South Korea's Adoption Reckoning

>> No other country in the world has sent its children abroad for adoptions for a longer time than Korea.

>> NARRATOR: In collaboration with the Associated Press, an investigation into South Korea’s Foreign Adoptions.

>> How did this program that started as a contained program grow dramatically over time to become this industry?

>> The top level of policy makers they were not really interested about the specific rules and regulations to protect the rights of the child.

>> NARRATOR: Accounts of falsified records and faked identities.

>> They've documented these children as abandoned that ensured the child was adoptable in the United States.

>> It would be wonderful if every child born in Korea could stay with their biological family.

But that's not the reality.

>> What do you do when you find out your origin story is marked with grievous injustice?

>> NARRATOR: Now on FRONTLINE, South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning.

>> Adoptions could be the issue that South Korea finds most difficult to address.

>> TONG-HYUNG KIM (speaking Korean): >> CHOI YOUNG-JA: >> KIM: >> CHOI: ♪ ♪ (breath trembling) (sniffles) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> I was adopted into France in 1982.

>> I was adopted... >> I was adopted... >> I was adopted... >> ALL: ...to Sweden... >> ...in 1982.

>> 1974.

>> 1988.

>> KIM: There are about 200,000 people around the world who were adopted out of South Korea.

>> ALL: I was adopted to the United States.

>> KIM: It's believed to be the largest population of adoptees out of any country... >> I was adopted in 1977 to Denmark... >> ...to Denmark in 1972.

>> KIM: ...an adoption program that ran for decades.

♪ ♪ >> (on computer): What would you tell to your birth mother if she watched on TV right now?

>> My dream would be one day to find you.

>> (voice trembling): Mom and Dad, if you're watching this, by any chance, you could just meet with me?

>> KIM: For decades, Korean television programs have been featuring foreign adoptees in search of their biological parents.

>> To my birth mother, I hope to meet you someday.

>> I hope that someday, I can learn more about you.

>> KIM: These reunions are meant to be feel-good stories, almost fairy tales.

But for some adoptees, under the surface is a much darker story.

♪ ♪ In the years since I began investigating adoptions, a growing number of adoptees have come back to Korea as adults only to discover that what they had been told about their origins was not true.

>> Everything that I knew to be true was suddenly erased.

>> KIM: There are accounts of false identities... >> It feels so careless, like systemic disorganization.

>> KIM: ...fabricated documents... >> They never checked whether my parents existed or not.

>> KIM: ...and even stolen children.

>> You are feeding a very dangerous and very dark system.

>> KIM: This has sparked a national reckoning.

♪ ♪ A Truth and Reconciliation Commission is now investigating hundreds of cases of possible human rights violations associated with past governments' handling of foreign adoptions.

>> This was all a lie, a lie made up for adoption procedure.

>> KIM: Over the past several years, I've been reporting on how South Korea is dealing with these allegations.

This is the one where they banned adoption agencies from touring hospitals and maternity homes for babies.

With my colleagues at the Associated Press, we submitted over 100 public record requests... >> What's this outlining?

Like, father, mother... >> KIM: ...and examined thousands of pages of documents, many that have never been made public before.

♪ ♪ Along with "FRONTLINE," we've been speaking to more than 80 Korean adoptees from eight different countries... >> Korea had no place for mixed-race children like me.

>> KIM: ...as well as people who worked at adoption agencies.

>> (speaking Korean): >> KIM: And we've interviewed experts and government officials in South Korea and abroad.

>> There were a lot of children brought to the States who might not have been orphans.

(people talking in background) >> KIM: This is the story of how South Korean leaders promoted a historic adoption boom, despite decades of warnings about problems, how Western governments also turned a blind eye, and the consequences that are still playing out today.

♪ ♪ (rain falling) Many of the adoptees I've met are in the process of trying to piece together their origin stories, including some dating back to the early decades of foreign adoptions.

>> My mother told me when I was growing up that I had been found abandoned.

(typewriter keys clacking) My name is Alice Stephens.

I was adopted into a family in Philadelphia.

♪ ♪ I was the youngest child of four.

The three other children were biological children of my adoptive parents.

My parents gave me a really good life-- everything they gave their other children, all the advantages, all the love.

I was in my 30s when my adoptive mother suggested that I find my birth mother.

To me, it just seemed like an impossible mission.

The big game-changer was DNA, um, for everybody.

(chuckles) And I took the DNA test, and it came back, and there was a very close match.

So I contacted the woman.

It turned out to be my father's cousin.

She very quickly figured out who, who my father was.

She sent me his obituary, photos.

The family gave me lots of information.

And then this one photo of my mother dressed up in a hanbok and my father in his U.S. military outfit.

It took me a long time to understand just what she did here in Korea, that she, that she was a military prostitute.

He kept her in a home that was quite near the base.

They were in a common-law marriage.

His family told me that he loved her.

He left Korea when my mother was six months pregnant.

So he knew that she was gonna have his baby.

Since my father wasn't Korean, I would not have been recognized by Korean society as a Korean.

She knew that life here would not have been good for me, and so, she gave me up.

♪ ♪ >> One of the reasons that Korean adoption is important to understand is that it represents the first large-scale adoption program in the world.

>> KIM: Eleana Kim is a leading scholar on South Korean adoptions and their legacy.

>> Korea was the top sending country for so long and really laid the groundwork for transnational adoptions to come.

