South Korea says it sent babies abroad for adoption ‘like luggage’

 For most of her life, Mary Bowers had one version of her adoption story. 

It was that she was an orphan — born in South Korea to a single mother who, unable to take care of her, handed her over to an adoption agency when she was a baby. In 1982, Bowers was adopted by a family in Colorado. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, though, she took the time to examine her past more carefully. She started finding discrepancies in her adoption documents. That’s when she decided to move to South Korea and keep digging. 

“As I delved further into my adoption file, I found the name of a father, as well, with his whole background, description, aunts, uncles, hometown, height, weight, all of that,” she said. “I was like, ‘well, if he wasn’t in the picture, this seems like a lot of detail to provide about this man,’ who honestly I had spent a good portion of my life hating because I thought, ‘well how could you leave [my birth mother] like that?’”

Bowers also found other discrepancies in her adoption records. For example, she was listed under three different names. The details just didn’t add up.   

In 2022, Bowers joined more than 350 Korean adoptees — from 11 different countries — who filed cases with South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission alleging all kinds of malpractice in adoptions. Last week, the commission released a damning report on this — it said South Korean adoption agencies sent children abroad like “luggage” for decades. The report includes details about falsified documents, profit-driven decision-making and children taken from their parents without consent.

“The commission determined that the state violated the human rights of adoptees protected under the constitution and international agreements, by neglecting its duty to ensure basic human rights, including inadequate legislation, poor management and oversight, and failures in implementing proper administrative procedures while sending large numbers of children abroad,” the commission said in a statement.

The commission’s report corroborates an investigation by The Associated Press last year, about how Korean birth mothers were pressured or deceived into giving up their children while adoption agencies bribed hospitals to route babies their way. The AP also produced a documentary on the subject in collaboration with Frontline (PBS) and compiled resources for adoptees who have questions about their backgrounds here.

A false narrative 

It all began in the 1950s, in the aftermath of the Korean War — planeloads of orphans were flown out of South Korea to the United States for adoption.

Over the years, more than 200,000 Korean kids were adopted by American families. Experts say that’s more than any other country. And for a long time, the narrative around this story was almost entirely heartwarming: Korean orphans, escaping a grim future of destitution in Asia, and finding homes in the US or other more prosperous, peaceful Western nations. 

Peter Møller, who was born in Korea and adopted by a family in Denmark, said that the problem with that well-known narrative is that it’s false. 

Møller now lives in South Korea and works with the Danish Korean Rights Group, an advocacy organization that’s pushing for accountability around international adoption in South Korea. 

“We have submitted more than 47,000 pages of evidence and documents. There’s no indication it was because of poverty or because it was about saving children,” Møller said.

Instead, it was about making money, he added — “And it was about the demand for children in the receiving country, and the adoption agencies and also the Korean government; they were willing to meet the demands for children from the receiving countries. That is actually the real story about adoption.”

Møller said that the findings released by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission last week are important, because they amount to an official recognition of things that adoptees like him have been talking about for years. 

Above all else, the commission concluded that many Korean adoptees were not orphans at all. 

“We are talking about gross violations of human rights, children being abducted in the streets and directly brought to receiving countries, sent out to receiving countries and we are also looking at pregnant women having their children taken.” 

This is not ancient history, Møller said. It ramped up in the 1960s and continued through the 2000s. These are unpunished crimes, and Møller said that many of the victims and the perpetrators are living today. 

He said that he hopes these new findings lead to greater accountability, and for Korean adoptees, an opportunity to learn the truth about where they come from. 

‘Far from finished’

The Korean commission recommended the country, among other things, apologize to the children it sent away. Some experts, including lawyer Choi Jung Kyu, who has handled various human rights lawsuits against the government, criticized the commission’s recommendations as too vague and lacking specific measures for reparations.

Meanwhile, multiple European countries have launched investigations into their own culpability in abuse in the Korean adoption system. The United States, which has taken in more children than any other nation, has not yet done so.

Sang Hoon Lee, one of the Korean commission’s standing commissioners, told The Associated Press that a more systemic evaluation would require a closer look at adoptions to the United States. US adoptees accounted for a smaller number of complaints received by the commission, most of which were filed by adoptees in Europe.

Bowers, who works as a corporate coach in Seoul, said that through several DNA tests, she connected with a biological brother who also grew up with an adopted family in the US, in Utah.

“Our adoption papers do not match. And his story is that our mother and father didn’t know each other. She got drunk in a bar. It was in a one-night stand, and then, he disappeared. But the interesting thing is that we have a 100% DNA match. We are not half siblings. We are full siblings. We share the same mother and father. And I am 23 years older than my brother.”

For Bowers, there are still many unanswered questions. 

The commission’s findings only cover about 50 of the adoptees who signed the petition, and she’s not one of them. 

“We are far, far from finished,” she said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.