'Do we have a humanitarian effort or just a baby pipeline?’

September 24, 2024 1:05 PM

AP/PBS investigative series (part one, part two, interactive; full length documentary)on how (esp in the 1970s & 80s) the international adoption agencies, the governments of South Korea AND the receiving countries (esp. in Scandinavia and North America) met the demand for adoptable children by turning children with families into "abandoned" kids available for export. Though the stated intention of adoption was to spare children from orphanages, [agencies] gathered more than 4,600 children from hospitals in 1988, 60% of their supply.

In 1976, [South Korea] facilitated a new law that removed judicial oversight and granted vast powers to the heads of private agencies. By then, agencies were procuring most of their children directly from hospitals and maternity homes, which often received illegal payments.

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. The number of children sent for adoption was often more than 10 times higher than the police count for abandoned children, he found — close to 9,000 in 1985.

Listing children as abandoned made adoptions easier because agencies didn’t have to verify child origins or obtain parental relinquishment.

Kim’s paperwork contains three conflicting stories of how she and her brother were turned into orphans.

1) relinquished by their paternal grand-aunt even though Korean law made clear that consent for adoption can only come from parents, direct-line grandparents or legal guardians.

2) Another document says Kim’s mother agreed to the adoption.

3) A third says the siblings were found “roaming” the streets and were “emotionally hardened” by the experience.

She wondered: How did no one in this system, from South Korea to France, catch such discrepancies?

posted by spamandkimchi (22 comments total)

Palimpsest is an excellent graphic novel by a Korean adoptee in Sweden trying to get answers about her adoption.
posted by Paragon at 2:03 PM on September 24 [3 favorites]

My childhood BFF has a brother who was himself adopted from Korea, and only just 2 years ago started getting into the whole "So I was adopted, what does that mean" journey. His follow-up last year deals with the "wait, WAS I an orphan" question, as well. He still went to Korea this summer to see if he could find anything out.

I noticed the investigations earlier this month and I have a feeling this is going to be a major thing going down.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:06 PM on September 24 [5 favorites]

This is unbelievably sad. I guess this is a testament to the banality of evil because the very idea of buying and selling anyone let alone babies is disgusting but that a whole bureaucratic system arose to do just that for decades is almost too horrifying to contemplate, that offices of "normal" people just went in and did this day in and day out for years.
posted by star gentle uterus at 2:09 PM on September 24 [8 favorites]

China just ended foreign adoptions this month, and the New Yorker has a piece about the history of the program and how it led to abductions and trafficking.
posted by msbrauer at 2:10 PM on September 24 [8 favorites]

Just the phrase "60% of their supply [of children]" is chilling.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 2:22 PM on September 24 [12 favorites]

I read an ethnography earlier this year about the practice of "child circulation" in Peru which talks about how in Peru's post-civil war period the country did a lot of bureaucratic work to assimilate into neoliberalism. Part of that meant making the complex cultural practice or circulation into grounds for declaring a child an orphan and getting them adopted into a predominantly white country.
posted by Summers at 3:40 PM on September 24 [5 favorites]

International adoption, and more broadly the vast majority of non-family adoption, is and always has been flat-out child trafficking.
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:00 PM on September 24 [7 favorites]

The really awful thing is the American focus on isolated nuclear families also puts the focus on babies - on children that are essentially a blank slate, which creates these perverse incentives. Meanwhile, there are so many older children closer to home who are in need of foster or adoptive homes, but they come with inconvenient familial connections or a memory of their own parents that people are unwilling to accept.

And of course, it’s worth noting that adoption of any kind is only for the rich.
posted by corb at 4:25 PM on September 24 [9 favorites]

My parents went to Korea in 1973 and when they returned our mother wanted to adopt. Mom sold us on the idea but dad wouldn't budge. I wonder what he knew back then.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 5:05 PM on September 24 [1 favorite]

Nicole Chung's memoir All You Can Ever Know unpacks the complexity of one such story (although it was supposedly a fully voluntary surrender of a child who couldn't be cared for by her parents).
posted by praemunire at 5:21 PM on September 24 [3 favorites]

I was involved in setting up short and long term foster care for some families in Cambodia, and there was no lack of families wanting kids locally, far more than supply. The only children who should have been eligible for international adoption were severely disabled children who couldn’t get services locally. Almost all of our fostered kids ended up with relatives once things stabilised.

