von Jayme Hansen, Executive Director of ICAV, ICAV USA Representative, adopted from Korea to the USA.
Mid-June this year, the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) announced they have revised their adoption process, perhaps accelerated by the public outcry at the abuse and death of baby Jeong-In at the hands of her adoptive parent but I believe more of an attempt to comply with Hague Convention guidelines.
I applaud South Korea’s efforts to revise their adoptions processes
I believe this is a small step in the right direction. Adoption agencies should not be solely responsible for the process of relinquishment of the child or the counselling of birth mothers. Historically numerous adoption agencies around the globe have used unethical practices and have pressured vulnerable single mothers into relinquishing their children. An Huffington Post article entitled “Adoption Criminality and Corruption” exposed some of the abusive practices by adoption agencies, stating:
„Another major problem that the Hague Convention on International adoptions does not address is “finders’ fees” paid by foreign orphanages. These fees are enough to incentivize criminals to kidnap children and claim that they were found abandoned. Often, the children who wind up adopted through U.S. agencies are passed through multiple hands in a process known as “Kinderwäsche“ making it impossible for even the most reputable American adoption agency to ensure the origins of the child involved in any international adoption. The line between legal, ethical adoptions and criminal activity is blurry at best.”
This latest action from the Korean government did not stem from Jeon-In’s case alone but her life and death did play an important public role in highlighting the illegal and abusive practices by the adoption agencies who facilitate the adoption and continue to face no consequences. Risk is always reduced if we get rid of the middle men (adoption agencies) who have a vested interest in profits or their agenda to promote adoption ahead of any other alternatives and have no-one overseeing their practices and procedures. It’s time Korea took more responsibility for their children and attempt to implement a revised model of adoption which appears to be an alignment with the Hague Convention guidelines. There are other countries like Australia who have successfully implemented a completely centralised model of adoption for many years and despite the early discussions around the risks of Central Authorities ( governments) discharging their responsibilities to accredited bodies (see paragraphs 242-243), there remains no research since then, that discusses the pros and cons of a centralised vs outsourced model of adoption by governments.
Of course, as with all change, there are always those who oppose it – especially when the pockets of big organisations (adoption agencies) risk loss of their income stream! I challenge the opposition and point out that it is economically unwise for Korea to continue in the wholesale trade of its children when they have the lowest fertility rate in the worldwith 0.84 births for every woman in South Korea. Furthermore, this is a Korean issue and individuals need to keep in mind that Korea wasn’t established as a democracy until 1948. The country was literally torn apart and destroyed during the 35 years of Japanese Occupation and the destruction during the Korean War in the early 1950’s. Compared to America’s longer established democracy – Koreans are quickly establishing their own method of self-governance, social programs and economic growth at a record pace.
Some have express concern that vulnerable mothers will not want to seek out government help in their times of crisis. I think if government staff focus on the best interest of their people, it is a good thing and assumes a country, ranked as the 10th biggest economy in the world (in 2020) has the capabilities to resolve their own issues. Furthermore, South Korea has an ever-growing number of certified professional social workers who have helped their nation through numerous crisis over the years helping it’s citizens through increased teen suicide, affects from COVID-19, and numerous other social impacts and issues.
I also don’t believe these changes will result in more babies being abandoned at baby boxes as some critics state. First, there is no proof that children were dying in large numbers before the baby box was established. There is also no indication that this change in policy would result in greater numbers of these issues. I have visited and logged thousands of hours volunteering in nearly half a dozen orphanages across South Korea and the government has made it relatively easy for parents to relinquish their children if they are unable to care for them. I met numerous mothers who came to visit their children at the orphanages and placed them there so that the state could feed and take care of the child when the parent was unable. I question anyone who can support a program like the baby box that allows women to abandon their children. Such actions in most developed countries would lead to arrests. The problem with so called solutions like baby boxes, where children are literally dropped off like mail, is that it allows individuals to bypass responsibility and to shirk the government established programs. Baby boxes also encourage a breach of fundamental human rights for the child to have its identity documented and protected.
Let’s also not downplay the issue of abuse of children by adoptive parents. Little Jeon-Ing was not the first or last child to die at the hands of her adoptive parents. The seriousness of the risk to adopted children should never be understated. An article written by Richard Wexler highlights the under reporting of child abuse cases in his article “Abuse in Foster Care: Research vs. the Child Welfare System’s Alternative Facts“. Wexler’s research found under reporting of abuse and neglect in numerous states across the USA. A study from Oregon and Washington state found one third of all children in foster care were abused. A study in Atlanta found 34% of the children experienced abuse where the goal was to assist them in being adopted. Mr. Wexler summarised his findings by stating “in survey’s going back for decades, from 25 percent to as high as 40 percent of foster children report having been abused or neglected in care”. The bottom line is that relatively few children are adopted in South Korea by its own citizens. In fact, only 260, children were adopted within the country in 2020. If you compare the number of abuse cases by the number of children that are actually adopted within Korea, the percentages of abuses dramatically climb up. An Artikel written in 2021 by Grace Moon states that “13.35% of adopted children were victims of abuse, double that of children raised by their biological families.”
For the critics who use inflammatory language labelling the changes as the markings of a “Socialistic System” – this is is an attempt to fuel conservative follower-ship without recognising the hypocrisy of such a call. Even the most developed countries, including the USA have state funded programs that oversee the protection children. Here in the USA we have a government agency in each state listed under numerous names such as Child Protected Services (CPS), Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) or Department of Social Services (DSS). I wonder should we also label our American programs in child welfare and protection as “socialist” too?
Korea isn’t alone in attempting reform in adoption. Numerous other countries are reforming adoption laws because of their recognition that children are not being kept safe and that the current system of plenary adoption has many flaws. This is also thanks to the role played by adult adoptees who have worked tirelessly to advocate for our rights and needs. A growing number of countries such as Romania, Russia, Guatemala, Ethiopia and South Korea have either banned or placed laws that make it nearly impossible to adopt internationally. These changes came largely due to the unscrupulous practices of profit driven adoption agencies. One of numerous examples was highlighted by pro-adoption agency Adoptive Families Association of BC. The Artikel summarized the issue by stating: “terrible conditions in Romanian orphanages after the overthrow of the Ceaucescu government in 1989, prompted parents from many countries to adopt thousands of abandoned children; it also spawned a lucrative adoption industry within the country. With little infrastructure, the system was vulnerable to unethical practices“.
My Recommendations to the Korean Government to Revise Adoption
My first recommendation would be for the Korean government to change its citizenship law. Unlike the USA and most countries, a Korean citizenship is not determined by being born within Korean territory. Citizenship instead, is conferred by jus sanguinis or through the “right of bloodlines” of an individual. This law means that “Children of Korean citizen women, who had either a non-Korean father or no known Korean father (no Korean man claimed paternity), were not Korean citizens — even if born in Korea.” The outcome of this law has had perverse affects: “therefore, many single mothers chose to “abandon” their “fatherless” child so that the child would have the rights and access to services, education, and employment as a Korean citizen, rather than have their child officially recorded as not having a Korean father and therefore being a non-citizen with no such rights.”
Another issue is the Korean government provides nearly 10 times the funding for orphanages compared to what’s provided for single mothers with children. The government should establish child welfare reforms so that single mothers have the resources to raise their children and be given the opportunity to thrive and become positive and contributing member of Korea’s society. Currently the only option is for the child to be plenary adopted or institutionalised for life. Not really a choice! We all know the researched outcomes of institutionalisation i.e, of retardation in child cognitive and emotional development, higher exposure to violence, and greater susceptibility to mental health issues.
Lastly, I recommend that South Korea establish stronger policies and laws for child support for single mothers. This includes enforcement to hold the fathers accountable and ensure they be responsible for the children they’ve sired. The Korean Herald highlighted this issue by stating, “83 percent of all single parents in South Korea never received any child support payments from non-custodial parents in 2012. Only 4.6 percent of them filed lawsuits. Even among those who won their cases, 77.34 percent said they never received any money, in spite of court orders.”
I am optimistic for a better era where South Korea holds itself more accountable for the long term well being of its children rather than exporting them en masse to other countries. Taking back responsibility via the revision to adoption processes is a great place to start!
Klicken Hier if you’d like to read Jayme’s other blogs at ICAV.
Am I a dog, cat or a fish that you can return back to a pet store? Your actions reflect that I am less than an animal You give strokes of affection and positive comments to your pets As I receive constant chastisement for the infractions that I committed You are genuinely worried when your pet is sick or lost You know nothing about me and remain clueless about the issues I face alone I am insignificant I am a nobody Why did you adopt me?
