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The New York Times
Published: October 8, 2008
Korea Aims to End Stigma of Adoption and Stop ‘Exporting’ Babies

By NORIMITSU ONISHI
SEOUL, South Korea — Daunted by the stigma surrounding adoption here, Cho Joong-bae and Kim In-soon delayed expanding their family for years. When they finally did six years ago, Mr. Cho chose to tell his elderly parents that the child was the result of an affair, rather than admit she was adopted.

International Herald Tribune
Published: September 17, 2007
With faith, an American adoptee's search for his father ends on death row
By Choe Sang-Hun

SEOUL: Aaron Bates, growing up a happy child in the American family that adopted him when he was 5, always wondered who his biological parents were and whether they were alive. After two decades, his search has led him to a prisoner on death row in South Korea.
Sung Nak Joo, 58, who says he is Bates's birth father (and is accepted as such by Bates despite genetic data suggesting otherwise) is one of the longest-serving death row inmates in South Korea. If the country resumes hanging condemned prisoners - the last executions took place in 1997 - he probably will be among the first to be executed.

The Korea Times
10-02-2008 17:08
The Face of Adoption
By Andrei Lankov
For decades, South Korea was the major source of adopted babies throughout the Western world. According to a recent estimate, over the years 1950-2000, some 150,000 Korean infants found a new home overseas.
Nowadays, the Korean adoptees form a large community ― and in recent years they have begun to rediscover their connection to Korea.
Most of the infants were adopted by middle and upper-middle class families who had next to no information on Korea _ and in many cases were not that interested in this East Asian country. This meant that many Korean adoptees grew up without any exposure to the Korean language and culture.

San Francisco Chronical
Sunday, September 14, 2008
'Asian Americans' documents the diaspora
Sandip Roy
Asian Americans in the Twenty-First Century
Oral Histories
Edited by Joann Faung Jean Lee

The Korea Herald
August 22, 2008
Number of Korean adoptees to U.S. dropping: State Dept.
The U.S. State Department issued visas for 939 Korean orphans last year, according to the department`s figures released recently.
The number compares with 1,376 for 2006, 1,668 in 2005, 1,773 in 2004 and 1,817 for 2003.
Korean nongovernmental organizations have called on their government to look into irregularities involving international adoption agencies in Korea, citing alleged abuse cases involving Korean adoptees abroad.
They said earlier this year that six cases of international adoption from Korea were made in the past decades without their mothers` consent, that the cases were revealed upon the adoptees being reunited with their Korean families as adults.

Yonhap News
2008.08.22
Number of Korean adoptees to U.S. dropping: State Dept.
By Hwang Doo-hyong
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (Yonhap) -- The number of South Korean children adopted by U.S. families declined gradually for the past years as a growing number of Koreans adopt Korean orphans following several prominent international cases of alleged abuse of adoptees.
The U.S. State Department issued visas for 939 Korean orphans last year, according to the department's figures released recently.
http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/news/2008/08/22/0200000000AEN20080822000500315.HTML

JoongAng Daily
August 18, 2008
Korean-born adoptee represents U.S. in Olympics
BEIJING - In February 1983, a girl was born in Daegu in southeast Korea. But she soon ended up at a local orphanage, and three months later, Allen and Marjorie Bashore adopted the girl and raised her in Shoemakersville, Pennsylvania. A quarter century later, the girl is now representing the United States in women’s field hockey.
Kayla Bashore, 25, is a midfielder and defender on the U.S. team, which is playing in its first Olympic women’s field hockey tournament since the 1996 Atlanta Games. Bashore is the first Indiana University graduate to represent the U.S. in field hockey.
Bashore is the second Korean-born adoptee to represent the United States in the recent Olympics. At the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics, Toby Dawson won the bronze medal in men’s moguls in freestyle skiing, and in 2007, he met his biological father, Kim Jae-su. Dawson said he wanted to use the publicity to find his birth parents.
Bashore has no memories of her native land. When asked about her name, she said, “All I know is it’s something Kim. I moved to the United States when I was three months old and I’ve never been back to Korea.”

JoongAng Daily
August 18, 2008
Swiss-Korean helps adoptees search for their cultural roots
Kim Dae-won works for Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link, the biggest nongovernmental adoptee-support organization in Korea. By Park Sun-young
“We hope the Korean people will treat overseas adopted Koreans as the ‘same Koreans’ they are. Many of them still regard overseas adoptees as foreigners,” said Kim Dae-won, 42, Secretary General of Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link, the biggest nongovernmental adoptee-support organization in Korea.
G.O.A.'L provides various programs and services for overseas adopted Koreans, including birth family search assistance, organization of family reunions and post-reunion support.
Its list of services and programs reach as far as one-on-one Korean language tutoring and mentor programs to help overseas adopted Koreans resettle in their mother country.

Joongang Daily
August 20, 2008
Outreach work helps adoptee rediscover roots
Mo In-ae, 31, has three moms - a biological mother, an adoptive mother and a stepmother.
She also has a second name: She was christened Kara Carlisle when she was adopted by an American couple five months after her birth in 1978.
This unique background is perhaps why she’s the youngest, and the only Asian-American, of the 11 members of the Human Relations Commission in Los Angeles.
She graduated from college in 2003 with financial support from her adoptive parents. Since then, she has been working on issues related to Korea and Koreans.

South China Morning Post
20th June, 1998
Korea's 'IMF Orphans'
(by John Larkin )
Ji Seung-yeop is too young to know why his father went to jail, or why his mother dropped him and his sister off some week ago at an orphanage.
Technically they are not orphans: their parents are alive. But for the time being four year-old Ju-hyun and five year- old Yu-na have effectively been orphaned by South Korea's deepening recession, which is breaking up marriages at an alarming rate.
Their passage form home to orphanage is typically of a growing number of cases this year. Rising unemployment and the resulting financial stress on low-income families is creating a social phenomenon of recession orphans. It started when their father lost his office job and went to jail for bankruptcy. Their mother disappeared after packing them off to Seoul's Angels Haven Orphanage.