Adoption is driven by demand from parents with more resources.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:24 PM on September 24 [6 favorites]

For anyone interested in the perspective of adoptees from Korea, I recommend a podcast called Adapted. It’s in its seventh (and final) season, so there’s a large number of interviews at this point.
posted by Hex Wrench at 8:34 PM on September 24 [3 favorites]

thank you for posting this, spamandkimchi, and to all the commenters sharing more info and links.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 10:43 PM on September 24 [3 favorites]

It’s giving South Korea never thought the leopards would eat its face. Origin of the global 4B Movement, these days, evidently, a South Korean infant out for a stroll can expect to get “Children of Men” (2006 film) nuisance-levels of in the baby’s face attention from strangers, as infants are not a very common sight anymore.
posted by edithkeeler at 1:25 AM on September 25 [2 favorites]

Voluntary relinquishment of healthy babies is really quite uncommon. When people do relinquish their babies in larger numbers it is usually due to immense social pressure. Similarly, it is unusual for a healthy orphan baby to have no kin willing to care for it. International adoption has always mostly been about prioritising the wants of prospective adopters ahead of the needs of the children and birth families involved. That's true even though the vast majority of prospective international adopters are acting from an entirely good place.

More generally, adoption should always be about finding families for children that need them. It should not be easy to adopt, because we should not be separating children from birth families unless we have to (ie we should want supply to be low) and because almost by definition those children will need more from their parents than other children.

And the important shortage in the global north is usually in people willing and able to be excellent foster parents to children born locally.
posted by plonkee at 2:28 AM on September 25 [4 favorites]

Goddamn this whole world sucks. If only it were just one or two countries. Has the U.S. found all the immigrant children stolen at the border and almost certainly sent to be raised by white fundie christians? Is this still happening? How about all those Ukrainian children stolen by Russia. It's horrifying, all of it.
posted by Glinn at 6:14 AM on September 25 [3 favorites]

International adoption, and more broadly the vast majority of non-family adoption, is and always has been flat-out child trafficking.

I know of at least two cases of baby trafficking here in the southeastern US; Landon Terry, from the first article, is a high school classmate. If outright stealing of babies is so common in the adoption industry, I can only imagine how widespread less blatant abuses are. Adoption can certainly be a good thing, but the way it is used to force women to have babies by the anti-abortion movement is absurd.
posted by TedW at 7:57 AM on September 25 [2 favorites]

The adoption Industry in Western counties has always been deeply corrupt, preying on poor and defenseless mothers and families to keep up the supply of healthy white and almost White(Asian) babies for sale. Black babies are bargain basement merchandise. No surprise that Korean adoption is as corrupt as so many other countries. Agreeing with so many other comments here critical of the adoption industry.
posted by mermayd at 8:25 AM on September 25 [2 favorites]

It’s giving South Korea never thought the leopards would eat its face. Origin of the global 4B Movement, these days, evidently, a South Korean infant out for a stroll can expect to get “Children of Men” (2006 film) nuisance-levels of in the baby’s face attention from strangers, as infants are not a very common sight anymore.

the 4b movement is not really linked with the low birth rate in south korea; that can be more closely connected to late-stage capitalism. but it's easy to assume that there's a pat answer to all of this if all you know of modern korean history and culture (as much as it exists outside of trauma responses for a century) is from pop sources and tiktok.

the ap investigation points out that one of the rationales for this sort of trafficking was for hard currency and reducing investment in the social safety net. it doesn't point out that the larger context of this, which you may have missed, is that this was during the era of a military dictatorship (primarily park chung hee and chun doo hwan) desiring economic growth at all costs, irrespective of the human impact: see state-supported (covertly, mostly) prostitution of women to american soldiers, the trade made by shipping of korean troops to vietnam for american dollars, "forgiving" japan for war crimes and the brutality of occupation for investment, horrific environmental degradation, and thousands vanished for political reasons.

democracy didn't arrive there until 1992 (1987 if you're being more generous than you ought to be) and a lot of this reckoning didn't really start until the 2000s. i wasn't kidding about how the country is, at this point, entirely trauma response to trauma response to trauma response
posted by i used to be someone else at 8:27 AM on September 25 [2 favorites]

there's a lot around the adoption stuff. even the comedy film joy ride from last year touches on it and how messy it is; it's turning out that there are a lot of american couples who bought korean babies to adopt and then forgot/neglected to file for citizenship--and some estimates say that as many as 20% of those adoptees (~20k) are at risk of deportation because of it, which the movie blue bayou speaks to.