Other families make a habit of routinely calling each other But we are not like other families, I don’t receive calls from you Most families visit each other over the holidays Unless I come to you, I don’t get visitations Most families know chapters about each other as they interact You know barely a paragraph of my life I am invisible to you I do not matter Why did you adopt me?
You remain vile, proud and unwilling to grasp onto the olive branches I’ve extended With that attitude, how could I subject my children to you? You claim that my truths are mere exaggerations, lies or made up stories How can we discourse when all my words are offensive to you? I have pondered this question so many times You said I have deserved the horrific things you did to me I am a disappointment I am not worthy Why did you adopt me?
There is no answer to this question You’re not honest enough to tell me why When you examine the answer, you dislike yourself even more When you’re confronted with the facts, you tighten your grip on denial You would rather take the reasons with you to the grave Than to be honest with your child I am not deserving I am beneath you Why did you adopt me?
Why do some adoptees need to be on the defensive, overly criticizing, put each other down, and posture themselves as aggressors?
I understand and respect that we all have varied opinions, thoughts, and information on a very complex subject. We all have unique stories and ideas to share. I think people do this because their trauma gets triggered. They feel like they need to have an outburst and they don’t understand why – they lash out in an onslaught of misspelled, poorly written, hateful words but it does nothing to win people over to their argument and it definitely doesn’t give one any credibility.
When I was a small boy, I was told that I would cry and scream when I became frustrated. I think this was me finding relief from the pending frustrations I faced as a child. Being intercountry adopted, I had to learn a new language, was forced to eat foods I didn’t like, I was unfamiliar with my adoptive culture, and worst of all, I was paired with impatient adopters who were strict and unempathetic to my situation. My “father” once smashed my face into a pile of mashed potatoes when I was unable to recall the name for gravy. I was told that children are meant to be seen and not heard. Their ultra-conservative life would not allow me to act out in any way. I think many of us face trauma triggers from our past – unknowingly. We yell when we think we are marginalized. We curse when we feel insecure.
I am regularly attacked for being outspoken. Today I was attacked by two different individuals. One was a very disturbed man who threw a barrage of expletives at me and other people. He posed initially as a calm, loving individual but immediately exposed his true colors – a very aggressive and demeaning individual. He initially drew people in with his looks and charm but the constant belittling soon soured the relationship. The next individual was a woman, threatened by academia or anyone espousing to be semi-intelligent. This woman always knows better, has to show she is well read, wants to show she has the bigger appendage (brain). If one wants to share information with others – it can be done without tearing the other apart. She could have asked clarifying questions or enquired about my thoughts or sought more information to understand my direction. None of this was done.
The forum I want to foster is one with the notion: “let’s share and learn”.
I had a wonderful conversation with a friend today about what transpired and I learned a ton from her. She said to me, “You can’t fix trauma, in my experience, you have to find healthy ways to cope.” My mind was blown away! I know this is true but in the moment, I forget to see the correlation. My first instinct was to write about these two individuals and find ways to tear them apart. I see this “reaction” a lot in adoptee forums. My friend also said, “Another thing to consider is how people act out when overwhelmed. It’s something I think about when considering compatibility.”
I think this is a wonderful idea and requirement. We need to find partners that can see past our outbursts and help us off the ledge. I found her words to be wise and something I’ve not considered before. If we found healthier ways to deal with our triggers, many of these fights could be prevented. We all have them and some wear it on their sleeves and others bury it deep inside. It can build up and be released onto strangers or colleagues who might be unfamiliar with what’s going on in our lives.
So, what triggers you? How do you cope? Have you witnessed any trauma triggers recently?
A post from an adopter on my Facebook page got me thinking about an issue.
Is there an exception to the rule where intercountry adoptions should be allowed?
The woman stated that, “All 13 of my children from China have special needs. Some pretty severe. One thing for sure … no-one in-country stepped up to adopt them.”
I have thought about this issue for along time and believed there should be special provisions and derived a list of these:
Orphans that are in imminent danger and have a high chance of dying, such as a natural disaster or a conflict (examples, Haiti and Vietnam’s Operation Babylift)
Children that are discarded by society and have a poor chance of survival (examples: HAPA children – this is a Native Hawaiian word which literally translates to “part” or “mix”. In Hawaii, the word refers to a mixed ethnic heritage such as half white and Korean. In Korea, such children are ridiculed, tormented and rejected by society).
Children with disabilities. As the adopter described, these children are unlikely to receive health care and such children are normally shunned by society. Sometimes these children would receive barbaric treatment of being beaten, starved and refused medical care.
On the surface, this sounds like a great idea but after much consideration, I found this logic to have some shortfalls. I listened to a podcast called Freaconomics (link in resource list below) on the subject of organ donation. Here you see something valuable that is given to a recipient for free. No money is allowed to be exchanged between the parties to prevent corruptive markets and abuse. Surely, a child is as valuable, or more, than the thousands of organs that are transplanted each year in America. The Freaconomics episode named “Make Me a Match” stated this economic proposition eloquently by saying:
“Matching markets occur where money and prices don’t do all the work. And some of the markets I’ve studied, we don’t let prices do any of the work. I like to think of matching markets as markets where you can’t just choose what you want even if you can afford it — you also have to be chosen. So job markets are like that; getting into college is like that. Those things cost money, but money doesn’t decide who gets into Stanford. Stanford doesn’t raise the tuition until supply equals demand and just enough freshmen want to come to fill the seats.”
Here we see a proven method of exchanging something of great value for nothing. I believe that the system could be implemented to place children into loving homes without corruption. However, adopters, orphanages and third-party agencies focus primarily on the emotional aspects of placement instead of addressing the real issues of corruption. If governments could implement a system where money would not be exchanged to place children – I would be in favor to support such placements immediately. Why would anyone not support such a system? I think one of the biggest issues is adopters themselves!
The issue I see is that not all adopters have altruistic reasons to adopt. Few adopters will ever admit to this. Adopters have preferences in children that they want to adopt and usually prefer lighter skinned babies (on average) over dark-skinned babies. If individuals were purely altruistic, then the race of a child would not matter and there would be no price elasticity based on race. However, we do see higher prices for more desirable children. David Smolin in his article “International Adoption: Saving Orphans or Child Trafficking” clearly pointed out this by stating:
“The perception that children are being implicitly bought and sold within the domestic adoption system is furthered by the common practice of private agencies charging vastly different sums based on the race of the child. Thus, it might cost thirty-thousand dollars to adopt a white infant but only ten-thousand dollars to adopt an African-American infant.”
The current practice may save a few children and nobody can deny this. However, on the flip side, we can all agree that a large number of adoptees are injured along the process. The online site called http://poundpuplegacy.org/ has catalogued over 638 cases of abuse, rape and death of adoptees. This is only a mere fraction of the abuse that occurs to adoptees and it’s the money that drives the demand side of the curve and ultimately the abuse. This lucrative business model, for the most part, continues to separate families and causes suffering and loss for the child that gets adopted. The positive adoptee and several adopters drown out the outspoken voices from the not-so-perfect adoptions. They want to highlight that positive adoptions are possible and largely ignore the issues that are addressed by the opposition. They fail to address that the overwhelming majority of children to be adopted are not children from war torn countries, true orphans or have disabilities. The main drivers for taking children away from families via intercountry adoption, is poverty.
The pro-adoption side fail to address these negative externalities. They never explore what is best for the entire cohort group. In the medical world, this idea is seen through the use of “triage”. This term describes how medical professionals need to behave in situations where they are overwhelmed by large numbers of casualties. Providers are taught to sort patients to do the greatest good for the greatest number. We too, should look at adoption in the same lens. Not only via the lens of adoptees but often the second point in the adoption triad – the original families. They too are often suffering and overlooked in the equation. David Smolin stated this corruption against the original families as:
“The international rules apparently allow aid to be offered only to those birth parents who relinquish their children, rather than requiring aid to birth parents to be unconditional. Thus, the international rules permit patterns of aid that create incentives to relinquish.”
In closing, saving the few who are marginalized, overlooked and forgotten does nothing for the overwhelming majority that are left behind. The system continues to corrupt and it does nothing to pressure the countries to change. Real change comes from external forces that demand change of these countries that are violating the rights of the child by allowing adoption to occur. I know many people disagree with me but to make lasting change we cannot be doing the same things of the past to expect a different result.
Several comparisons have looked at social climate and economic factors to understand the motivations for why the South Korean government continues to export its children via intercountry adoption. Some individuals claim it’s due to impoverished conditions after the Korean War but I find this to be misleading. America has a long tradition of sounding a rallying cry after a great disaster such as the collapse of an economy, famine or war. Modern intercountry adoption began from South Korea and has remained popular over time. Other nations have become popular sending countries in recent years, for example China. However, South Korea still reigns as having the highest number of children sent away to a foreign country via intercountry adoption.