>> KIM: No other country in the world has sent its children abroad for adoptions for a longer time than Korea.

(explosion pounds) Korean adoptions really begin in the aftermath of the Korean War.

♪ ♪ >> By the end of that conflict, there were thousands of children who had been separated from their families or had been orphaned.

There were also mixed-race children who had been fathered by U.S. soldiers and born to Korean women.

(people talking in background) >> KIM: Korea's first president, Syngman Rhee, saw the mixed-race children as a threat to his rebuilding efforts, which was focused on restoring an old idea of Korea based on ethnical homogeneity.

There was a lot of emphasis on maintaining the pure Korean bloodline.

In 1954, he issued instructions making adoptions easier.

He said, "If a foreigner wishes "to adopt a mixed-race orphan, take the necessary measures."

>> And certainly on the U.S. side, there was also a lot of interest in rescuing those mixed-race children.

>> KIM: Pictures of mixed-race children began appearing in publications in the United States, and adoptions began at a small scale.

But they really took off when an evangelical missionary named Harry Holt came onto the scene.

♪ ♪ >> Harry Holt went to South Korea to find children that he believed God wanted him to save.

>> In Portland, Oregon, a welcoming committee of foster parents... >> Cameras were waiting at the bottom of the steps when the Holt children arrived, and it was broadcast all over the nation.

>> Many of these orphans are ours.

There's at least 1,000, maybe 1,500 Black and white American orphans with American fathers.

I'd like to say to the American people, that is, open your hearts to these little ones and help to bring them home, where they belong.

>> And that was the point at which the Holts decided to start the Holt adoption program.

♪ ♪ >> KIM: Together with Syngman Rhee's government, the Holt adoption program pioneered a method called proxy adoption, which allowed Americans to adopt a child in Korea without actually coming to the country by having Holt or another local agency acting as their proxy.

>> Here is Harry Holt-- he is flying 89 of the tots to America... >> Holt brought over planeloads of children.

He would charter airplanes.

>> His third trip from Korea brings the total to 76.

>> So this is how you see Holt's program grow over the years.

♪ ♪ (people talking in background) >> The Reagan Library might have records related to adoption.

He met with the Korean president.

>> KIM: Yeah, that's possible.

(voiceover): My A.P.

colleague Claire Galofaro and I have been focusing our reporting on explaining how South Korea's government, Korean adoption agencies, and Western governments worked together to ship huge numbers of Korean children to the West for decades.

>> The question we asked was, how did this program that started as a really small and contained program grow dramatically over time to become this industry?

♪ ♪ Before South Korea, there was no systemic way for an American family to adopt a child from abroad.

But in 1961, Congress passed a law that defined what an orphan eligible for adoption meant.

They defined an orphan as a person who had lost one or both parents to death, disappearance, or abandonment.

That language became important, because what our reporting has found is that the adoption agencies relied on the word abandoned, because that made processing adoptions much quicker, much easier.

And they could get kids out of Korea and to Western countries faster if they listed them as abandoned.

>> KIM: Korea didn't have-- and still doesn't have-- an automatic birth registration system.

So what the Korean adoption system did was register these children with a unique document called orphan ho juk, or an orphan certificate.

This document would describe that the child's parents were unknown, and therefore classifying them as abandoned orphans.

It didn't matter if the child was, you know, really left on a doorstep or actually had parents who agreed to the adoption of the child.

They just documented these children as abandoned.

That ensured that the child was adoptable in the United States and other Western nations.

♪ ♪ When you live your whole life believing that you were abandoned by unknown parents, do you even try to find your roots?

Many adoptees I've spoken to said they never really wanted to find their parents, because they didn't really think there was anything to find.

This was part of the problem in Choi Young-ja's search for so many years.

Her son had gone missing in 1975, after running outside to play with neighborhood kids.

She told me she looked everywhere for him, visiting police stations and orphanages.

>> CHOI (speaking Korean): >> KIM: >> CHOI: >> KIM: A few years ago, her search took on a new urgency.

>> CHOI: >> KIM: She submitted her DNA to a database that helps reunite families.

>> CHOI: >> (on computer): But everything we were told, which I believed when I was a kid, was actually a lie.

And being adopted, you're asked a lot about... >> KIM: When I first started developing a reporting interest in adoption, I... Like most Koreans, I thought of it as a humanitarian response rooted in the Korean War that was helping orphans find families.

And I thought there has to be a deeper explanation than the explanations that the Koreans have shared for a long time.

Is this really a war relief effort?

♪ ♪ By the 1960s, South Korea's adoption program, which had primarily focused on mixed-race children, shifted to children who were fully Korean.

>> That's really the moment when adoptions should probably have been reconsidered, but they just continued.

And so, there was essentially, if you want to talk about it in terms of supply and demand, there was a new supply.

>> KIM: This was happening under the dictatorship of President Park Chung-hee, who made it his mission to dig South Korea out of poverty and create a formidable military force to counter threats by North Korea.

>> South Korea is spending 40% of its budget on national defense, and two percent on social welfare.

>> KIM: Over the next decade, they began sending thousands of children overseas in adoptions every year.

By sending needy children overseas, it allowed them to reduce the annual costs of supporting orphanages and keep spending on national defense.

And by the mid-1970s, Park's government passed a law that removed judicial oversight over adoptions, which made the foreign adoptions of Korean children even easier.

