Archive

2007.10.21
Raising a Child Alone in Seoul, South Korea: One Single Mother’s Story
By Annie Sirgey
Eunjeong Park sat, tissue in hand, talking to an audience of about twenty people all gathered in the reception area of a building run by KOROOT, an organization in Seoul that helps connect Korean adoptees with their homeland.  With gaze cast downward, back hunched over, and legs tucked under, she quietly recounted the difficulties she has faced as a single mother raising a child on her own in Seoul today. Her interpreter, a compassionate woman in her early twenties, sat on her left, listening carefully to her every word. She interpreted slowly, her sentences carrying the slurs and monotones of a person who spent a lot of time in North America.

I could see the guest speakers and audience as I rushed toward the sliding glass doors of the building. I was late to this important gathering organized by Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK) of which I was a member and hoped I hadn’t missed too much. I wanted to get a first-hand account of the trials and tribulations single mothers in Korea face. It turns out I caught the tail end of the first talk given by a short woman with a small oval face sitting on Eunjeong’s right. I would have to get her story from another member of the audience later.

The Progressive, January 1988
Babies for sale. South Koreans make them, Americans buy them
by Matthew Rothschild
Seoul, South Korea. Five pregnant women sleep on blankets on the tile floor of a small room. They keep their personal belongings in three wooden closets on one wall above their feet. This is home, at least until the babies come. The dormitory is called Ae Ran Won, and it is one of a dozen homes for unmarried women in South Korea. Ae Ran Won can hold fifty pregnant women in its ten rooms, but when I was there in November, it had only thirty-five. These women supply the raw material for a peculiar South Korean business: the export of babies to the United States. U.S. families are adopting 6,000 Korean children a year, most of them infants, at a price of about $5,000 a head.
Korea is by far the largest supplier of foreign babies for the U.S. adoption market; 62 percent of all babies adopted from abroad are South Korean. That amounts to 10 percent of the total adoptions in the United States by families unrelated to the adoptees. Many of the babies come from unwanted mothers' homes, about 250 a year from Ae Ran Won alone. At first, the women do not want to give up their babies. According to the questionnaire that we distribute at the orientation interview, 90 percent want to keep the babies, says Kim Yongsook, the director of Ae Ran Won. But after counseling, maybe 10 per cent will keep them. We suggest that it's not a good idea to keep the baby without the biological father, explains Kim Yong Sook, and if the unwed mother and biological father are too young or too weak financially, we suggest that they give the baby up for adoption. We can't push, we can suggest.
After delivery at a hospital, the baby is taken from the mother and given to one of four adoption agencies licensed by the South Korean government. The agencies then place the baby with a foster mother until an American or European family can be found to adopt it. For some of the Korean mothers, the experience hurts. Just after delivery, they are very upset, says Kim Yong Sook, who was a social worker and an unwed mothers' counselor for eleven years for Holt Children's Services, the largest adoption agency in Korea, before joining Ae Ran Won. They have guilt feelings and avoidance feelings. I'd like to see my baby again, they say. Sometimes they have bad dreams. They miss the baby and have a lot of pain. Most of the mothers are poor women from low-paying factory or clerical jobs. They do not receive payment for their babies, though medical expenses - including delivery costs - are picked up by the adoption agency that takes the baby. Ae Ran Won provides free room and board for up to a year, free vocational training, and as much as $100 to help the mother adjust when she leaves Ae Ran Won. Like most of the homes for unwed expectant mothers, Ae Ran Won is supported by the Korean government, the adoption agencies, and charitable donations. On the other side of Seoul, at the end of a narrow open-air fruit and vegetable market in a poor section of town, a two-year-old boy pees in the street and a mangy white dog prowls about. Two houses down is Sung Ro Won Babies' Home, an orphanage for infants under three. It, too, is a supplier for the U.S. market. The orphanage, which had 106 infants when I visited, turns over at least that number each year to Holt and other agencies for foreign adoption. Almost all are abandoned and brought here by the Seoul police, says Kim Chong Chan, the superintendent of the babies's home. Some kids are waiting now, in jail or some other place. Son Migu was born on December 8, 1986, and was abandoned in a motel that same day. She has a pony tail standing straight up on the top of herhead. Dressed in a pink frilled shirt and white thermal stockings, she sits up in one of the twenty-four white crated cribs that crowd the room. All are occupied. In one month, Son Migu will go to her American family. In a nearby room, eleven girls who are two-and-a-half sing Kumbaya, My Lord. Some clutch my blue blazer. Ten boys in the next room greet me in unison, then some call me "appah" or dad. They bring out brown envelopes with pictures of Americans. Kim Chong Chan goes over the photos with them, explaining about their new parents.
Kim Chong Chan takes me to his office. On his desk, under the glass top, is a long poem from a grateful American couple, praising God for sending such a wonderful child: He picked up out baby; "Our daughter so fine/And delivered her to us Via Northwest Airlines."