Korean War the Rallying Cry but Not a Major Contributor
The graph above shows the number of adoptions that occurred by year. The rally cry for South Korean adoptions may have started with the aftermath of the Korean War and for 17 years, the children did trickle into the America. The gap between the Korean War and the start of the first wave of Korean Adoptions that occurred in the 1970s was nearly a full generation after the Korean War. Therefore, there must be another driver that motivated South Korea to export its children.
If the safeguarding of the children after the War was an important driver to aid South Korean children, then one would expect to see the number of adoptions rising after the War. However, the increase in adoptions did not occur until sixteen to eighteen years after the War had ended. One argument often used has to do with the poor economy. However, the two peak periods with the largest number of children sold off via intercountry adoption occurred during the largest economic boom for Korea. Therefore, other reasons must exist that motivated South Korea to sell of its most precious asset, its children.
This essay will investigate the underlying motivation in depth for why South Korea has sent out so many children via intercountry adoption. I will draw from both my professional financial background and as a person who has lived this exporting experience.
American Adoption Trend or Preference?
The bulk of children adopted to America came from Asia and Russia and former Soviet-controlled countries. Preferential selection based on race has been cited numerous times to be the main reason for this disparity amongst the Caucasian community who adopts the majority of children into America. The article Discouraging Racial Preferences in Adoption by Solangel Maldonado summarized this context well:
“Tracing the history of transracial adoption in the United States, this article argues that one reason why Americans go abroad to adopt is race. The racial hierarchy in the adoption market places white children at the top, African American children at the bottom, and children of other races in between, thereby rendering Asian or Latin American children more desirable to adoptive parents than African American children.”
If Americans were really concerned for children involved in conflicts, then there are huge gaps in adoption trends. One would assume children from the massacres of Rwanda, Darfur and other Wars and disasters would be reflected in adoption statistics but America has a preference to adopt children that are from light-skinned countries. Ethiopia is located in northern Africa and Ethiopia has some of the lighter shades of skin color in Africa. The culture was influenced by Judaic influences as well as the middle east. The reality is Americans do have a preference, they want as many light skinned babies as possible.
In the past, I have been asked to talk about the business side of adoption. The following information is initially from an interview I did with Kevin Vollmers for an interview on Land of Gazillion Adoptees. I found a great explanation about supply and demand and how it correlates to business, to include the adoption industry.
“Supply and demand are perhaps one of the most fundamental concepts of economics and it is the backbone of a market economy. Demand refers to how much (quantity) of a product or service is desired by buyers. The quantity demanded is the amount of a product people are willing to buy at a certain price; the relationship between price and quantity demanded is known as the demand relationship. Supply represents how much the market can offer. The quantity supplied refers to the amount of a certain good a producer is willing to supply when receiving a certain price. The correlation between price and how much of a good or service is supplied to the market is known as the supply relationship. Price, therefore, is a reflection of supply and demand.”
A focus on factors that influence the supply side of the equation of adoptions from South Korea was highlighted and shows how changes in prices and the use of subsidies have made adoption a very lucrative business.
Demand Side within America for Intercountry Adoption
Some individuals are very ignorant about the large demand for children in America. For the most part, prospective parents are looking to adopt infants to allow them to experience parenting. I was surprised by the number of couples incapable of conceiving and although technology is advancing to assist conception, the barriers to use these technologies are at high costs and the toll it places on the woman’s body as compared to the trade-offs of not conceiving.
The latest information from the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) estimates the following:
“About 6% of married women aged 15 to 44 years in America are unable to get pregnant after one year of trying (infertility). Also, about 12% of women aged 15 to 44 years in America have difficulty getting pregnant or carrying a pregnancy to term, regardless of marital status (impaired fecundity)”.
National Survey of Family Growth stated that 7.5% of all sexually experienced men reported receiving help with having a child at some time during their lifetime. This equates to 3.3 – 4.7 million men in America. Of the men who sought help, 18.1% were diagnosed with a male-related infertility problem. This data points out that there could be as high as 6.7 – 10.8 couples that will have problems in conceiving children and are likely candidates for adoption. This isn’t to say that infertile couples are the only ones wanting to adopt. There is evidence that families without fertility issues and families with biological children have the desire to adopt too.
In a recent survey conducted by the National Council For Adoption and their testimony before Congress on foster and adoptive parent recruitment reform; their polling concluded the following:
25% seriously consider becoming a foster parent/ or adopt;
63% believe religious leaders should do more to encourage people to become foster parents or to adopt;
76% support hiring more case workers, even if cost millions of dollars.
Besides the desire to raise a family by infertile couples, the adoption industry has been heavily influenced by the evangelical movement in America that spans nearly a decade. During this time, large established families without infertility issues have adopted in high numbers. The evangelical adoption movement also fought to lobby in Congress to keep the adoption tax credit and won in 2017 to extend the bill to support growing evangelical families.
It’s extremely hard to determine how large the demand side of adoption is, it’s true that not all infertile couples will look to adoption as part of their basket of choices and furthermore, there are large segmented groups like the evangelicals that are very pro-adoption and that too is also hard to determine but the demand side potential could be easily be in the double digit millions.
Demand Side within South Korea
South Korea has little-to-no demand for adoption within its own borders. It’s estimated that South Korea takes in around 4% of their unwanted children. Despite selling off 200,000 children, it has nearly a ten-fold increase that remains within their state-run orphanages in the past six decades. It’s estimated that more than 2 million children have been brought up by the state in South Korea. For the most part, Koreans adhere to Confucian principals and conform to staying within their own bloodlines. Therefore, the demand side in Korea is near non-existant. To understand the cultural differences, The Economist ran an article entitled “Why adoptions are so rare in South Korea„ and stated:
“Traditional Confucian notions of the bloodline family still hold sway, as do aspects of primogeniture. Women who cannot bear children face strong social stigma, as do orphans and adoptees, whose chances of getting a job and marrying are limited. Many adoptions in South Korea are concealed from family and friends—and, in many cases, the adopted child. Parents ensure that the baby’s blood type matches their own; some mothers even fake pregnancy. All this sends the message that adoption is shameful, in turn discouraging more of it. The secrecy also explains why 95% of infants adopted within South Korea are less than one-month-old: young enough to be passed off as biological children. A majority of adopted babies are girls so as to avoid difficulties over inheritance and at ancestral family rites, which are normally carried out by bloodline sons”.
Supply Side in America for Domestic Adoption
The Department of Health and Human Services produces a report every year about the number of children who are in foster care or in need of a home. Adoptionnetwork.com provides a plethora of adoption statistics to give an idea of how large the supply is within America. The site gave the following examples:
428,000 children are in foster care in the United States;
135,000 children are adopted in the United States each year;
In 2015, over 670,000 children spent time in the foster care system;
2% of Americans have actually adopted, more than 1/3 have considered it;
Around 7 million Americans are adopted;
State and federal expenditures for foster care administrative costs (placing and monitoring children in foster care) totaled $4.3 billion
In America the figures show the vast majority of children are not adopted and the system is heavily subsidized by Federal and States funds that has turned into a multi-billion dollar business.
Supply Side in South Korean for any Adoptions
The exact number of children that are available for adoption each year in South Korea is unknown and has been artificially inflated due to laws and incentives that encourage abandonment. The math doesn’t lie, its estimated that 4.2% of the 51.5 Million Koreans were either raised in state ran institutions or sent off for adoption. The real issues are glossed over when emotions are used over facts. The main reason why South Korean mother’s give away their children is because there are no social welfare programs nor civil rights that support single parenting in South Korea. A single parent receives on average 70,000 won (US$84) per child a month compared to the 1.1 million won that is spent for each child in an orphanage and this disparity helps push desperate mothers to relinquish their children.
If the support went to the mother instead of the institutions, the supply side in Korea would dry up overnight.
Despite these perverse laws, the number of children in welfare centers that house orphans has dropped considerably. In 2015, the number of children taken care of by the State declined to 12,821 from 17,517 in 2006, i.e., a 26.8% drop. Many organizations try to point to the fact that South Korea has shipped 200,000 children to other countries as an indicator of a large supply of children available for adoption but does anyone show the research for this? No because in doing so, we would understand there is not a large supply side in South Korea.
Joel L. A. Peterson is the national award-winning author of the novel, Dreams of My Mothers and he stated in a Huffington Post article in 2015:
“Instead, my research suggests that many — maybe most or all — “abandoned” Korean children were wanted and their mothers went through a horrendous, agonizing process to reach a decision that showed that their mothers cared for their welfare and did the only thing they could to give some advantage to their child by at least conferring Korean citizenship.”