Korea's Ministry of Health and Welfare, which oversees adoption policy, wouldn't go on camera, but they did give us written answers to questions we submitted.

They attributed the increase in adoptions starting in the 1970s to a reduction in foreign aid that was crucial to their child welfare budget.

They also attributed it to an increase in child abandonment in that era.

But I talked to Kyung-eun Lee, a former Health Ministry official who oversaw adoption policies starting in 2010.

She questions whether there were really so many abandoned children in need of adoption.

>> This number of abandonment of a child, it does not really reflect the reality.

>> KIM: She's been instrumental in passing adoption reform in South Korea.

Why was the government so eager to facilitate foreign adoptions?

>> From my understanding, the government did not really care about the details.

The top level of policymakers were not really interested about the specific rules and regulations to protect the rights of the child, the safety of the child, the need of the children.

What they focus was the welfare need of the, uh, national budget.

The orphanage received the government subsidies.

If the number of, uh, children in orphanage increased, the welfare cost of government would increase.

So if you want to decrease that welfare burden, you just decrease the number of children in orphanage, and orphanages send those children to adoption agencies.

>> KIM: At the time, many poor families were using orphanages to temporarily care for their kids.

She said once children left the orphanages, the government pretty much abdicated oversight.

>> This system is totally in, under the power of private agencies, and a fate of a human being is decided by a private entity.

How can you expect an appropriate decision to fulfill the interest, the best interest of a child?

♪ ♪ (people talking in background) >> KIM: The majority of adoptees I've spoken to left South Korea when they were very young and have believed the origin story that they were told.

>> (speaking Korean): >> KIM: But Yoo-ree Kim's case was different.

She was 11 when she was adopted to France and always knew that she wasn't an orphan.

Her story caused a stir in Korea when she went on television in 2022.

>> (speaking French): >> KIM: Her mother was poor and had placed Yoo-ree and her brother in an orphanage until she could get back on her feet.

(both greeting in Korean) >> KIM: Her mother stayed in touch, sending letters and money over the two years they were there.

>> I was waiting for my mother to come and pick us up.

I did not understand why Korea was, uh, taking me away from, uh, my motherland.

>> KIM: Did you demand that orphanage worker just contact your father, contact your mother, you know, contact any relative you had?

>> Yes, I did.

But she refused.

I told her that my mother was unable to do such a thing.

She said it was done, and that my mother will never come back.

>> KIM: Yoo-ree and her brother were adopted by a couple who lived in a small town in Southern France.

>> The sexual abuses started on the second day, as soon as we arrived in the family house.

>> KIM: From your adoptive father?

>> Yeah, from my adoptive father.

It was almost daily, at the beginning.

And I was hoping that someone would show up to investigate.

Then I will be able to explain what's happening, and I will be able to go back to Korea.

But they never came.

>> KIM: Yoo-ree eventually ran away from home and filed a complaint, but the case was dismissed by a judge due to insufficient evidence.

Her adoptive parents and her brother denied the abuse ever happened.

In a letter to Yoo-ree, her adoptive father called it a "false accusation".

He passed away in 2022.

Yoo-ree's adoption paperwork had multiple conflicting stories about how she became an orphan.

And she spent years thinking that her parents had abandoned her.

Until she went to South Korea.

You came to Korea to visit them.

>> Uh-huh.

>> KIM: How did that go?

>> Uh...

It went well.

My mother insisted I see my father, and I asked to both of them, why did they abandon me, and why did they sign the paper for the adoption?

And both of them denied being involved with the adoption.

>> KIM: When did you realize that your parents were telling you the truth, that they never relinquished you?

>> I...

It took me years before being able to find the, all the adoption paperwork.

And I went to the city hall and requested the family registry.

I asked to the employee from the city hall, "What does this paper concretely mean?

", and he told me that I was a Korean citizen who has been living her entire life in Korea.

>> KIM: So based on just looking at this paper, it seems as if you and your brother just never left.

>> No, and we were never adopted.

>> KIM: Kept being...

So this was when you realized that, you know, your parents never gave consent.

>> Yeah.

>> KIM: I spoke to Yoo-ree's mother, and she told me she had previously worked at the orphanage and assumed her children would be cared for there, not sent away.

Yoo-ree reached out to the Health Ministry for answers about how her adoption could have gone through.

>> They sent me a letter with a vague apology, and they said they will monitor adoption better for the future.

>> KIM: So it says, it sympathizes with the pain that you went through, and... >> No, I don't care about their sympathy.

>> KIM: Yeah, it doesn't acknowledge... >> No.

>> KIM: ...any responsibility of what went through in the '80s.

>> No, no.

I was separated for 40 years from my mom and dad, and I have no idea what's, uh, like having a family.

It's an immense sense of loss.

♪ ♪ >> KIM: Yoo-ree is now seeking accountability, both in South Korea and France.

Last year, she asked the French authorities to investigate her adoption, and she's submitted her case to South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

More than 350 people have also filed claims, and while it's impossible to know just how many problems there were over the years, that's thought to be just a fraction of the overall number.

♪ ♪ The commission is supposed to release its full findings next year.

But they agreed to talk to me about what they've learned so far.

>> PARK GEON-TAE (speaking Korean): >> KIM: >> PARK HYEJIN: >> KIM: >> PARK HYEJIN: ♪ ♪ >> I was adopted through the Holt adoption agency.

>> Social Welfare Society.

