Archive


Name	ASK

Subject	Complexity of Intercountry Adoption 200608

Complexity of Intercountry Adoption
August 2006
by Boon Young Han

The past year has been a busy one for those concerned with legislation on child welfare in Korea. 2005 ended with the controversial announcement from the former minister of Health and Welfare Kim Gun Tae that intercountry adoption would be brought to an end within 4 to 5 years. As various congressmen and women are working on legislation to carry out the practical aspects of a ban to intercountry adoption, criticism is coming from all parties having a stake in the current practice.

As an overseas adoptee based in Korea the last 4 years, involvement in the politically active adoptee community in Korea has become a conscious choice along with my pursuit of a masters degree in Korean Studies. I often see the adoption issue simplified at the expense of valuable information. Thus, most literature and other sources on adoption are still primarily grounded in personal stories. A representation carried out by only a small percentage of the more than 150,000 overseas Korean adoptees sent to more than 30 different cultures since the Korean War. My involvement in the adoptee community tells me that we have great diversity and thus is it of equal importance to show this span of experiences. However, though these statements are valuable from an anthropological point of view, I hope the discourse of the practice of intercountry adoption will allow itself to be directed by factual statements over those of emotional character.

Being new to the issue of child welfare and the structure of intercountry adoption in Korea, I was surprised to learn that children send overseas today mainly come from single mothers. Thus are the images we have of the post-war abandoned street children far from relevant to the 2006 situation. Only 8 of the 11,447 children sent overseas between 2001-2005 came from an institutional background. During the same period 32 children came from broken families, leaving the majority, being 99.7% born to single mothers. Regardless of how intercountry adoption from Korea started, and regardless of my experiences in both my adoptive country and Korea, the children likely to be affected by the upcoming bill on intercountry adoption are those from single mothers. Thus, giving them a family outside of Korea, is not only an act of providing them with a family environment, but it becomes an act of depriving them of their ties to their birth family, original environment, culture and linguistic heritage. These are the issues to take into consideration in the discussion of intercountry adoption.

Single mothers dominated the picture of reason for adoption as early as the 80’s. Close to three out of four children left a family behind upon their adoption in that decade and it has steadily increased since then. Thus, adoption, and in particular intercountry adoption, has most of all today become a means to separate Korean mothers from their children. Furthermore, as adoption is a privately run activity in Korea, the government, by default benefits from the practice. The four agencies licensed to handle intercountry adoption receive government funding, but largely operate on the profit made by the adoptions, including donations. Knowing that the adoption agencies by law are allowed to charge close to 10 mill won per intercountry adoption, this being 5 times more the limit for domestic adoptions, reasonable doubt can be directed towards them, their incentives and reasons for being.

International concern was raised as early as the 1960’s on the issue of intercountry adoption. This mainly regarded the ability of the adoptive parents to accommodate the needs of the children. A decade later, the focus was on the imbalanced traffic of children from developing countries to developed countries for money. UNICEF furthermore singles out the Korean adoption system in their 1999 report on intercountry adoption as a country where the procurement of children is very questionable. Thus, with two previous failed attempts to carry out legislation to end intercountry adoption from Korea, in 1976 and 1989 respectively, any measures presented now, can hardly be labeled as either immediate or as fundamental.

I indeed think a change of the current adoption law and responsible plan to end the systematic practice of intercountry adoption should be the only answer possible from the worlds 10th largest economy (IMF, 2005). The time is long overdue for Korea to start the construction of a comprehensive social welfare system.

DATE: 2007.10.01 - 04:09

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