He further explains why there isn’t a supply curve in South Korea by stating:
“Recent surveys conducted in Korea indicate that greater than 90 percent of single mothers desire to keep their child if their circumstances and society had allowed. It would seem that, indeed, Korean mothers are no different from mothers everywhere. Just Korean laws and the weight of Korean social norms.”
Unscrupulous Practices Decrease Input Costs
Adoption agency costs are much lower to operate in poorer developing nations. Operating costs could be much lower – a few thousand dollars to cover a year supply of expenses for lodging, food and incidentals. During the height of the baby sales in South Korea there was a large disparity in GDP per capita between America and South Korea. WIth the lower operating costs in Korea during this time period, this allowed the South Korean government to make more profit. The cost could be dramatically less if unscrupulous practices that were market driven to bring in children for foreign adoption. Other benefits to the adoption agency and the adopters include the lack of resources for poor families to look for their child or petition the legal system if the parents change their mind.
Adoption Incentives Drive Profits Upwards
The American tax incentive plays a negative roll in driving up costs in adoption. Several economists correlate the rise of College tuition with the increase of Federal grants and subsidies. This means for every dollar a student received in grants and free money – the university had increased the tuition costs and the amount of debt the same for the student. The government provided funds did not offset costs for the student. Instead, what the system did was increase the total cost of tuition. No matter how much this can be pointed out by economists and smart legislators – people will demand to get more of their schooling funded through grants and government subsidies instead of asking for ways to lower tuition costs.
The same problem holds true for those who want to adopt. Funding is available via tax write-offs, loans, and grants to prospective parents, incentivizing them to adopt.
There is no clear evidence that the input costs are being driven up or that parents are being matched with better children due to more extensive search or process. Specific adoption expenses such as adoption fees, court costs, attorney fees and travel expenses are used as a tax credit. Remember a tax credit is a dollar for dollar reduction in federal tax and not a reduction of taxable income. Furthermore, the adoption tax credit allows US$13,460 worth of tax credit for the adopted child. So, one must ask, where does this money go? Adoption agencies respond saying the increases in costs are caused by tougher regulations, longer holding times and increases in input costs (food, shelter, clothing, etc.).
An assessment was made at the financials of Holt International to determine where the funds were being distributed throughout the system.
Holt International, as well as numerous adoption advocacy sites, have used the figure of US$40,000 to be the average cost a prospective family spends on each adoption. Using this for 2010 on the number of children processed for adoption into America, the total amount of revenue earned was US$29,560,000. Subtracting the adoption fees Holt International charges to each family, the total liabilities unrecorded is US$18,756,000 i.e., 63% of the funding is unaccounted for.
A Washington Post article states that the biggest cost outside agency costs (which are separate) is legal fees that range from US$6,000 to $8,000. Much of what Holt and other adoption agencies publish is vague and the financial records change from year to year, making it hard to determine where the funds are spent and preventing transparency. In 2010, how did Holt earn an additional US$14 million worth of revenue when half the revenues came from adoption fees?
Adopt for All Children is another American adoption agency and they list a greater breakdown of their costs. They co-operate with the Eastern Social Welfare Society to place children from South Korea to America.
Smoking Gun Another adoption agency called New Beginnings that deals with South Korean Adoptions gives some insight of the greater detail of their South Korean Program Fees:
„Korean Program Fee Program Coordination $6,500 for program sponsorship and development; working with ESWS to identify a child and arranging for an adoption; receiving a referral of a child that includes the Child’s Background Study; securing the child’s legal information to present to USCIS for immigration approval; filing the documents in Korea for court approval and emigration permission, establishing the itineraries while the family is abroad for the adoption hearing, the placement of the child and the child’s travel visa. ($2,500 due at home study approval; $1,500 due at acceptance; and $2,500 due at submission of Emigration Permission).” Foreign Agency Fee and “Donation” $19,500 For child care expenses prior to the adoption, identifying a child available for adoption, securing the necessary terminate parental rights, providing the background study on the child, arranging for the finalization of the adoption and the immigration of the child (due at acceptance). Total Korean Program Fees $26,000„
The document provided by New Beginnings show that a large portion of the adoption costs gets returned back to the South Korea Government. I dislike the term that these agency use. They call it donations and that means the funds are unaccounted for. South Korean agencies need to be transparent on the funds they received and how the funding is spent. Regardless, this is the amount of funding that could have contributed to Korea’s economy: to pay for salaries to process documents, cost of care for the children and other expenses. I will refer to these numbers throught the study as the Foreign Agency Fee and Donation.
Holt Case Example It is almost impossible to obtain any real assessments from Holt’s online financial statements. Most years, Holt will publish a total number of children adopted into America vs. splitting the numbers between adoptions made from the parent country and domestic adoptions. Due to limited data I have to make some assumptions. I will assume the majority of the costs will be transferred to the American families and that the majority of costs would be for foreign born children i.e., the domestic adoptions should be cheaper to process.
In 2007, Holt listed the domestic and international adoptions to America separately and if we peel back the onion, the overall costs for the international adoptions would increase if we sliced the domestic adoptions out of the equation. I used the 2007 figures to come up with the new cost: 59 domestic and 561 foreign adoptions and this implies approximately 10% of all Holt adoptions, for an average year, are domestic.
The Federal Adoption Tax Credit was enacted in 1997. I do not have enough data to determine if the law increased these costs. I would need to look at financial statements going back to the early ’90s to make an accurate assessment but it doesn’t mean this data is totally useless either. First, the adoption fee per international child is close to what other sources are reporting. The increase in Total operating Revenue suggests the costs are passed down to the potential parents, the number of adoptions is not increasing dramatically and the annual operating funds have increased from year to year, on a whole. This may be due to inflation of 2-3%.
The annual reports also list the areas the adoption agencies are actively working. We can see numerous trends. First, they are constantly going to economically depressed areas to obtain these children. We see where they are focusing their attention and possible patterns of abuse. For instance, in recent years adoption agencies have been prohibited from doing business in Russia and Guatemala due to perceived or real abuses within the adoption process. Overall, one can assume that the policy is working well in encouraging individuals to adopt. However, other sources point out that the program is supporting foreign adoptions and not helping the domestic foster care system.
A recent Child Trends research brief uses 1999–2005 data from the US Treasury Department to determine who most benefits from the credit. In his report summary, author Rob Geen reveals that:
The vast majority of adoption tax credit recipients completed private or foreign adoptions rather than adoptions from foster care.
The tax credit disproportionately supports higher-income families.
The tax credit primarily supports the adoption of younger children.
Nearly all foreign adoptions were supported by the … tax credit but only one in four foster care adoptions were.
Estimated Size of the Adoption Industry
The adoption process is no different to other programs where federal assistance increases the wealth of those who run them. Together with increasing demand for international adoptions, the federal assistance acts to inflate costs and enables those who run the programs to become wealthier.
I went to the US Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs to get the average number of intercountry adoptions per year. The site has a database that lists the total number adoptions as 271,833 from 1999-2017. I took the average year to be around 15,101 adoptions a year and multiplied it by Adoption.com’s average intercountry adoption cost of US$35,000 to determine the size of the American market. It is US$529 million dollars a year. This does not factor in legal fees, medical fees, counseling costs and immigration costs. It also doesn’t factor in all the other developed countries that adopt abroad. Several sites estimate that Europe and all other developed countries adoptions numbers, equal that of America. Therefore, the entire intercountry adoption industry is worth at least a billion US dollars a year.
There were actually two peak periods where children were adopted out of South Korea enmasse and these occurred during the 1970s and 1980s. There was no correlation between the adoption rates against GDP per capita. If this was true, then one would expect more children being exported during the IMF crisis in the later part of the 1990s, however, this never occurred. One could argue that size of the family may have been the key driver. This could be said for the children born in the 1970s. The average household size contained 4.53 children per household.
South Korea’s birthrate stabilizes near the current rate which is below 2 children per family around 1982. However, a large number of children were still being adopted for nearly 8 years after the birthrate dropped below 2 per family household.
A better explanation for the adoptions has to do with South Korea being a patriarchal society. If a South Korean woman losses support from her partner, she is shunned and ridiculed by society. She has no support system to turn to and is given only one option to give her child a fighting chance: adoption.
Wikipedia states: “Statistics demonstrate the success of South Korea’s national education programs. In 1945 the adult literacy rate was estimated at 22 percent; by 1970 adult literacy was 87.6 percent[41]and, by the late 1980s, sources estimated it at around 93 percent”.
In relatively a short period, South Korea greatly improved its education system which meant a larger number of women entered university. The age when women gave birth in the 1970-80s was 20-24 year old mothers and this is where a large number of children for adoption came from. The number of children born to this segment shrank dramatically after the 1980s. This was largely due to 2 factors: firstly, the use of ultrasound technology to determine the sex of the child and perform targeted abortions on female fetuses; and secondly the increased use of contraceptives and abortion by women in South Korea.