>> It was KSS.

>> KIM: Four agencies inside South Korea handle most of the adoptions in the years after the Korean War.

>> KSS.

>> Social Welfare Society.

>> Eastern.

>> Holt International.

>> KIM: They always publicly pointed to the benefits of adoptions as a way of saving vulnerable children.

>> Holt Children Services.

>> From Holt International.

>> Holt Children's Services.

>> KIM: Holt was the largest, handling about half of all the adoptions.

♪ ♪ In 1977, Holt split in two: Holt Korea, which processed the adoptions of children leaving South Korea; and Holt International, which paired adoptees with families in the West.

Holt International was the only adoption agency that would agree to an on-camera interview.

>> This is the historical wall that tells the story of Holt.

See, these are all the kids as they were coming off the plane.

>> KIM: At Holt's headquarters in Oregon, Claire and I met Susan Soonkeum Cox.

She's a longtime executive and spokesperson for the agency, and is now retired.

>> So Mrs. Holt took lots of pictures.

When I first came to work at Holt, Mrs. Holt asked me if I would like to see her scrapbooks.

And, of course, I said yes.

It was... >> Did you find yourself in any of them?

>> Yes, I did.

>> KIM: She joined Holt in the 1970s, two decades after becoming the 167th South Korean to be adopted through the agency.

Is '56 your year, too?

>> Mm-hmm.

>> KIM: She has been a vocal defender of Holt, and says that most adoptions have gone well over the years.

>> That's me.

>> Oh, wow.

Will you tell us how you came to work for Holt?

>> Mm-hmm.

>> To do this as your career?

>> Well, it certainly wasn't ever a plan that I had.

The board decided to put an adoptee on the board of directors.

And so, I was that first adoptee.

I was the only one for many, many years that was involved in adoption work.

And, um, in 1983, I went from being a member of the board to a member of the staff.

>> KIM: You were adopted in the aftermath of a very devastating war.

>> Right.

>> KIM: I mean, the '70s, Korea was very far off economically, but at the same time... >> Mm-hmm.

>> KIM: ...Korea was rising as an industrial nation in Asia.

>> Right, right.

>> KIM: So did it feel strange that your birth nation is, you know, continuing to rely on adoptions because they couldn't find a social welfare solution for those children?

>> But I, that wasn't what I saw.

What I saw were the kids.

What I saw were the consequences.

And there was still a huge effect of war in the '70s.

The whole concept of the war seemed pretty, didn't seem all that far away, still.

>> You know, some people have said to us that that period of time, like, when it went from being people who were mixed-race to fully Korean children, that that's when we maybe should have taken a look at whether continuing to send children abroad in huge numbers for adoption was really the best solution.

Did you question whether continuing adoptions at a large scale of fully Korean children was really the best thing?

>> (inhales) Well, I think philosophically you can say, um, is that the best thing for children?

It would be wonderful if every child born in Korea and every other country could stay with their biological family and, um, live a happy, you know, fulfilling life.

But that's not the reality-- I mean, it just simply isn't.

And I think to not accept that, um, fails to address what is important for, for children.

♪ ♪ >> Look how cute.

>> (chuckles) >> Look at him.

Look at her.

>> For many couples looking for an American baby or a young child, to adopt is a long, arduous, and, sadly, often successful ordeal.

♪ ♪ >> KIM: By the '70s and '80s, demand for adoptive children in Western countries had skyrocketed.

♪ ♪ >> American families were really desperate for children.

The, uh, there was access to birth control and abortion like there had never been before.

The number of domestically available children for adoption had plummeted.

Waiting lists were extremely long, um, sometimes years.

Um, and so families were really eager to adopt from abroad.

>> The coincidence of Western demand and Eastern supply has now led to 23 Third-World countries allowing their babies to be sent to Europe and America for adoption.

>> Most of the 5,000 foreign children adopted in the U.S. last year came from Korea, one of the few countries that's made such adoptions easy.

>> I think Western demand is one of the most fundamental pieces of this, because if there had not been this incredible demand for babies in the West, a lot of these kids would've never left Korea, because they would've had nowhere to go.

More than half of the 200,000 adoptees from Korea ended up in the United States.

♪ ♪ There were essentially two governments with the power to rein this in at the beginning, and that was the South Korean government and the United States government.

♪ ♪ >> KIM: We've been asking the U.S. State Department for details of their involvement in adoptions over the years.

They said records are very scarce, but our questions prompted them to begin looking more closely at adoptions.

They declined to talk on camera, but we spoke to former ambassador Susan Jacobs, who was the State Department's first special adviser for Children's Issues and who has worked on the subject for years.

She acknowledged there were problems since the beginning of adoptions out of South Korea, partly because of political pressure.

>> There was pressure to issue the visas to allow people to bring children to the United States to be adopted.

The parents were pressuring the Congress, and these were individual constituents.

And then the Congress would call the State Department, and you would get a call from your assistant secretary.

>> There's congressional testimony, I think it was from 1977, where officials talk about how one officer flew from Tokyo to Seoul for one week every month.

In that week, they processed all of the orphan petitions.

>> Mm-hmm.

>> And so that would be, you know, hundreds of children in that single week every month.

Do you think that is a sufficient period of time to be able to process that kind of question, "Is this an orphan?"

>> Absolutely not.

There couldn't have been any rigor in that process whatsoever.

They were probably filling out...

