Separated by Holt International. Generations of Korean Children From Their Real Families.

Published: Sep. 20, 2024, 1:55 p.m.

Yooree Kim marched into a police station in Paris and told an officer she wanted to report a crime. Forty years ago, she said, she was kidnapped from the other side of the world, and the French government endorsed it.

She wept as she described years spent piecing it together, stymied at every turn to get an answer to a simple question: How was she, a bright, diligent schoolgirl, with known parents whom she loved, documented as an abandoned orphan in South Korea in 1984 and sent to strangers in France? She believes the government of France — along with many Western nations — allowed families to “mail order children” through international adoption, and did nothing to protect them.

“They were reckless,” she said. “They never questioned anything. They never checked where I was from. They never checked whether my parents existed or not.”

An investigation led by The Associated Press has found that South Korea’s government, Western countries and adoption agencies worked in tandem to supply some 200,000 Korean children to parents overseas, despite years of evidence they were being procured through questionable or downright unscrupulous means.

Those children grew up and searched for their roots — and some realized they are not who they were told. Their stories have sparked a reckoning that is rocking the international adoption industry.

The modern adoption system has its roots in Oregon, where in the 1950s, Harry and Bertha Holt, evangelical Christians from Creswell, said they’d received a calling from God to save Korean War orphans. Harry Holt soon began flying children from Korea to the United States by the planeload for adoption by Christian American families.

Holt’s program grew into the largest adoption agency in South Korea, sending thousands of children to the West.

A U.S. branch, Holt International, split off in the 1970s but continued to partner with its Korean sibling organization. Headquartered in Eugene, Holt International is today a well-respected agency that works all over the world, and has called for stricter safeguards in the industry.

The AP investigation, in collaboration with Frontline (PBS), was based on interviews with more than 80 adoptees in the U.S., Australia and six European countries, along with parents, agency employees, humanitarian workers and government officials. It also drew on more than 100 information requests and thousands of pages of documents — including many never publicly seen before and some the AP got declassified.

In dozens of cases AP examined, it found:

• Children were kidnapped off the streets.
• Parents claim they were told their newborns were dead or very sick, only to have them shipped away.
• Documents were fabricated, leading adoptees to anguished later reunions with supposed parents — only to discover they were not related at all.

• South Korean government officials declined to answer questions about its past, saying it will let a fact-finding commission finish its work. But in a written statement, the Health Ministry acknowledged that skyrocketing adoptions in the 1970s-80s were possibly driven by an intent to reduce welfare spending.

  The adoption agencies declined to comment on specific cases, but have long defended their practices as a way to search for foreign families for vulnerable children.

Weakest citizens targeted

Korea’s adoption program grew out of the wreckage of the 1950-53 Korean War, when Americans took in the unwanted biracial children of Korean women and Western soldiers. It expanded to include the children of unwed mothers and poor families. Korea relied on private adoption agencies as its social safety net, bringing millions of dollars into the economy.

Korean officials fit their laws to match American ones to make children adoptable in the West, where access to birth control and abortion had caused the domestic supply of adoptable babies to plummet. The government endorsed “proxy adoptions” for families to adopt children quickly without ever visiting Korea. Korea also rewrote its laws to remove minimal safeguards or judicial oversight.

Concerns were raised early. In a 1966 internal memo obtained by AP, International Social Service, a Geneva-based organization, wrote that it suspected the Korean government assessed agencies not by child welfare standards, but by the money they brought in. Korean officials were aware that lost children were documented as abandoned; the origins of alleged orphans weren’t verified; and some were “disguised” by agencies as being born from unwed mothers to make them adoptable, according to records seen by AP.

The mothers of biracial children didn’t always want to give them up, records show. In a letter to his wife in 1956, Harry Holt wrote: “One poor girl almost had hysterics in the office. She thought she could keep track of her baby after he had gone to America. I had to tell her it was a clean break and forever. Poor girl, her baby wasn’t weaned yet and she cried and cried.”

The adoption business boomed and attracted competitors, including Eastern Social Welfare Society, Korea Welfare Services and Korea Social Service. Holt remained the largest, sending about half of Korean adoptees abroad. Holt split in 1977, forming the Oregon-based agency Holt International. By then, South Korea was climbing out of post-war poverty, yet the numbers of adoptions kept skyrocketing.

Workers warned

In the 1970s, humanitarians on the ground expressed alarm that adoption was becoming a competitive business, that agencies were foraging for children. But U.S. officials processed visas allowing them to leave South Korea by the hundreds a month. A concerned social worker wrote in a 1976 document that U.S. officials were processing adoptions in a “callous” and “assembly line type method.”