as one can imagine, many of them aren't conversant in korean, so deportation has in several cases led to deaths by suicide.
posted by i used to be someone else at 8:36 AM on September 25 [2 favorites]

the 4b movement is not really linked with the low birth rate in south korea

Source? If you’re going to Well, Ackshually, and make weird assumptions slandering TiKTok (??) or whatever, then sources are super helpful to provide.
posted by edithkeeler at 4:49 PM on September 25 [1 favorite]

well, actually (as i wrote this on a different sm site before, i've reformatted and recombined it):

• the 4B movement isn't as large or influential as one might imagine: it's maybe 50,000 women; there are approximately 9.5 million Korean women between 15-50. even doubling the number of 4b practictioners would place them at best around 1%.
• the timing doesn't line up: the earliest mentions of the 4B movement date to 2019, but you can see the fertility rate already collapsing before then (from kosis, the korean governmental statistical service, or in more readable format from statista)

what is more intrinsically tied to the low birth rate is the hypercapitalist, ultracompetitive nature of hell joseon:

1. high cost of living: south korea has become a country with a relatively high cost of living compared (~$2-4k/mo household of four) to its median income (~$26k/yr). this already puts individuals and couples at a disadvantage if they live on their own, because:
2. unaffordable housing: average housing costs in seoul tends to be around ~$606k. it is typical for people to live with their parents before marriage, but this, as one can imagine, adds some difficulty for social lives (leading to things like love hotels), but it also means that there is an expectation in having your own place if you want to marry and have a family of your own... and this dream becomes even harder to achieve when:
3. un(der)employment: young people have difficulties in finding work with underemployment and unemployment being very common. this is exacerbated by the fact that young men are required to serve in the armed forces in their 20s, which either impacts their education (delaying their graduation) or early employment, putting them behind young women in the job market, which is in part why many younger men have been easily convinced to view feminism (as opposed to military service) as the reason for their work troubles.
4. high household debt: underemployment coupled with high cost of living results in staggeringly high household debt, which is at 104.5%, among the highest rates in the developed world. high debt loads make it more difficult to invest in things like buying a home, affording essentials, or participating in the educational/social arms race.
5. the educational/social arms race: this means trying to get the best credentials as well as best aesthetics in order to get into the right schools, and then the right colleges, and then the right chaebol. naturally, this means raising children is phenomenally expensive. even if, in that article, the number doesn't seem all that high, remember the high household debt, undermployment, and cost of living vs. household income, and ~$400/mo for a cram school (which starts at 4 years old, and goes at least 10-11mos out of the year) and you can see how it can easily become a crippling expense. This is before other expenses around kids get factored in, and excluding things like plastic surgery, which is often used to give people a leg up (because physical attractiveness is, like in many cultures, seen as shorthand for other positive attributes). cram schools, or hagwons, are seen as crucial because the ultimate goal is to do well in the national graduation test, the suneung, a test so critical that flights will be scheduled around them and a national scandal occurred years ago over a question with two right answers. this test determines how likely it will be for a student to gain entrance into the colleges, from the SKY universities (seoul u, korea u, and yonsei u), considered the elites (think ivies++) to other rarefied ones like kaist, postech, ehwa, hongik, or even the flagship national ones in each province. while the educations are fine, the value of these universities (not unlike the elite ones in the west) is often in the networking: you are more likely to get hired if you have a SKY diploma because the person in the prestigious firm also probably went there too.
6. the chaebols: because the chaebols (the big conglomerates, like samsung, hyundai, sk, lg, and so on) are often the most desirable and well-paying jobs, competition is fierce. hypercapitalism and state support has made it so the chaebol dominate the economy to the extent that Korea lacks a vibrant mittelstand that other countries do, meaning that those careers not in the chaebol often pay less and exacerbate the conditions laid out in points 1, 2, 3, 4, and why families see 5 as so critical and will go deeper into debt over it.
7. poor gender equality: korea has some of the worst outcomes of all oec nations when it comes to gender equality, with a staggering pay gap. This is in many ways a result of Korea's patriarchal society; the awfulness of it described by many korean women is hardly an exaggeration, but the discourse has gotten progressively more toxic as young men have radicalized, which has in turn radicalized more women in a positive feedback cycle. This was seen in the 2022 elections where current president yoon essentially won the vote of a large portion of young men by promising to abolish the ministry of gender equality and family, and his center-left opponent had been overheard saying feminism was a problem. mind you, 'feminism' as a concept in Korea is an extremely touchy subject, with women and companies finding themselves in the crosshairs for remotely supporting mild feminist concepts (though see earlier in this graph about the feedback loop of radicalization begetting more: ilbe leads to megalia and womad, megalia leads to men being mad about the pinch symbol, etc.). all of this is mentioned to provide context to the next part--while Koreans ostensibly believe in equality of genders, in practice it's not quite as straightforward, with one key issue feeding back into points 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5: women are expected to give up their careers to raise children and look after the house and their husband's (and, secondarily, their own) parents. because women often get established in their careers a little earlier (see 3, and the effects of compulsory military service), this means that they often know that they have a time limit to then get married and have children before they are too old, while also knowing they have to save ridiculous amounts of money to help smooth the jump from being a dual-income household to a single-income household, while also knowing they have to spend sufficient amounts of money in order to appear attractive, enticing, and be a good match on paper to men (as many services exist to pair up single people based on aesthetics, cultural status, job opportunities, class, clan...). because of this, women tend to put off marrying and having children longer and longer, until their mid to late 30s, which also reduces the number of opportunities they have of bearing and raising children. which, in a positive feedback loop, means that they're going to invest more into the one (or, occasionally, two) children they have... raising prices of hagwons across the board (see 5), putting themselves and other families into debt (see 4)...

