, one popular way for adoptive parents to expose their adopted child to the traditions and food of their birth country was for them to attend "culture camps" which would last for one day.

Cross-race effect

A 2005 study in American Psychological Society of the cross-race effect used Korean adoptees whose average age was 27.8 years old who were adopted when they were between 3 and 9 years old by French families and the study also used recent Korean immigrants to France. The study had the participants briefly see a photograph of a Caucasian or Japanese face, then the participants had to try to recognize the same Caucasian or Japanese face which they had just seen from a pair of either Caucasian or Japanese faces. The Korean adoptees and French people could recognize the Caucasian faces better than they could recognize the Japanese faces, but the recent Korean immigrants could recognize the Japanese faces better than they could recognize the Caucasian faces, suggesting that the cross-race effect can be modified based on familiarity with certain types of faces due to experiences starting after three years of age.

Implicitly raised as white

C. N. Le, a lecturer at the sociology department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said that Korean adoptees and non-white adoptees in general who are raised by white families are raised to implicitly think that they are white, but since they are not white, there is a disconnect between the way they are socialized at home and the way the rest of society sees them. Le further said that most white families of non-white adoptees are not comfortable talking with their adopted children about the issues that racial minorities face in the United States, and Le further advised white families who adopt transracially that just introducing their kids to Asian culture, telling them that race is not important and/or telling them that people should get equal treatment in society is insufficient. Le said that the social disconnection between how they were raised and the reality of American society causes "confusion, resentment about their situation, and anger" for adoptees who were transracially adopted by white families.

Many of the South Korean children adopted internationally grew up in white, upper or middle-class homes. In the beginning adoptive families were often told by agencies and social workers to assimilate their children and make them as much as possible a part of the new culture, thinking that this would override concerns about ethnic identity and origin. Many Korean adoptees grew up not knowing about other children like themselves. This has changed in recent years with social services now encouraging parents and using home studies to encourage prospective adoptive parents to learn about the cultural influences of the country. With such works as "Beyond Culture Camp" which encourage the teaching of culture, there has been a large shift. Though, these materials may be given, not everyone may take advantage of them. Also, adoption agencies started to allow the adoption of South Koreans by people of color in the late 1990s to early 2000, and not just white people, including Korean-Americans. Such an example of this is the rapper GOWE, who was adopted by a Chinese-American family.

As a result of many internationally adopted Korean adoptees growing up in white areas, many of these adoptees avoided other Asians in childhood and adolescence out of an unfamiliarity and/or discomfort with Asian cultures. These adoptees sometimes express a desire to be white like their families and peers, and strongly identify with white society. As a result, meeting South Koreans and Korean culture might have been a traumatic experience for some.

Adoptive parents' role in shaping racial identity

Adoptive parents also play a significant role in the development of an adoptee's racial identity. Early studies showed that adoptive parents tend to engage in parenting behaviors that reject the differences or downplay the unique racial and ethnic experiences of children (Andujo, 1988; DeBerry et al., 1996; McRoy & Zurcher, 1983). This process of forced cultural assimilation causes adoptees to more closely identify with their parents' cultural worldview and identify more strongly with the majority culture (McRoy & Zurcher, 1983). Although early studies showed this process of cultural assimilation, more recent studies have shown that parents adopt the belief of enculturation, which is when parents acknowledge the differences within the family and educate their children about their birth culture and heritage (Lee, 2003). Parents with this belief typically provide their children opportunities to be more involved in their birth culture; these opportunities can be social, cultural, or educational, but the purpose is to promote a healthy ethnic identity. Children who grew up with parents who used enculturation were more likely to show racial pride and have a more secure ethnic identity.

Adoptees' feelings about South Korea

In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, group discussions about the topic of how they felt about South Korea led to many feelings. There was anger about the negative way Koreans view adopted Koreans. There was concern over Korean orphans in South Korean orphanages, and there was a feeling of obligation to help the Korean orphans who remained in the South Korean orphanages. There was a feeling of responsibility to change Koreans' views of domestic adoption, so that adopting an orphan in South Korea would not be something that Koreans in South Korea would be ashamed of doing.

Discrimination for not speaking Korean

In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, the majority of respondents (72%) reported that they had no ability with the Korean language, and only a minority of respondents (25%) reported that they had any ability with the Korean language. Of the study's respondents who visited South Korea, 22% described their visit as a negative experience, and about 20% described their visit as a both negative and positive experience. Inability to speak Korean was mentioned as being a cause of their visit being a negative experience by more than one respondent, and inability to speak Korean was generally the cause of the negative parts of the visit for the respondents who reported both a positive and negative experience. One respondent said that they felt that Koreans in South Korea looked down on them for their inability to speak Korean. Another respondent said that the Koreans in South Korea were initially nice to them, but the respondent said that Koreans in South Korea became rude to them after finding out that they could not speak Korean. Many of the adoptees felt like they were foreigners while visiting South Korea.

Korean adoptee camps

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