Mother Jones
November/December 2007 Issue
Did I Steal My Daughter? The Tribulations of Global Adoption
The answers are never easy when you enter the labrynth of global adoption.
By Elizabeth Larsen
I FIRST MET MY DAUGHTER in the lobby of the Westin Camino Real, the grandest hotel in Guatemala City. The night before, my husband Walter and I had soothed our nerves running on the treadmills in the fitness center, where a polite attendant handed us plush white towels and spritzed the equipment with a flowery disinfectant. Afterward I wrote a series of letters to our daughter. Because children adopted from overseas usually have little information about their history, parents are advised to document the trip as best they can, creating what is known as an "adoption story."
Reading the journal now, more than two years later, it feels so self-conscious. "We've been waiting so long to meet you—almost seven months!" the first entry reads. "Ever since you were seven days old and the agency emailed us your beautiful photos, we've wondered what you will be like. We fell in love with you that minute!" Gone is any sense of the surreal. Walter and I already had two biological sons; now we were jetting into a Third World country with the sole aim of leaving with one of its daughters. (Wanting a girl, we'd opted for the sure bet that adoption offers.) I mentioned, but didn't dwell on, the brutal poverty outside our hotel windows, focusing instead on how my sons were looking forward to meeting their little sister.

From Groove Magazine, June 2011
http://issuu.com/dthw8s/docs/groovekorea
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Adoption Scapegoats: Single Moms
What do you say to a man that puts blame on 'promiscuous women'?
By Jenny Na
Adoption from Korea continues today because single mothers are promiscuous.

JoongAng Daily
April 03,2009
Fostering families
[Changing attitudes to raising children]‘I always knew these children would leave someday, but the pain of separation was unimaginable.’
A constant runny nose plagued the baby boy, who looked like he’d never had a haircut. The social worker who had brought the 10-month-old child to the home of Yun Ik-sang, a 48-year-old pastor, said the problem was rhinitis.
The social worker handed the pastor a bag containing three diapers and a half-finished bottle of baby formula. She said the child’s mother had handed Yeong-su (not his real name) over to the foster care organization and would come back for him when her situation improved.
Yun and Lee greet their children after school. There are only 10 pupils in total at the village school.

Why ASK?
By Kim Stoker
Published in The OAK/G.O.A.'L. Newsletter
Winter 2007
*한극어: 아래에있는글을 보세요*
I’m often asked about ASK (Adoptee Solidarity Korea) – what is it, what do we stand for, who’s in it – questions that, in of themselves are not really surprising since the notion of inquiring about adoption is something that ASK encourages people to do. But somehow the answers don’t always come easy. One reason for that is because international adoption is not always the simplest of issues to discuss. It is complicated, nuanced, emotional, and integrally important to all of our lives. Sometimes I might refer people to visit our website since it contains such information as our mission and vision statements as well as papers and news articles related to adoption. We also have announcements about our monthly forums and other activities that we sponsor. And yet the website doesn’t seem to say everything either. And then there is the confusion with our name in Korean, which is 국외 입양인 연대, not to be confused with the name of GOA’L 해외입양인 연대. This causes confusion not so much among the adoptee community, but more with the Korean community, in particular, news outlets. It’s true that our names are similar in Korean but what we represent is somewhat different.
Adoptee Solidarity Korea is, in essence, a group of adult adoptees living in Korea who are working towards a day where intercountry adoption (ICA) out of Korea is no longer necessary. We believe that while the issue of ICA is related to the past, it is not bound by it. The Republic of South Korea today is very different from the country that it was 15-20-30-40 years ago when the majority of us were sent abroad for adoption. Our opinions about ICA have, by and large, been directly informed by the experiences that we’ve had living in this country, the country of our birth. We’ve formed our opinions based on the knowledge that we’ve accumulated through reading articles about adoption, our own personal experiences with Korean society, adoption agencies, search, birth families, adoptive families, and most importantly – from each other, from all of us who are members of our community – this sometimes seemingly random assortment of diverse characters from all over the world.

A fight to change adoption law
By Shannon Heit
The Korea Herald 2009.11.13
Leveraging the help of a group of lawyers and a Korean unwed mothers organization, a group of expats in Seoul are driving a movement to create a major shift in how the country deals with adoptions.
With the support of Democratic Party Representative Choi Young-hee, this coalition presented its bill to revise the current Special Act Relating to Adoption Promotion and Procedure law at a National Assembly public hearing on Nov. 10.
The coalition has been working together for over a year to draw up a proposal for a new adoption law. Involved are three adoption-related groups - Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoptee Community of Korea (TRACK), Adoptee Solidarity Korea, KoRoot - an unwed mothers group, Miss Mama Mia, and the Gonggam Public Interest Lawyers Group.
What initially began last year as a request to the Anti-corruption and Civil Rights Commission for a probe into cases of allegedly inaccurate or falsified adoption records has expanded into a movement that could change the course of Koreas adoption program.