I mean, I hate to say this-- they were doing what they were told to do.

They were signing off on these forms and letting the children go on their way to the United States.

>> There's this one I.S.S.

social worker, wrote in her report about Korea that she brought these concerns to the attention of the people at the embassy.

>> And what'd they say?

>> She said that they seemed somewhat indifferent to them, and that they thought that the agencies should be left... >> To do whatever they... >> ...to do their business.

>> Um...

I can imagine that that is the exact truth.

You know, "Don't tell us how to do our work."

The Korean government was in favor of this, and if they didn't care if their children were being adopted into the United States and other countries, then why were we worried about it?

You wish you could go back in time and change the way we did things, and that people would not change the facts of a, of a child's birth or how they came into care or anything else.

But those things did happen.

I do think that the country of origin has the first responsibility to raise alarms about what's happening to its children.

(people talking in background) ♪ ♪ >> KIM: When Choi Young-ja discovered that her son had been adopted abroad, he sent her his adoption paperwork.

♪ ♪ The documents said he'd been found in a neighboring city and given to Holt, where he was registered as an orphan and, five months later, adopted to Norway.

♪ ♪ Holt had repeatedly told her they didn't have her son.

But she went back to them after seeing the paperwork.

>> CHOI (speaking Korean): ♪ ♪ >> KIM: Holt Korea did not respond to questions about Choi Young-ja's son.

Susan Cox of Holt International also said she couldn't respond to specific adoption cases.

But she questioned how representative cases like these were of the overall adoption program.

>> Has there been some activity that shouldn't have happened?

Probably, of course-- we're human, and everybody is different.

There's good social workers, there's bad social workers.

There's good employees, bad employees.

And so, that's going to be, that's the reality.

What I'm talking about is the accusation of systemic, deliberate wrongdoing.

That I reject.

>> How have you felt about that number of people who've come forward to say that they aren't happy about their adoption, or that they think it was sort of tainted?

Has that been an upsetting experience for you to watch?

>> It depends on-- it depends.

Anyone's experience is their own experience.

I'm, I am not going to disagree with that.

But I think, you know, there's kind of different levels of, of discontent.

And I think the... What I really disagree with are people who just outright say that Holt is a terrible agency, that everything is done for profit.

Those things are disturbing to me, because it's not, you know, that's not accurate.

Um, for people who say, you know, "My adoption wasn't good," "My parents," you know, "were abusive," or whatever, I give a lot more credibility and, and concern to those, because, you know, that's more tangible.

That's more real.

♪ ♪ (phone vibrating) >> KIM: Since I began reporting on this story, I've been trying to get interviews with adoption workers in South Korea.

(speaking Korean): (sighs, mutters) (phone buttons clicking) It's hard, because they're legally forbidden from speaking publicly about their cases.

(speaking Korean): But for years, I've been talking to one former adoption worker.

(speaking Korean): ♪ ♪ She worked at one of the four agencies in South Korea in the early '80s.

(speaking Korean): >> WOMAN: >> KIM: We agreed to conceal her identity and not name the agency she worked for.

♪ ♪ >> WOMAN (speaking Korean): >> KIM: >> WOMAN: >> KIM: >> WOMAN: >> KIM: >> WOMAN: >> KIM: In addition to the immense pressure, she told me that she sometimes came across records that she believed had false information in them.

>> WOMAN (speaking Korean): >> KIM: She said the policy at the time required an abandoned child to be held for six months before adoption, in case a relative turned up to claim them.

>> WOMAN (speaking Korean): >> KIM: >> WOMAN: (chuckling) >> KIM and WOMAN: >> WOMAN: ♪ ♪ >> KIM: While she didn't know if this child was eventually adopted abroad, I've spoken with other adoptees who said they were misled by adoption papers that distorted or fabricated their origin stories.

♪ ♪ >> I had, like, a book that had all of the different photos of my arrival that my parents had put together.

Growing up, I really had access to my paperwork.

I really believed so much of what was written and documented as truths and my truths of who I was.

I have this case number tattooed on my back.

(laughs) And so I, I really identified with it.

(typewriter keys clacking) My name is Robyn Joy Park.

I was adopted to the U.S. in 1982.

♪ ♪ After college, I decided I'm going to just pack my backpack and move back to Korea.

>> KIM: To help find her birth parents, Robyn Park reached out to Eastern Social Welfare Society, the agency that handled her adoption.

>> It was really fast.

I was notified that they had located and contacted this birth mother.

♪ ♪ I think a part of me was just, you know, in kind of shock and awe that this was just really happening.

We held hands and sat on this little couch.

I'll never forget her spoon-feeding me rice for the first time.

The relationship with her developed over time.

It was about, like, six years.

The deepening of the relationship, it meant everything.

♪ ♪ I didn't know about my biological father.

It was kind of a sensitive topic.

My now-husband, he's a forensic scientist and works with DNA.

And so, I requested a DNA test to be able to have her profile.

And then based on that information, my husband would be able to kind of create this profile for a biological father.

The moment that I learned about the results for the DNA test, um, was a, a really surreal moment.

All the, the profile markers that should have indicated that we were biologically related were showing that we weren't.

♪ ♪ I learned that this was not my biological mother.

Initially, it was kind of denial, like, "No, this can't be true."

You know, that, like... (laughs) All the paperwork that I, I've had shows otherwise.

And we shared the DNA results with her, and...