This also explains the high percentage of South Korean girls given up for adoption throughout this period. More than likely, the poorer women who could not afford to have an abortion or use contraceptives were forced to give up their child due to social pressures.
“Imbalances in the sex ratio at birth in Southeast and East Asia increased especially after the mid-1980s. We study how ultrasonic technology affected sex ratios at birth in South Korea, a country with a strong son preference. Between 1985 and 1995 fetal screenings and abortion services were widely available, though not available in the years before, and prohibited in the years after”. (Source: NIH article)
As a direct means of avoiding unwanted births, particularly after contraceptive failure, induced abortion gradually increased in South Korea especially among urban women (Choe and Park, 2005, Stephen, 2012). By 1970, abortion had become a common practice with more than 40% of women reporting having had an induced abortion to terminate unwanted pregnancies and this rate rose to over 50% by the 1980s (Chun and Das Gupta, 2009). Abortions were easy to obtain in clinics throughout the country and the operations were safe, cheap and completed without social resistance despite the illegality of the procedure (Tedesco, 1999).
Adoption used for Cost Avoidance
What could be another driver for South Korea to sell off their children? I believe we really need to look at the economic incentives. The first economic incentive is the cost avoidance. South Korea forfeited the costs to raise children in institutions from the age they enter the system until adulthood. One needs to remember economic growth in South Korea was extremely high and the average growth between 1970 to 1990 was 18.7% each year. Imagine the amount the government would have to carry as the costs of wages, food and shelter continue to rise by that amount each year?
I measured the growth by looking at the GDP per capita as an indicator. I calculated the cost to house, feed and educate a child under an institution would cost more than a family given the children need 24 hour care. I used the cost of 40% of the given years GDP per capita as the cost to raise the child for that given year. The costs could actually climb higher when factoring in the higher cost of labor to take care of infants and special needs children. I also estimated that the average child spent 16 years inside the institution. An assumption was made that the average age of the child sent to Korean institutions was 2 years old.
The total cost to the South Korean Government in terms of cost avoidance for only 20 of the 62 years that Korea was exporting children (1970-1990) is estimated to be around US$6.4 billion!
This is evidence that South Korea had an economic motive to sell off its children and supports this theory of cost avoidance. South Korea spend way less money on social welfare programs than other OECD countries which means they have more funding for other programs such as its R&D and military.
In her 2010 book, Kim Rasmussen said: the root cause of the number of adoptions out of South Korea in 2010 was South Korea’s lack of spending on its social welfare system. Rasmussen also shared that the other OECD-30 countries spent an average of 20.6% of their GDP on social welfare benefits while South Korea only spent 6.9% of its GDP on social welfare benefits. Rasmussen believes that South Korea’s promotion of domestic adoption does not address the heart of the problem and that South Korea should raise its spending for social welfare benefits.[50]
Adoption as a Revenue Maker
In the graphs below, I estimate the average cost for the Foreign Agency Fee and Donation as a steady state (US$19,500 per child) times the number of adoptions per year in South Korea. I compare the revenue in terms of the GDP per capita and determined that in 2015, when the article was written, the cost is around 35% of the GDP per capita in America. I then took that percentage and calculate it by the American GDP per capita stated for each corresponding year. I took the information and compared it against the cost and number of barrels of oil used in Korea to determine how much adoption could have impacted the South Korean economy (if any). The Tax and South Korea’s GDP was compared to determine the strength of the economy and whether it had any effect on the number of adoptions. There doesn’t seem to be any correlation.
The price adjusted to today’s dollars of the total adoption program from 1970-1990 earned South Korea a revenue of US$3.1 billion, averaging US$157 million a year.
To understand the magnitude and impact, the equivalent to a program in America which is more than 6 times the size of South Korea, the revenue gained by selling off its children would be the equivalent to the cost of the fight on AIDS in Africa. In that program America spent roughly US$1 billion a year. Or you could equate the amount to the American national After-School Lunch Program for the entire country that fed hungry impoverished children.
The yellow line in the graph (above) takes the adjusted Foreign Agency Fee and Donation times the number of children that were adopted each year. Most of the funds went to the South Korean government as above the line profit. Articles have been published stating that the South Korean government has made money from adoption, such as this article on International Adoption of South Korean Children in Wikipedia.
A 1988 article originally from The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy says the South Korean government made fifteen to twenty million dollars per year from the adoption of Korean orphans into families in other countries. The 1988 news article also says the adoption of orphans out of South Korea had three effects: it saved the South Korean government the costs of caring for the Korean orphans; it relieved the South Korean government of the need to figure out what to do with the orphans and it lowered the population.[5]
I think the amount of revenue gained from exporting South Korean children has been understated!
Comparison of US Wages to average adoption cost, using regression based on known costs
Due to a lack of transparency, there is no exact method of calculating how much revenue the South Korean government made during the adoption process. Holt and other adoption agencies that operate out of South Korea declare their financial statements on an annual basis and if the amounts are lower than the average adoption transaction, one could assume the difference is given to the South Korean government. Issues that make transparency difficult are that adoption agencies such as Holt change their financial statements on a frequent basis and only a fraction of the adoption companies share their financial statements with the public.
The graph below shows a comparison of Korea’s GDP Growth (grey line) in comparison to profit made from adoption (blue line), changes in oil useage (orange) and increase in tax revenue (yellow) over time.
A comparison was made of the cost of barrels of oil used during the twenty years. The amount of money made in adoption sales stays above, or at the level of oil used, when using the steady state number ($6000/adoptee) and it jumps dramatically higher when applying the Foreign Agency Fee and Donation ($19,500). The blue line would grow three fold.
Economically selling off the children via intercountry adoption has been a suicidal move because the population ultimately fell below 2.1 children per household. In developed countries, sub-replacement fertility is any rate below approximately 2.1 children born per woman, but the threshold can be as high as 3.4 in some developing countries because of higher mortality rates. Going below this number will result in the current situation that South Korea faces and that is a sub-replacement fertility rate. This occurred around the early or later part of 1982.
I theorize that the rapid drop in fertility rates in South Korea occurred for two reasons:
Cultural: it was unacceptable for women to have children if they weren’t married. That segment quickly disappeared (20-24 year olds) because of contraception and abortion use took place. I need to overlay this to see if more kids are being raised in orphanages. South Korea makes it too easy for parents to dump their kids off and run.
Someone (or the government) was economically gaining from the wholesale of children: if we average the profit throughout the years of $5000 x 200,000 children the profit would be equivalent to US$1 billion dollars .
In 1980 South Korea’s GDP was $68 billion, showing the wholesale of its children would have significantly contributed to the economic growth of the country. There must be a South Korean document somewhere that is equivalent to Germany’s Final Solution. Instead of eradication, South Korea had a plan for the mass exportation of its children.
Following 1988, there was a large drop in intercountry adoptions after the Seoul Olympics. This is an important date, as many nations were chastising South Korea for the exportation of its children. Feeling this pressure, South Korea immediately reduced the number of adoptions per year by 75%.
The Number of Institutionalized Children and Adoptions are Dropping
With the recent passage of laws and strict requirements for adoption the number of children exported by South Korea for adoption has declined sharply over the past decade. In numerous studies, I note the statistic that America has been taking in nearly half of the adoptions worldwide.
An online journal The ConversationArtikel says international adoptions have dropped 72 percent since 2005 and quotes:
“In recent decades South Korea, Romania, Guatemala, China, Kazakhstan and Russia– all former leaders in foreign adoption – have also banned or cut back on international custody transfers. In 2005, almost 46,000 children were adopted across borders, roughly half of them headed to a new life in the United States. By 2015 international adoptions had dropped 72 percent, to 12,000 in total. Just 5,500 of these children ended up in the U.S., with the remainder landing in Italy and Spain”.
Furthermore, the number of children sent to orphanages in Korea has also fallen. See this Artikel which quotes:
“In 2015, the number of children staying in welfare centres caring mainly for orphans dropped by 26.8 per cent to 12,821, from 17,517 in 2006”.
Adoptee Parents are Rapidly Dying Off
During the early 1970’s, fertility rates within South Korea and the ratio for women giving birth was one third in the early to mid 20s age range, one third in the mid to late 20s, and one third in their 30s or older. As South Korea progressed, the number of women in the younger segment shrank greatly. My initial graph above showed potential age lines and made the assumption that the father was on average a couple of years older than the mother.
