The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (49 page)

These statistics don’t tell the whole story, though. Of one hundred unplanned pregnancies to single women in South Korea, the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs has estimated that ninety-six will be aborted. Although abortion is illegal in South Korea, illegal abortions are widespread and used frequently to conceal unwed pregnancies. Hyoung-Suk Choi’s brother even found a facility that would perform an abortion when she was eight months pregnant. Of the four in one hundred pregnancies that single women carry to term, roughly three of the mothers will relinquish the children for adoption and only one will parent—just 1 percent of all unplanned pregnancies to unmarried women.

The primary reason why this is happening in South Korea (when, by contrast, only about 1 percent of single mothers in the United States relinquish for adoption) is South Korea’s intensely conservative sexual culture, in which women engaging in premarital sex have long been subject to a strong double standard. Although that prohibition has relaxed in recent years, as women marry at older ages and many do have sex before then, social censure for women who “get caught”—by getting pregnant—is severe and even peers roundly consider unmarried pregnant women as irresponsible or stupid. Adoption agencies tell American adopters that so many South Korean women relinquish children for adoption because of the country’s “Confucianism.” By this they mean the country’s tradition of strict family hierarchies and expectations of filial obedience, its way of defining virtuous womanhood by whether women are submissive to the men in their lives, and the country’s painstaking documentation of family lineage, historically tracked only on the father’s side. In this context “Confucianism” is shorthand for institutionalized patriarchy, a system in which, until 2008, only fathers could register children. This means that if a father didn’t acknowledge a child born out of wedlock, in order for the child to legally or socially exist, a grandfather might have to register his grandchild as his own son or daughter, or a mother might have to take the dramatic step of starting her own family registry.

The pressures on single women who keep their children aren’t just social. Naming conventions and the open availability of family registries
in the country make it easy for employers to tell when a woman has a child out of wedlock. Because Korean women traditionally keep their own names after marriage whereas their children take those of their fathers, in most cases a mother should not have the same name as her child. If she does, a prospective employer can see, as soon as he checks on a job applicant, that she may be an unwed mother. In a country where huge majorities of women who have children out of wedlock either quit or are fired from their jobs, single mothers face extreme difficulty when trying to find work. Child support legislation is often unenforced, and poverty-based welfare assistance is restricted to only the neediest cases—with that need determined by assessing the financial resources of an unwed mother’s family, even if that family has cut her off. What little help the government supplies to support children born to unwed mothers tips the scales in favor of adoption: assistance for single parents is between just $50 and $100 per month, depending on a mother’s age, whereas foster parents caring for children until their adoption get $250 per month in compensation, and government-run orphanages for abandoned children receive $1,000. “It’s not just the social aspect, of people not wanting to be your friend,” said Choi. “It’s to the point where we can’t even make a living for ourselves.”

Many turn to maternity homes and adoption instead. Of the thirty-six unwed mothers’ facilities in South Korea, seventeen are affiliated with adoption agencies; in some cases agency offices are within maternity home walls. Unsurprisingly, these homes have much higher rates of relinquishment from the women who reside there than do unaffiliated homes. Choi’s home, Ae Ran Won, is among those that are not agency affiliated, and today fewer of its resident mothers tend to relinquish for adoption. However, when Choi was there, she estimates that nearly 70 percent of her fellow residents were planning to give their children up. It wasn’t much discussed, as the pale of shame about being pregnant out of wedlock lingered even in the home, but the evidence was in the air. Choi would frequently wake up in the morning to find another woman gone; everyone would know she had left to deliver her baby. The women would return by themselves, their faces puffy and drawn. Choi didn’t understand why until she returned to the home after her own labor, empty handed and red eyed, after a night of crying alone.

Choi went into labor early, and in August 2005 she gave birth to her son, Junseo, prematurely. The hospital staff wasn’t cruel or rude, she said, so much as merely distant. They assumed all the women coming from the home would be leaving their babies behind. “So they didn’t do any of the
extras,” Choi said, like show her how to feed her baby or allow her to hold him after birth.

Ten hours after Choi gave birth the adoption agency came and took the baby. Choi’s brother came to the hospital to make sure she gave him up. The agency let her hold Junseo for a minute before they took him, and Choi arrived back at the unwed mothers’ facility before lunch. That night, however, she felt that nothing was different in her life except that she no longer had her son; she felt like she had thrown him away.

In the morning she called the agency to say she had made a mistake. They told her it was too late and that changing the paperwork now would be a serious inconvenience. When she pressed them, arguing that nothing could be settled so soon after Junseo’s birth, an agency staffer claimed her caseworker had gone on vacation and she would have to wait four more days for his return.

When she called on the fourth day, the agency refused to give her directions to the home and told her to find it herself. When she got there she found Junseo in a crib in a room as bare as a Plexiglas box: white walls, with no pictures or mobiles or toys. The antiseptic surroundings made Choi want to cry. She took her son out of the agency after the staff had her sign a receipt, as though, she said, she was receiving a package in the mail. But as she carried Junseo back to Ae Ran Won, she told him he now had a second birthday: one when he was born, and one five days later, when she got him back. “I said to my child, ‘You are born again.’”

CHOI’S EXPERIENCES
weren’t uncommon, although her victory was. “I know when people hear my story, they realize it’s hard,” said Choi, “but I want them to know it’s two hundred times harder than people are even thinking.”

Many South Korean women who have tried to reclaim their children from adoption agencies have faced a variety of roadblocks, such as imposed delays or demands that they pay between $20 and $30 per day for the time their child was in the adoption agency facility. This cost can rise to the thousands in some women’s cases but is probably less about the money than an additional way to discourage mothers from changing their minds. Other mothers have faced requirements that they produce letters of consent from their parents or the father of their babies, giving permission to reclaim their children; that they demonstrate that they’ve found jobs or apartments or reconciled with the baby’s father; or, in one case, that a mother write a letter of apology to a US adoptive family that the
agency had selected for her child. “A mom shouldn’t have to feel sorry about taking her child back,” that mother told me, “but at the time, I would have done anything. If the parents were there and I had to bow and say I’m sorry, I would have done it.”