It was pretty devastating, seeing her response to it.

And really kind of flipped my world upside down, um, and had me really questioning, then, like, "Well, well, who am I, then?"

(traffic humming in distance) I brought this forward to Eastern, the Korean agency.

They were in shock.

They were trying to cobble together some sort of response, you know, and suggest that, that it was another potential adoptee case that I was switched with.

♪ ♪ I had never met anyone who had had similar experiences.

The first case that I learned about was through "The Ricki Lake Show."

>> So I took the DNA test, and the people who I had met, whose names had always been on my birth records, were not genetically related to me.

I went on this show.

I was just hoping that maybe someone out there would maybe have a similar experience, or have a lead.

>> Were you able to find your biological parents?

>> I'm in the process right now.

>> It was just mind-blowing to know, like, "Oh, my goodness, I'm not alone in this."

So I actively pursued, you know, her, and since then, we've really been able to meet more switched cases.

It's really revealed to us that we're not isolated incidences, that there's quite a large amount of us.

♪ ♪ >> My story's, like, straight out of a "Choose Your Own Adventure," man.

An adventure that, like, nobody would choose.

(typewriter keys clacking) I'm Michaela Dietz.

I arrived in the States in February 1983.

I had follow-up calls with Eastern to figure out why the DNA test was not a match.

Eastern actually never apologized, and they didn't really admit fault.

They said, in looking back at their records, the only thing that they could determine was that two girls were born on the same day, and perhaps their paperwork was switched.

♪ ♪ >> KIM: With new details Eastern provided her from their files, she was able to track down her family.

♪ ♪ In 2015, she went back to South Korea to meet them.

>> I learned pretty early on that my birth father died in the '90s, my birth mother was alive, and that I had four biological sisters.

Hi.

>> (cries) >> Oh, my God.

>> Oh, my gosh.

>> Meeting my sisters for the first time is, I think, one of the, the highlights of my life.

And then meeting my birth mother was a lot different.

It was hard-- it was really hard.

Umma!

>> (crying) (sobbing) >> She never explained to me directly.

And I think, um, you know, giving me up, it just was too much for her to handle.

But I actually tracked down the man who was very close with my birth father.

My birth father said to his friend he wanted me to have a better life.

But this man told me, "Why'd you wait so long?

"Your birth father, he wanted to meet you, "and he left all the information for you in your files.

His name, his phone number, contact, everything."

And that's, I think, one of the hardest things to hear, is, like, he was expecting me to, you know, reach out.

And even if I wanted to, I couldn't, because our records were switched.

I mean, it's just Shakespearean, in a way.

(laughs softly) ♪ ♪ >> KIM: Unlike Michaela, Robyn still hasn't been able to locate her biological family.

I reached out to Eastern, which handled both of their cases, to find out why the switches happened.

Eastern declined an on-camera interview, but I did get to talk with the president of Eastern, and she defended the agency's practices.

She said it was a overall process of finding Western homes for discarded children who otherwise wouldn't have had a chance at a decent life.

She acknowledged there was some adoptions that went wrong, but she described them as mistakes or isolated incidents that happens because so many children were being sent.

♪ ♪ When I spoke to the investigators from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they told me they'd also found several switched cases.

>> PARK HYEJIN (speaking Korean): ♪ ♪ >> KIM: This is a summary of a meeting between the government and the head of the adoption agencies.

>> Do you know when this meeting was?

>> KIM: Yeah, it was in 1982.

>> Oh, wow, okay.

>> KIM: Adoptions in South Korea hit their peak in the 1980s, with an annual average of around 6,000 children sent abroad every year.

In our investigation, we found internal Health Ministry documents that show the government knew there were serious problems in the country's adoption system.

They were aware that there were child intake problems, which refers to how they were procuring these children from different sources.

Yeah.

>> What problems are they describing with intake?

>> KIM: This doesn't specify the problems, but when they get to the part about discussing fees, they say they should control fees to a level so that it doesn't create concerns about human trafficking.

♪ ♪ Agencies were no longer just relying on the orphanage system to receive babies.

They were sending workers to actively gather the babies in what some critics call as a process that amounted to baby hunting.

That meant adoption workers were touring poor neighborhoods looking for financially struggling parents who could be persuaded to give away their babies.

Most importantly, they were sending adoption workers to hospitals and maternity homes and other birth venues.

♪ ♪ >> PHILSIK SHIN (speaking Korean): >> KIM: Researcher Philsik Shin has studied how hospitals and maternity homes became a major source of children for adoption.

>> SHIN (speaking Korean): >> KIM: His research has raised questions about about the common practice of labeling children as "abandoned" to facilitate adoption, and he points to the fact that the number of adoptees during the '80s was often ten times higher, or more, than the number of children reported as "abandoned" to police.

>> SHIN (speaking Korean): ♪ ♪ >> What do you do when you find out your origin story is marked with grievous injustice?

(typewriter keys clacking) My name is Robert Calabretta.

That was my given name at adoption.

I was adopted at the age of supposedly six months old.

When I look back at it, I was grieving for a language, a culture, a person that I had lost.

And so that began the quest for, you know, who am I, really?

Where do I come from?

I contacted Holt.

Within a couple of months, they came back saying, you know, "We're sorry.

"Everything that you have is on the short, like, two-page dossier," which essentially said, "Your parents met at a office "that they both worked at, they were not married, they had you, "they wanted to keep you, but they were too young.