I also found an article on life expectancy which increased by nearly 20 years from the 1970s to today. The dotted horizontal red line in the graph above is the changes in life expectancy and will merge with the mean age of the parents. The life expectancy shot up and stayed around 84 years from the mid 80s to the present. Where the dotted vertical red line meets the dotted horizontal line shows a high likelihood that the fathers have passed away and where the dotted yellow and first dotted red line meets, also holds true for the mothers. I also calculated the ages by the number of adoptees adopted by year group and estimated, using current actuary tables, that more than 2,000 parents are dying each year. Roughly one third of all adoptee’s biological parents have already died and it’s crucial for adoptees to do their searches as soon as possible if they want to find parents alive.
In Conclusion
The money spent on the intercountry adoption of South Korean children would have done more to support single mothers, prevented the separation of children from their surroundings and prevented unnecessary negative externalities experienced via adoption. South Korea could have used the funding to begin its social welfare programs such as Canada’s training programs which train mothers how to raise their children, cope with stresses and empower them to become productive single parents.
The issues facing many 3rdworld countries are not about bad parenting but rather a situation of a lack of resources. If a mother cannot afford to provide for her child, she will do anything to ensure that her child will have a better life. Few individuals see the altruistic actions of desperate mothers. These mothers are willing to give away their children to afford them a better life. Furthermore, nobody has dethroned the archaic ways of doing business and management of governance in South Korea. Rights and laws go to protect the same patriarchal men who hold the keys to the power in South Korea. Nothing is being done to provide for the millions of women and children left vulnerable when the man decides to abandon the family. Nothing is done to ensure child support is provided and a safety net developed by a government who chooses to bury its head in the sand, instead of dealing with issues that have plagued them for over 5 decades.
“Although Korean women are participating more in the labour market than in previous years, the gap in the level of employment between men and women, regardless of their education level, is enormous. In fact, the gender gap is wider among those with a tertiary education than among those with only preprimary and primary-level education; and South Korea is the only OECD country that shows such an effect”. (Source: OECD)
Can a famous example of conservation teach us anything about adoption? Most people can’t see a correlation but I do! Less than a hundred years ago, there were just 16 whooping cranes left in North America. These beautiful majestic birds were near the brink of extinction. Men who over hunted and destroyed the bird’s habitat also became its savior. People dressed in bird costumes attended to the young chicks.
In nature, it is not uncommon for cranes to lay two eggs. When this happens, the parents would ignore the weakest of the chicks and let it perish. However, at the conservatory, the scientists would raise the chicks in groups. The whooping cranes are carefully incubated and then hatched inside a plexiglass to observe a real whooping crane. This is done to imprint the chicks with what a real mother would look like.
Individuals meticulously ensure that the whooping crane chicks are attended to, using puppets that teach the young chicks how to find food and drink water. The puppet would mimic drinking water and then raise its head back as the crane does in nature. The attendants would teach the young cranes how to fly. They used an ultra-light plane to lead the cranes on a short flying lesson and eventually lead the cranes from Canada and fly them down to southern Florida. The scientists spared no expense and the average cost to raise a chick to adulthood cost around US$100,000.
The program was hailed as a huge success because the sixteen original whooping cranes that had four breeding females grew to a flock of more than 500 whooping cranes in the wild. Numerous documentaries were made about the success of this 11-year-long endeavor. The picture of the ultra-light plane leading a group of whooping cranes was popularized and shown in newspapers across the globe. The birds were then flown into their mating territory and the birds paired together and laid eggs. However, the overwhelming majority of birds would abandon their eggs after laying them. Of the 500 birds, only two or three mating pairs successfully hatched their chicks. This puzzled the scientists and after much consideration, they deduced the likely causation for this problem stemmed from the bird’s unorthodox upbringing. The scientists said it best by stating:
“They have so much baggage from a screwed-up and not normal childhood”!
Does this story sound familiar to you? Because it looks eerily familiar to some of the adoptees I’ve met and their lives. No matter how well the adoptive parents treated their adoptive child – they may have grown up as a disappointment to the adoptive parents or had a hard time adjusting to their new surroundings. Other times, the adoptees look to be successful: they have degrees from reputable schools, they drive high-end cars and attain high levels of success. But after closer examination, you might find their personal life to be a total disaster.
Like these cranes, some adoptees look like they achieve success but a small flaw prevents them from achieving full potential. I have met numerous adoptees incapable of keeping a relationship or keeping a partner. They might behave over clingy and suffocate anyone they come across, they might privately deal with overwhelming guilt or anxiety, or perhaps prone to performing some other social faux pas.
Like the whooping chicks, the interactions before or during our upbringing may have made an indelible mark on our lives. It may stem from the lack of empathy or touch when we were young. The traumatic experience of being separated from our mother at a certain age, or being left alone in dark bedrooms, or forced to lie still for hours in our cribs, changed the course of our personalities and lives. No matter how wonderful our lives are afterward, we are faced to confront issues that we cannot fathom or explain.
I think these birds explain in some part why adoptees are four times more likely to commit suicide, or why they are disproportionately represented with learning disabilities and have higher than average rates of drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders and incarceration. The reason for both the birds and adoptees is that we all had to deal with living without our natural mothers.
In third grade, I was in Mrs. Peterson’s class and given the assignment to do a family history project. I asked my adoptive parents about the project and they stated my Aunt Eirene had worked on the family tree and traced back across several hundred years. My family automatically skipped the fact that my own biological family existed and was not included. I was adopted at the age of four and a half years old. I had a lot of residual memories from my childhood but did not understand the things that I could recall. I was told I had an overactive imagination and that I daydreamed a lot. Later as an adult, I met numerous other adoptees and many of them had fantasies about their biological families. Some adoptees had dreamt that their biological families were royalty, others that their biological families were wealthy and looking for them.
I recently met a bunch of adoptees. One shared about identifying with a podcast in which a male adoptee fantasized that his parents were royalty and were looking for him. During the conversation it was stated,”Who knows – one of us might be royalty!”
On the day of the family tree assignment I stood up in front of the class and talked about my biological father being very old and that he fought in the Korean War. I also talked about army men marching past our village and seeing their tanks and machine guns. I was recalling events as best I could from memory. It is true that it is highly improbable that my father was in his late forties or early fifties when he had children. A simple calculation of the age of most fighting soldiers during the Korean War would fall within a narrow range of ages. It was highly improbable that my father was that old. The town where I had lived was located several hours south of Seoul and was not as heavily guarded as the Korean border or coastal cities. An initial impression might consider I was on the cusp of telling great tales. In fact, the teachers concernedly told my adoptive parents what I recalled in class and said I had a heightened sense of imagination. I was chastised by my adoptive parents for lying.
In my early twenties, I joined the military and selected to serve in Korea. While I was there, I learned that the construction of Korea’s expressway number 1 began in 1968 and was completed in the summer 1970. The 660 mile stretch of highway became the main artery that moved commerce from the ports of Pusan through the capital city of Seoul and up to the North Korean border. This main expressway is the second oldest and most heavily traveled expressway in Korea. It shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that this corridor was also the main route for the movement of troops and military equipment. It so happens that the highway passes along the outskirts of Cheong-Ju, the town that I grew up in. The memories of seeing soldiers walking alongside the road past my village is highly probable. As for my father for being old, I was confused about that. In my formative years, I was living with my grandfather because my father was away from home. I mistook my grandfather for being my father. I have memories of being ridiculed and told I was being untruthful. These memories flood my mind as I write this. I never meant to lie, all I did as a young child was to do my best to explain what I recalled.
DNA testing with 325Kamra has taken me all over the globe and as a result, I’ve been able to meet thousands of intercountry adoptees. During these travels, I’ve heard numerous stories that were often stranger than fiction. The first story is about one of the few Caucasian children adopted by a Korean family. Both families worked together in diplomatic channels and the boy’s parents were both killed in a motor vehicle accident. The Korean family took the orphaned boy in immediately and raised him as their own. I met this individual during my first tour to Korea when we were both stationed in Tong-du-chon in the mid-nineties.
In Europe, I met a Korean man adopted by a Korean family and a Korean girl raised by a Jamaican family. From all the stories that have been shared with me, about 99.9% of all Korean adoptees were adopted to Caucasian families. The unique adoption stories also occurred in the United States. In the early nineties, my next-door neighbor was a Korean adoptee and she was actually found by her biological father. Her father worked hard in the construction business and became a millionaire. He hired a private detective to find his daughter in America and he showered her with gifts. He paid off her mortgage and the costs to refurbish her home. He even threw in tickets to fly the whole family to visit him in Korea.
In college, I started the first multi-cultural diversity club on my university campus. As the president, I was invited to visit other campuses around the state and I met up with Korean student groups in Cornell, NYU and various universities on the East Coast. At one student conference, I met a Korean adoptee who was raised in a Jewish family. She was able to recite part of the Torah and read Hebrew. What I learned from these interactions is that adoptee lives are as varied by the families who adopt them. Things that adoptees might dream about, can actually occur.