IN THE 1950s
international adoption came to South Korea—as it would for other countries in the future—during a period of intense social upheaval. Years of civil war and Japanese occupation had shattered much of Korea’s traditional lifestyle. Millions of people had died in the fighting—between 10 and 15 percent of the entire Korean population, both North and South. Many others were displaced from their homes. The eight biracial children that Oregon evangelicals and adoption pioneers Harry and Bertha Holt had adopted were among the thousands of “Amerasian,” “Eurasian,” or “GI” babies who were born of US and UN troops stationed in Korea during the war and unwed Korean mothers. The GI babies had blond or brown hair and light eyes, marking them as different in a homogenous nation that abhorred miscegenation—Koreans called such children “honhyulah” or “mixed blood”—partly as a result of Korea’s Confucian culture and partly in response to Japan’s long occupation of the country. After WWII ended Japanese rule, Koreans took pride in “pure” bloodlines, coining a new nationalistic slogan, “One family, one blood,” that bespoke their independence. Some “Amerasian” children arrived in orphanages with their hair still sticky from dye—evidence of their mothers’ failed attempts to pass them off as purely Korean.

Although the Holts’ evangelical mission to adopt all “Amerasian” babies out of the country had first popularized the idea of international adoption, leading to approximately six to ten thousand adoptions in the early postwar years, the flow of children out of the country didn’t stop after the GI babies had found homes. As the number of biracial children declined, a critical International Social Service report noted in the 1960s, agencies began competing to locate other potential adoptees, seeking out mothers living near military camps, where sex work was prevalent, to relinquish, as too few women were approaching agencies themselves. In 1966 a potential turning point came and was surpassed, as the demographics of the children being sent for international adoption shifted to full Korean children, now drawn from poor or broken families and increasingly from unwed Korean mothers facing discrimination if they kept their children at home. It could have been a moment for South Korea to recognize that its society was changing, as evidenced by the fact of
children born outside of marriage. Instead, however, those children were sent overseas. “Pray for these dear mothers who choose to give up their babies,” wrote Henry Holt, as he began to process the children of unwed mothers for adoption.

As Korea industrialized with what historian and Korean adoptee Tobias Hübinette calls “astonishing speed and horrifying efficiency” between 1962 and the early 1990s, people moved from traditional life in the countryside to factory work in the city. Inevitably women’s roles changed with the economy. But the social mores that governed their behavior did not keep pace with the realities of their modern work lives, and unwed motherhood was still considered a deep stain on a family’s honor. Child abandonment began to increase, and the adoption agencies working in South Korea built institutions to house this new class of orphans, as well as homes for disabled children and unwed mothers. Beginning with its origins with the Holts, international adoption began to take on other roles. It became a form of population control in a growing island nation, a way for the government to build alliances with the developed nations adopting its children, and, as Hübinette notes, a way to “regulate, control, and discipline women’s reproduction” at a time when women were no longer living the traditional, home-centered lives of their mothers.

By 1967 more than seventy thousand children were listed as living in more than six hundred institutions in South Korea. Although these numbers were padded to increase foreign donations and the true figure was somewhat lower, they still illustrated the reality of a new system in which orphanages had become dependent on foreign aid and institutions needed to maintain high numbers of children in their care in order to justify continuing aid. Sponsors, after all, weren’t interested in supporting “orphans” in their families’ homes but rather in orphanages or on their way to being adopted.

Eleana Kim, a Korean-American anthropologist and author of
Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging
, explains that agencies were given subsidies from the state to perform some of these social services, but the more important form of compensation they received was the government’s permission to conduct overseas adoptions of South Korean children. “Essentially the state would allow them to send children overseas for adoption if [agencies] would also provide certain welfare services [like supporting maternity homes and orphanages],” said Kim. “It put the agencies in this position of having to generate revenue in order to support all these welfare recipients, meaning they had to send more children overseas.”

It also allowed the South Korean government to outsource its child welfare problem while ignoring the larger social issues at its root. With the adoption system effectively taking care of the problem of unwed mothers and their children—sending some abroad and financing the institutions that cared for the rest—the government had no need to build a welfare or child protection system of its own, as the adoption program that had originally been created to handle the pariah children of wartime unions had become, ten years later, the most easily accessible means to deal with an unplanned pregnancy. And because adoption provided an easy way to cover up the proof of premarital sex—the “illegitimate” children themselves—Korean society could maintain old ideals of gender roles for women while ignoring the reality that traditional lifestyles had been forever changed. These factors created such a symbiotic relationship between South Korea and international adoption agencies that even as the country broke out of poverty to become a global economic force, international adoption remained embedded in the country’s child-care system, and children continued to flow overseas year after year, by the tens of thousands.

Adoptions from South Korea increased through the 1960s and ’70s, helped along both by the government’s fear of overpopulation as well as growing financial incentives that made profits for agencies and fed revenue to the government through mandatory fees. South Korea would dominate all international adoption programs almost every year through the 1980s and 1990s—peaking in 1985 at nearly nine thousand adoptions in one year—even as the country’s economy steadily grew. Today, although South Korea is a G-20 member and among the most technologically advanced nations in the world, it still remains a “top five” sending country as well, fielding the oldest and largest international adoption program in the world. It also maintains a sterling reputation beyond its borders for its uniquely “clean” system: the model adoption country, nearly sixty years on, where the system runs predictably and well, and adoptive families are rarely surprised. Around three babies leave the country each day.