And so your mother put you up for adoption."

And that was the story that I was given.

A good portion of adoptees in my community, they were able to find their family or information about themselves using a Korean government organization called National Center for the Rights of the Child.

So I filled out their application.

And this is 2019.

It took them three months to get through to me.

And I got a email saying, "We have good news.

"Your father called us today."

He became very emotional, but also a little confused.

We started video calling.

He was, like, "Your mother and I thought you were dead."

Everything just kind of fades to black.

What do you do when you have someone come back from the dead 30 years later?

♪ ♪ >> KIM: Robert Calabretta returned to Seoul in 2020 to meet his father and mother, and has been visiting them every year since.

>> Hey.

>> Oh!

>> Uh... >> (laughing) (speaking Korean): (Calabretta murmurs, Lee laughing) >> CALABRETTA: >> LEE: (laughing) >> CALABRETTA: (both laughing) >> LEE: (Calabretta responds, Lee reacts) >> LEE: >> CALABRETTA: (both murmur) >> LEE: >> CALABRETTA: (both laughing) >> CALABRETTA: >> KIM: Lee Sung Soo, Robert's father, told me that contrary to what's in the adoption papers, he and Robert's mother were married and looking forward to raising their first child.

>> LEE (speaking Korean): >> KIM: He told me that the hospital director proposed a solution to him and another new father with infant twins.

>> LEE (speaking Korean): ♪ ♪ >> KIM: The hospital, which was a source for many adoptions, has long since closed, and its records were destroyed.

I wasn't able to find the director from the time, or the other father.

But I reviewed Robert's adoption documents from Holt.

They say he had pneumonia, but there is no mention of any surgery.

He was described as a "normal healthy baby, adoptable."

>> LEE (speaking Korean): Mm.

>> KIM: Holt Korea would not answer questions about Robert's case, or any other specific adoptions.

But its former president told me Holt and other agencies were just following government policy in sending kids abroad.

By the end of the 1980s, uncomfortable questions were beginning to be raised about the country's adoption system.

>> South Korea is ready to show the world a pristine city.

>> KIM: South Korea was modernizing, transitioning away from a military dictatorship to a democracy.

(crowd chanting) >> Protests denouncing the government and calling for an uprising... >> KIM: This was during the time when South Korea was also preparing to host the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.

>> The games were his top priority.

The president-elect needs to prove Korea has gained a political maturity to match its economic progress.

>> (counting in Korean) (audience cheers and applauds) >> KIM: The 1988 Seoul Olympics for South Korea was billed as the country's arrival in the international stage as an economic power and a newborn democracy.

It was its coming out party to the world.

>> In a few hours' time, the 24th Olympiad will get underway.

>> KIM: Korea loved the international attention it got.

But there was also the concerns about how the Western media was focusing on its adoption program.

>> This is a shame-- national shame.

They should be cared by our people.

>> The authorities are embarrassed by this export of human beings.

>> KIM: And the government was very sensitive about its international reputation.

In the wake of the Olympics, the South Korean government conducted its first meaningful audit of the adoption system.

A lot of different types of birth mothers in different situations were sucked into the adoption system.

In this document, it covers a lot of wrongdoings.

It includes payments to hospitals, maternity homes, or other venues where women gave birth.

This audit report was probably the most significant accounting by the government of problems in the adoption system, pulling together years of internal warnings under previous dictatorships.

>> And then what happened after this came out?

>> KIM: So this coincided with government efforts to just clean up the acts.

Their focus was to stop the direct intakes from hospitals and maternity homes for babies.

And once they do it, you see adoptions dropping once the government clamped down.

>> Certainly, just before the Olympics, there was a lot of introspection about, "What are we going to do?

"The world is going to see us on the world stage, and what will we do about adoption?"

That was a huge concern in the '80s.

>> KIM: There's a lot of reports about the government, internally, raising, raising concerns about how adoption agencies were gathering children and paying hospitals for unwed mothers to provide their babies.

How much were you aware of these, you know, allegations or concerns being expressed in Korea at the time?

>> What you're talking about with regard to paying hospitals, I mean, I don't know about that in terms of, did the agency pay the hospital bill for the mother?

Maybe.

I mean, I don't know how that worked, but as far as a, a bribe or a payoff or a, um, I don't know, a finder's fee or something, I'm not aware of that.

>> At the peak, it was, mid-1980s, more than 8,000 children were leaving Korea.

Is it sort of your understanding that if they had not been adopted abroad, almost all of those children would've grown up in orphanage institutions?

>> Yes.

>> That's your belief?

>> Oh, yeah.

>> Okay.

>> What else would they have done?

>> I think the other side would say is that agencies or agency representatives were going to hospitals and encouraging families to give their children up, and if that hadn't happened, maybe they would've grown up with their birth families.

Some of these children would've never even entered an institution if it hadn't been for very active adoption agencies working on the ground.

>> But see, that's a premise that I don't accept.

I...

Certainly, that is not, um, what I'm familiar with.

So, when adoptions are done improperly, it puts to risk the entire process.

What is good about it is, is lost to, you know, what is bad.

Has there ever been inappropriate adoption?

Probably, yeah, I mean, I, I think that's probably true.

I think mistakes were made, um...

But was there deliberate intent?

I, I don't think so-- I, I believe not.