I think it is a common practice for adoptees to fantasize or dream about who their parents are. What I found interesting is that the fantasies are rarely about common everyday individuals. I’ve never heard an adoptee tell me that they believe their parents were librarians or bakers. I mostly heard things like, “I think my family was royalty” or the extreme opposite of the spectrum and believe their mother was a prostitute. I think many adoptees make sense or cope with their adoption by making up stories. I think this is a normal occurrence and families and friends should not dismiss everything that adoptees might share as memories. As in my story, I was able to verify everything with my biological family after I found them. As for finding a princess … I found a Korean adoptee who was able to trace her family back to the last princess of Korea. I met her in Germany – very fitting, since it’s the land of a thousand castles!
My recommendation for adoptees who believe in the stories you are told or you have created to cope with life is: you never know – maybe you will be the next adoptee whose life is stranger than fiction!
I was stationed in Korea for eight years and have made more than a dozen trips to Korea since I left in 2007. During my last visit to Itaewon, I came across a small bronze statue of a girl sitting on a chair, next to an empty chair, located at the stoplight intersection closest to the US military base. I read the inscription on the plaque and learned that the statue of a young girl wearing a traditional hanbok with clenched fists commemorates the estimated 200,000 girls and women who were forced into prostitution to service the Japanese during WWII.
Currently, there are 40 comfort women statues erected in and outside of South Korea, located in the United States, Canada, Australia and China. The statue is a visible reminder of the abhorrent pain and suffering the Japanese brought upon so many lives. It’s believed that three-quarters of all comfort women have already died and those that survived, told unspeakable accounts of torture.
In recent years, many comfort women have been outspoken and demanded apologies and reparation for what they endured. In 1994, the Japanese government set up a public fund called the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF) to provide compensation to the countries where the Japanese had occupied during the war and enslaved the women for sexual exploitation. In recent years, there has been a public outcry by the Korean citizens against the Japanese government for sweeping this gross violation under the rug. The Japanese government has never officially recognised nor apologised for the exploitation of women in this manner.
The original monument to former “comfort women” who served as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during World War II — sits in Itaewon district as well as in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul
The Japanese could learn how to do the right thing from their WWII allies. The German government has apologized for their atrocities during WWII and they’ve erected a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The US government apologized five times to the American Japanese for their involvement in rounding up citizens and sending them to internment camps. Furthermore, the US House and Senate apologized for their wrongdoings to their own citizens, apologizing for slavery and the Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation in the United States.
However, this story doesn’t end with the Japanese. I agree that the comfort women deserve both an apology and reparation for their pain and suffering. I believe this is the proper thing to do. But I want to point out the hypocrisy of the Korean government as they use the same tactics and verbiage of the Japanese government as to how they also deal with the issue of the 200,000 children displaced through intercountry adoption. Korean society ignores that adoptees suffer from adoption trauma as well as a moral injury. Many of my fellow adoptees can remember being forced on planes and sent into the arms of strangers. The psychological damage for many adoptees go beyond that one experience and the US Department of Health and Human Services study estimates the percentage of adopted people seen in mental health settings fall within the range of 5 to 12%, or 2.5 to 6 times the percentage of adopted children in the general population.
Adopted people are nearly four times more likely to attempt suicide, according to a study published in the online journal of Pediatrics. The Institute for Family Studies learned through their studies that adoptees are more likely to have difficulties through school and are four times more likely to repeat a grade and three times more likely to be expelled from school. The rosy outcomes promoted by pro-adoption groups in the US and elsewhere are very misleading. The media largely ignores the adoption stories that are about death, rape, abuse and neglect. Numerous adoptees have endured horrific lives, not unlike those of comfort women.
Like the comfort women, adoptees are being ignored by the same government that caused the initial pain and suffering. Adoptees are asking for honesty when their histories are being shared. They ask for honesty and transparency. It’s statistically impossible for all adoptees to have been abandoned and left on doorsteps of every police station in Seoul.
Adoptees have taken matters into their own hands and have become videographers, sharing their stories and showing the flaws in the records and the stories that were told to them. The truth may be that the records of children were switched at birth or exchanged with other children who had more favorable stories.
Adoptees are speaking out and want to be told the truth even if it means there is nothing in our files. The government programs providing assistance to adoptees are largely run by Korean Nationals and have little to no input from adoptees. How can the largest stakeholder have no voice in designing the programs that are meant to support them? Doesn’t it make sense for the Korean government to hire Korean adoptees to support fellow Korean adoptees?
The red tape and lies don’t stop here. Numerous Korean families have been outspoken because they were given lies and the run-around when they enquire to find their children sent abroad. Furthermore, the organizations supposedly providing support to Korean adoptees are largely tone deaf and not motivated to provide assistance. I met a Korean adoptee who was diagnosed with liver failure and when he turned up for assistance, he was given little to none and died a slow and painful death.
Sadly, that is not an isolated case. Adoptees who are stranded and deported to Korea have reached out to the Korean government for resources and support. They were met with a plethora of demands from the Korean government in order to obtain assistance. Individuals with possible learning difficulties or prior formal educational experience were expected to pass Korean language classes to receive benefits. The benefits given were not enough for these adoptees to meet their basic needs. These adoptees then turned to their adoptee peers to pay for basic necessities such as food and clothing. I know this from first hand experience.
I met an adoptee just prior to his death and I have worked with adoptee-led organizations who raise funds to support the deported adoptees in crisis in Korea. I have also met with adoptees who erected the statue in memory of murdered adoptee Hyunsu O’Callaghan. The reality is that the real work for adoptees still comes from fellow adoptees.
3 NOV 15 Korean Herold article stated: “Kang Tae-in, a representative of a group of Korean birth families, said it was untrue that most birth parents don’t want to be found. He said many members of his group have tried to search for their children, only to be insulted and lied to by adoption agencies”.
The Korean government imposes restrictions that make it hard for adoptees to find their biological families. Adoptees have been forced to resolve issues on their own. A group of Korean adoptees got together to start a non-governmental organization (NGO) called 325KAMRA, largely funded by Thomas Park Clement, a Korean adoptee sent to America. 325KAMRA was formed because there was no consolidated DNA database widely available for Korean adoptees around the world to search for their biological families. There are approximately 150,000+ Korean adoptees in America and 50,000+ Korean adoptees in Europe – many of them wish to find biological family in Korea.
The South Korean Police have a separate database that started in 2004 and it has been used largely for missing people. Adoptees can access this but only if their adoption paperwork states that they were not given up by their parents. According to a news article in 2013, this police database had 24,764 samples from “missing people (mainly people with intellectual disabilities at institutions) while only 1,732 family members of missing persons had registered their DNA in this database. As of 2013, since 2004 there had been only 236 cases of reunion (children under age 14 (110 cases) and disabled (112 cases)).
325Kamra has been extremely successful compared to the closed system established in Korea.
As of November 2018, 325KAMRA has enabled 70 adoptees to be re-connected with biological families through DNA matches, genetic genealogy and DNA detective work. Moreover, there have been at least 100 matches to close family members using autosomal DNA tests. That means 170 Korean adoptees have found biological family through the use of autosomal DNA tests in the last three years. This is 72% of what the Korean police database yielded in over a decade. To date, Thomas Park Clement and 325Kamra have distributed over 4,700 DNA kits to Korean adoptees – primarily in the United States, Europe and Korea.
3 NOV 15 Korean Herold article states: “According to the law, one can access their birth records without their birth parents’ permission only if the birth parent is dead or cannot be found, or the adoptee has a medical condition or other reason for doing so.”
I personally think the Korean government needs to be reminded of their own obligations. We should use the same tactics that have been used by the Korean government against the Japanese. We should erect statues by every comfort woman to remind them that another group of individuals is also being overlooked.
I recommend we erect a statue of a younger girl squatting on the ground in her hanbok crying. The girl is crying is because she is forcibly removed from her homeland and exported to a foreign country via intercountry adoption. It’s a girl because a larger percentage of adoptees sent out of Korea are females.
If we don’t speak out, then the Korean government will continue to reduce the support promised for adoptees. To date, the Korean government has already slashed operating expenses which funded adoptee programs – programs such as the travel exchange program that facilitated the return to homeland for adoptees. What also needs fixing is the loopholes in Korea’s legal system. For example the 2012 Adoption Law gives adoptees the right to petition for their birth records but the same request cannot be granted to biological parents wanting to search.
Korea can be a beacon for other countries involved in intercountry adoption but there is still much work that needs to be accomplished. It will require adoptees to speak up and petition the Korean government in order to make real changes. I pray we can accomplish this before all our parents pass away.