the big thing is that on social media (4b became a huge trend on tiktok earlier this year with almost everyone speaking on it being a westerner, usually white) and even in a lot of publications (like the cut) is that it is an almost orientalist, exotified view of korean feminism with an absurd focus almost exclusively on the 4b movement. this is enormously reductive and flattens the vibrancy and breadth of korean feminism, from the radical, to the mainstream, to the personal into what is essentially a mikado-esque funhouse reimagination of lysistrata that bears little resemblance to reality.

what's worse, virtually every single western person who talks about 4b (especially those linking it with the birth rate collapse) seems to be utterly unaware of other korean feminist movements like 탈코/"Escape the Corset" or "#WithYou" and almost never mention the horrific patriarchal scandals and crimes like molka, the nth room, burning sun, or the current situation with deepfakes on telegram.

they consistently fail to place it within the greater context of modern korean society^† and of the conflict between traditional korean patriarchy, capitalism, and modernism and how it interacts with liberal values on gender, freedom, and democratic ideals--and in how it deals with gender and sexual minorities. (aside: south korea has a huge anti-queer/terf problem, especially amongst the radfem groups--and admittedly, even as someone who would be hated by them, korea might be one of the only places where i'm willing to give them a pass.)

while it can be intoxicating to some to imagine an army of angry korean amazons refusing to deal with the world of men, it is very much in the radical, anonymized branch of korean feminism; like i pointed out in the first part of this, 50k or 100k is a rounding error, and given all of the other socioeconomic factors going on, breathless protestations of tiktok creators and twitter and reddit fans aside, 4b's impact on the birth rate is at best minimal to none.

finally, if you're really curious what south korean feminism is like there are a lot of other sources that will give more insight than just grabbing for the fantastical notion of 4b as The Thing:

• in terms of fiction: try the vegetarian [채식주의자] by HAN kang or kim ji-young, born 1982 [82년생 김지영] by CHO nam-ju (the movie version, which makes the husband portrayed by gong yoo "one of the good ones" and muffles the impact with a hopeful ending is... fine; the book, although fiction, includes footnotes with statistical references to underscore just how it's an everywoman story: the name and birthdate is akin to picking "jennifer brown, born 1983"); even other works like please take care of mom [엄마를 부탁해] by kyung-sook SHIN and the drama doctor cha streaming on netflix (which i stopped watching because a few episodes in the premise became more comedic which also felt like it took away from the very real problem of coming back to work after being more or less forced to be a mother) reference these issues of patriarchy and expectations surrounding women.
• nonfiction: try flowers of fire by hawon JUNG, which is an actual on-the-ground report on south korean feminists speaking more to actual concerns rather than feminist mirroring of mgtow

additional context previously

---

^†: one thing to keep in mind is that korea is a country that went from being one of the poorest countries in the world with a rigid confucian patriarchy to one of the wealthiest in a matter of 70 years--and if we're being more accurate, the change really only happened in the last 50, and only 30ish for actual democracy--meaning that all of these social movements are more compressed: labour, lgbt equality, feminism, disability rights. it is also a country that has basically come up from multiple generational traumas (brutal japanese occupation (1910-1945), less brutal american and soviet occupation (1945-1950), war and massacres (1950-1953), civilian dictatorship and massacres (1948-1960), military dictatorships and massacres (1960-1987), social unrest and protests (1970-1990s), the imf crisis (1997-1998)) so those movements are sometimes more aggressive which leads to aggressive backlashes.
posted by i used to be someone else at 11:25 AM on September 26 [3 favorites]