♪ ♪ >> KIM: By the 1990s, adoptions out of South Korea had dropped from a peak of 8,000 to just over 2,000 a year.

And in 2007, the U.S. ratified an international agreement known as the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which established standards to ensure that adoptions are made in the best interests of the child.

>> After Hague, people began to look at what was in front of them.

They were looking at these adoptions and trying to figure out, is this child really an orphan?

>> What do you think is the U.S. government's responsibility now in addressing those concerns of the past?

>> In addressing the concerns of the past, I think we just have to promise not to make the same mistakes that we did.

And I think that that might be the best that we can do.

And promise to listen to the voices of everyone that's involved in the process.

♪ ♪ >> KIM: As the State Department has begun looking back on adoptions in the '70s and '80s, they told us their early findings suggest there may have been adoptions based on falsified documentation, though they said they have no indication U.S. officials were aware of it.

Some U.S. agencies have paused accepting children from South Korea.

In Europe, France and Switzerland have publicly acknowledged their inaction on preventing abuses.

Denmark and the Netherlands no longer allow international adoptions from any country, and Sweden has stopped taking children from South Korea entirely.

>> South Korea is really important in the conversation about the future of intercountry adoption.

Adoption agencies created an adoption industry in South Korea and then moved around the world to almost every continent.

What happened in South Korea and what is happening now in South Korea will say a lot about sort of the very foundation of the intercountry adoption industry.

>> KIM: In South Korea, recent reforms, including a 2011 law that re-instituted judicial oversight, has led to a significant drop in foreign adoptions-- just 79 last year.

♪ ♪ Most of the focus now is on preventing future abuses and helping adoptees reconcile their pasts.

By 2025, the government has pledged to make it easier for adoptees to get access to their adoption records.

But the agency responsible for amassing all those files concedes it's a huge undertaking.

>> SARA YUN (speaking Korean): >> KIM: >> YUN: >> Good morning.

>> Morning.

>> KIM: For the last five years, Alice Stephens has been struggling to track down her South Korean birth mother, who gave her up in the '60s.

>> I've also been told that it's the most common name for Korean women at that time.

So it's like looking for Jane Smith... >> Yeah.

>> ...in the U.S. >> Adoptees, as they're trying to use their paperwork, thinking it's gonna lead to the truth of their adoption and their biological parents, it just leads back to the system.

Built into the design of it was not a returning adoptee who later in life will want to know where they came from and who they might be related to.

The paperwork produces a child that's adoptable.

It doesn't record a history.

>> I'm hoping that's her name.

>> KIM: Alice had more to go on than most adoptees: a name and some basic information.

But still, no success.

>> Looking for my birth mother has been an exercise in extreme frustration.

It's just kind of a bureaucratic maze.

I'm trying to follow the procedures right now!

I've, I've gone through avenue and avenue, and now I'm trying another avenue.

You could go to the police station, you can go and submit your DNA to the government.

You can do all these things.

But they give you very little help.

♪ ♪ I'm just extremely angry at the way that the whole system was set up.

♪ ♪ They made it impossible for me to find my birth mother, and for my birth mother to find me.

♪ ♪ This is where my father would come to visit my mother from the Army base.

This is the closest thing I have to my origins.

You know, to think that I was probably born here is, it's very moving, very emotional to think that my mother lived here.

(voice trembling): And my father visited her.

Here.

I've got to keep searching for her, definitely.

♪ ♪ >> How do you live as a family that has had such an early disruption?

>> My mother, my dad, they have no idea who I am.

>> I used to be angry, and now I'm just flabbergasted.

>> I think I've come to peace with my own story that I may or may not know in my lifetime.

>> So if you want to talk about ultimate accountability, I think that, clearly, state policies had something to do with it.

There was, uh, an interest in adoption as a form of population control.

Each moment in South Korean modernity has had adoption fulfill a certain function.

So mixed-race children were a problem-- adoption.

Oh, you have children who are poor and in institutions, or you have children born out of wedlock, or you have children from divorce, whatever the issue, decade by decade, adoption has been seen as a solution.

And, uh, and not, um, scrutinized enough.

>> KIM: It's a dark side of the country's industrialization that the country has never been able to squarely address and reconcile with.

Among the legacies of its brutal military dictatorships of the past, adoptions could be the issue that South Korea finds most difficult to address.

♪ ♪ Last fall, Choi Young-ja was finally going to be reunited with her son, Frank.

We accompanied her to the airport.

Frank didn't want to be shown on camera.

(people talking in background) >> (sighs) (speaking Korean): >> WOMAN: >> CHOI: (people talking in background) >> CHOI: ♪ ♪ (crying): (panting, crying) (speaking Korean, sobbing) >> Hello, Mom.

>> (sobbing) (wailing): (wailing) I love you!

I love you!

(wailing) >> Go to pbs.org/frontline for a Q&A with the team that made this film.

>> There was a lot of emphasis on maintaining the pure Korean bloodline.

>> What our reporting has found was that the adoption agencies relied on the word ‘abandoned’.

>> And see additional reporting with our partners at The Associated Press.

Connect with FRONTLINE on Facebook, Instagram, and X, and stream anytime on the PBS app, Youtube, or pbs.org/frontline.

Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org >> For more on this and other "FRONTLINE" programs, visit our website at pbs.org/frontline.

♪ ♪ FRONTLINE's "South Korea's Adoption Reckoning" is available on Amazon Prime Video.

♪ ♪