There’s much about adoption that can be good, but an adoption gone wrong is, perhaps, a sin for which there can never be a proper penance.
That painful truth came to mind today, as news broke of South Korea’s Truth & Reconcilation Commission reporting massive and historical adoption fraud. The TRC found that hundreds of thousands of South Korean children were exported for profit in faulty international adoptions from the 1960s until 2011, being “sent abroad like luggage.”
The investigation revealed that most of those children, although listed as “orphans,” had living family members who could have been found had the South Korean government not been so hasty to adopt them out to foreigners, who were too often inadequately vetted. Parental consents and birth records were routinely forged, and adoption agencies readily trafficked the children, as South Korea set no limits on the fees being collected for those adoptions.
While international adoption numbers have plunged sharply over the last decade, the Commission in South Korea has urged that country to ratify the Hague Treaty to avoid future violations. Additionally, it is advising the country to issue a formal apology to South Korea’s adoptees all over the world, to restore the identities of those whose records were falsified, and to survey the citizenship status of that nation’s children adopted elsewhere. The South Korean adoption agencies involved, however, will face no penalties for their part in these civil rights violations.
The Truth & Reconciliation Commission of South Korea is to be credited for its painstaking effort in acknowledging all the adoption gone wrong there. Australia did so in 2013. That same year, Ireland apologized to the birthmothers of the Magdalene Laundries. Scotland said sorry for forced adoption, in 2023. And yet– far more nations should. Chile, Argentina, Cambodia, Indian, Great Britain, Russia, Greece, Spain, Lebanon, and too many more to count. (Ours included.)
How to Make Right in an Adoption Gone Wrong?
Here’s the thing: you can’t. As the old church doctrine taught: there are sins of commission and sins of omission, and either requires rectification through acknowledging what was done wrong, making an apology, and taking action to correct it via a good deed.
Not every person adopted out of South Korea (or anywhere else) feels wronged by the way their adoption was handled, yet each bears an imprint of some kind, as a result. Every adoptee has experienced change of some sort by virtue of having been adopted.
So what should adoptive parents who have concerns about their adopted child/ren’s adoption do, years later? Adoptive mom Peg Reif has struggled with this guilt, after learning her Korean daughters may have been kidnapped from their birthfamilies. A similar question that came up a few years ago, during the Marshall Island adoption scandal, in which Americans learned they’d adopted children whose birthparents did not truly understand those adoptions were permanent. There is no magic formula, but there’s something to be said for honesty, for shared regrets and for promoting change, to whatever extent is possible.
One American couple who’d adopted two daughters from China and learned one involved faked records started a company called Research-China to help reunite Chinese adoptees with their birthfamilies. Another American family made the heart-wrenching decision to return their adopted daughter to her rightful family in Uganda, after learning she had been trafficked in the process of being placed with them. Other parents have sought to help their adopted kids locate their birthfamilies later in life. Yet too many, particularly for whom unethical adoption procedures were hidden by closed adoption practices, continue to plead the Fifth, hoping old secrets stay secret. They forget that all important advice: that only the truth can set anyone free.
¿Y tú, América?
It’s all too easy to assume that what happened in South Korea is “on them,” but the reality is that there is plenty of adoption practices in the USA, past and present, which doesn’t stand up to the light of day. From the abuse of the Orphan Train riders to the victims of the Georgia Tann baby-selling ring, from the “butter-box babies” to the Baby Scoop Era, from the egregious misdeeds of some founding members of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys to the endless stream of illicit adoption agencies, lawyers and facilitators still misleading consumers in the current day, there is no shortage of adoption gone wrong right here in America.
Will we ever come clean and apologize to the countless adoptees born and placed (or bought) here, over the years? Will the “best interests of the child/ren” ever outnumber the seductive lure of an adoption done wrong, now that there are fewer adoptable babies and more waiting families than ever before? When will the adoptee voice truly get heard the loudest by the adults in the room?
Abrazo would love to see birthparents, adoptive parents and adoptees lead the charge to demand an apology from our government and from the adoption industry for every adoption gone wrong here on American soil. It’s not about being woke, just about affirming what was wrong and who was harmed by it. That would be a first small step towards creating real change.