There were few safeguards to ensure that children adopted to the U.S. were truly orphans. Federal officials issued visas for the children, but their adoptions were finalized by thousands of local courthouses across the country — many of which did not require proof that the children were truly abandoned or relinquished by their parents.

Humanitarian workers openly worried about what they were seeing. Francis Carlin, who then ran Korea’s Catholic Relief Services, said there weren’t enough legitimate orphans to feed Western demand, which led to “a lot of the compromises, a lot of the hanky panky” involving larger agencies.

“These, I would call them brokers, were going out and trying to get more and more children,” Carlin said. “They would put the legitimate parent on a guilt trip and say, what are you doing? You can’t afford to take care of this child … . You’re so selfish.”

Western governments

In 1974, South Korea tried to stop adoptions to Scandinavia, after its political rival, North Korea, charged that children were “being sold like animals in the foreign land.” South Korean government records from the time show that diplomats from Sweden, Denmark and Norway began begging for babies.

“The adoption of Korean orphans by Swedish parents is not because Korea is neglecting its orphans, but because Swedish couples without children are desiring to adopt them, so it would be good to continue the transfers of orphans,” the Swedish ambassador said in a meeting with South Korea’s deputy foreign minister in January 1975.

South Korean Health Minister Ko Jae-pil wrote in a report that the countries sent nine pleas for adoptions to continue, citing at least 1,455 requests for Korean children. Ambassadors visited Korean officials multiple times and “have kept badgering by sending diplomatic documents” that practically threatened halted adoptions would damage relations, the report says. One wrote that he was “concerned that the public opinion against South Korea would worsen” if they halted adoptions to Scandinavia.

Under pressure, South Korea reversed course.

“Accepting the strong requests by related nations to resume adoptions is considered to promote international friendships,” Ko wrote in 1975.

Children stolen, bought

By the 1980s, agencies were procuring most of their children directly from hospitals and maternity homes, which often received illegal payments for babies, according to records seen by AP. Though the stated intention of adoption was to spare children from orphanages, they gathered more than 4,600 children from hospitals in 1988, 60% of their supply.

A government audit in 1989 shows that Holt Children’s Services, the biggest agency, made nearly 100 illegal payments to hospitals during six months in 1988, worth about $16,000 now. Eastern Social Welfare Society gave even more, worth about $65,340, to hospitals over that period.

Despite the agencies’ common practice of labeling children as “abandoned,” records from 1980 to 1987 show that more than 90% of the Korean children sent to the West almost certainly had known relatives, said Philsik Shin, a scholar at Korea’s Anyang University. It was “almost customary” to document children as abandoned, said Helen Noh, who matched hundreds of children with U.S. parents at Holt from 1981 to 1982.

Switched, lost identities

Robyn Joy Park, who was adopted by parents in Minnesota in 1982, traveled to South Korea in 2007 to meet a woman her agency, Eastern, said was her biological mother. She developed a deep bond with the woman over several years, but was devastated after a DNA test in 2012 showed they weren’t related.

The AP spoke to 10 others who found their identity was switched with someone else. When children processed for adoption died, became too sick to travel or were found by their biological families, agencies often replaced them with other children, according to former adoption workers. At a meeting with an adoptee in 2021 where AP was present, a longtime worker said Western partner agencies were willing to take “any child of the same sex and similar age, because it would take too much time to start over again.”

Park is among more than 360 adoptees who have asked South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding their adoptions.

Nobody knows how many Korean adoptions were questionable or even fraudulent, in part because of the privacy and sensitivities involved along with the vagueness and unreliability of the documents. Advocates say many adoptions have happy endings.

Adoptions plummeted from around 8,000 a year in the mid-1980s to around 2,000 a year in the 1990s. But tens of thousands of children were already overseas.

Holt’s South Korea operation, a separate company from the U.S. Holt International, declined to comment on specific allegations, as did the three other Korean adoption agencies. Holt Korea in recent years has denied wrongdoing, attributing adoptees’ complaints to misunderstandings and the country’s problems with social welfare. Kim Jin Sook, president of Eastern, said the agency was just carrying out government policies to find Western homes for “discarded children.”

Yooree Kim believes Western governments clung to the narrative that they were saving needy children and ignored evidence that suggested otherwise. Foreign diplomats in the country surely would have noticed that Seoul’s streets weren’t packed with abandoned babies and street children, she said.

“We were commodified like a good to be sold,” she said. “They made fake orphans and fed the market.”

— Kim Tong-Hyung and Claire Galofaro, The Associated Press