As a child, I remember playing near the burn pits that laid by the small village of unpainted traditional Korean style homes (Hanoks). They nestled below a small outcrop of mountains, located in central Korea. My brother grabbed my hand to take me to see the prize he had found lying in the small garbage heap near our modest home. Among the charred remains of the trash there laid a couple of discarded light bulbs glistening in the harsh summer sun. We laughed as we smashed the bulbs into small shards of glass.
The small journey to the garbage pile and playing had worked up an appetite and I told my brother I was hungry. “Come follow me!” he called. I ran behind him as we raced down the trail towards the community garden. We stopped for a minute to catch our breath and we scanned the garden to find something to eat. There amongst the tall weeds, we found the brightly yellow-colored melons called chamoe. It begged us to bite into its juicy flesh. I grabbed one of the fruits hungrily and sunk my teeth into the hard flesh. The fruit wasn’t ripe and it had a bitter taste. I threw the fruit on the ground in disgust and we ran home to see if grandma could make us something delicious to eat.
By the time we arrived home, it was nearing dusk and my stomach hurt with the pains of hunger. My brother ratted me out, telling my grandfather I had tried to eat the unripened fruit. My grandfather gingerly placed me on his lap and started patting my stomach in a circular motion to reduce the pain. I immediately fell asleep and was woken up by the sounds of feet pitter-patting around the rice mat floors. It was the sound of my brothers and sisters getting ready for school. I too got up, to walk my siblings down the country dirt road to school. As we walked, I was chastised by my siblings and told to go back home. I stood at the end of the dirt road waving goodbye as I watched my family vanish down the road that wound amongst rice paddies and train tracks, covered by the cool mist of the morning fog.
When I was married and in my mid-thirties, I asked my aunt to give me the contact information to meet up with my half siblings who I remembered from my youth. We made a phone call and I waited anxiously to see if we could connect. The person on the other end of the line was the wife of one of my older brothers and she was scathing mad that I was trying to connect with my siblings. She told me, “This is in the past and that is where it needs to stay!”
Several months later, I called the family again hoping to get my brother on the phone. I was chastised again for calling and disrupting the family. I was rejected, never to be allowed to reunite with the family from my childhood memories.
Short-Lived Reunion
I sat uncomfortably on the hard lino covered floor of a traditional Korean Restaurant. The smells, sights and sounds so foreign to me. Just moments earlier, I had felt like I was on an epic journey “around the world in 80 days” with my aunt. That same morning my aunt was waiting for me at the entrance of the military camp where I was stationed. We rode the 5-hour long journey using a variety of transport: the jerky movements and clackity sounds of a train, the bumpy, vinyl covered back seat on a community bus that bellowed black smoke, and then a short ride on the Hyundai cab to the restaurant. None of the transport had air-conditioning and the hot sun beat down on my black hair. My brain felt as though it was boiling from the inside out. Large beads of sweat flowed from my brow when I arrived to meet my biological family.
When I entered the small restaurant, I scanned my eyes around to look for my new family. I caught a glimpse of my beautiful sister and then my father. It was odd for me to see someone who looked like me but a much older age. I felt as though I were in a time machine to meet a much older version of myself. My father’s head was covered with thinning grey hair and a receding hairline. The sunken cheeks and the deep wrinkles above the brow were telltale signs of a defeated person. My father was looked down at the table in shame.
I was asked questions about my life in America and how I liked Korea. Once all the niceties were exchanged my father asked, “Why did you look for me?” I was dumbfounded by the question and as I was about to answer, a blur entered through the front entrance and walked up to our table. A short stout young man entered the room with a wide grin on his face. His light brown eyes scanned the room looking at his dad and then at me … his face was distorted with confusion and then he rushed up to me and gave me a bear hug and began sobbing in my arms. I look like a younger replica of my father and my brother recognized that I was his brother immediately.
Mi-san, my beautiful half-sister in South Korea
As a child, I remembered the siblings I had grown up with. I never assumed my father would marry again but via his third marriage, he brought two more siblings into this world for me to unite with.
The pecking order went like this: the four half brothers and sisters I grew up with in Chong-Ju, my sister and I who were sent to America, and the two half-siblings from my father’s third marriage. My father was a success in being a prolific procreator. My father’s personal decisions led to his first two separations and sadly his third wife succumbed to illness when her children were beginning elementary school. I think I bonded with my half siblings because they knew how it felt to grow up without a mother.
Within a year of uniting with my sibling, my father had a stroke that made him fully dependent for care. My younger sister Mi-san faithfully went to my father’s home each day to feed and bathe him. I wanted to be part of my siblings’ lives but the language barrier prevented me from picking up the phone or arriving at their doorstep to visit.
A year after I kindled the beginnings of a new relationship with my new family, I received orders from the military to move back to the United States. There was a five-year separation where life was a blur and my day to day actives was filled with school and work. In 1998, I received another chance to reunite with my family in 2001 when I was given assignment orders to South Korea as a second lieutenant. I was so happy to again partake in their lives. I attended my sister’s wedding, the birth of her daughter and visited their small home that was established near the place of my birth.
Life happens in a blur and six years later, I was once again moved away in 2007 due to my reassignment by the Army. As I left Sth Korea, I assumed I would get the chance to hang out with my new found brother and sister when I retired from military service. I hoped I would again have a chance to play with their kids, go on trips and share in the bounties of life.
In 2011 when I was serving in Afghanistan, I received an email from my aunt stating my brother had died unexpectantly in his sleep. My heart was crushed and I immediately flew back to Korea to bury my younger brother. I learned one of life’s hardest lessons: that we cannot always look to the future to share and bond with those most important to us.
Min-Soo, my brother who passed away in 2011
Taken for Granted
I was one of the lucky few adoptees to be adopted with a biological sibling. Initially, my sister was the annoying younger sibling that followed me everywhere. She was 2½ and I was 4 ½ years old when we were sent to the United States. I began kindergarten the same year that I arrived and learnt about American culture the hard way.
I was in trouble for going with the girls to the girl’s bathroom. I was chastised for not returning the books to the school library. I received detention for copying graffiti that was already written on the gym wall. I had no idea that the words, “the principal is a fucking retard” was derogatory! Life was a learning experience and nobody understood me at all.
My sister, on the other hand, was gifted. Life was unfair and it gave all the talent to one sibling but it was not me! She was a straight-A student. She made it to the State Finals as a gifted athlete. Even though I was 2 years older, she beat me when we raced towards the school bus. I later realised I was a pretty fast runner but my sister had that rare gift as an athlete. Lastly, my sister was way better looking. She won the local beauty pageant and after I joined the Army at 17 years old, I quit showing pictures of my little sister to my Army buddies because they would always ask me to set them up on dates with her. My sister had it all: she was stunningly beautiful, extremely smart and a gifted athlete who had the potential to compete at College or even at Olympic level.
Jessica, my biological sister whom I grew up with
Once my sister reached adulthood she chartered a different course and over time the energetic, bright young woman who I was familiar with, morphed into someone I could not recognise. The resilient person I knew became a shell of her former self. She sought out love and married at a young age. The love she was seeking was fleeting. At the end of 3 divorces, she lost everything that mattered to her, including her own children. She squandered her opportunities. She received the GI bill to pay for College but she never enrolled.
Time took its toll, her beauty faded and the life of constant defeat opened up a crevasse that allowed her to be defeated in everything she did. The desire to be successful was now a distant memory and today she stares in the mirror wondering who the defeated person is on the other side: the older woman with a scalp of thinning grey hair, wrinkled face from living a tough life, thin frail yellow nicotine-stained fingers that work minimum wage jobs to barely make ends meet. Every time I reach out she tells me everything is fine. Yet I hear from her children about the suffering she endures. Being evicted from her home, having to sell her car way below market price to make ends meet. I can read between the lines when she speaks to me. I no longer understand her and my privileged life cannot understand the difficulties that she faces.
Conclusion
My family search was bifurcated. On one side, the door was slammed shut and I was met with rejection. On the other, across the hall, the door was opened for me to meet my half-siblings. The hallway that leads to my sister has been eroded by the termites of life, treading down a once familiar path now filled with navigating around an unstable sister who has squandered her life away.
This is what life has taught me:
Don’t have unrealistic expectations when it comes to searching for family.
The range of emotions and outcomes will vary with each person’s journey.
If you are searching, be prepared you may be greeted with open arms to meet a family who may not want anything to do with you. What you think will happen may be something completely different. Treasure the journey.
I’m grateful for all the people who helped me along the way to find my family. Many people went out of their way to help and guide me through the process. Sometimes it takes patience and time for relationships to blossom. Of course, the opposite can also occur. Like in the case of my biological sister, our relationship has deteriorated over time and I can no longer recognize the person she has become.
A few days ago, I was invited to attend the filming of Sarah Henke to cook with a famous TV Chef from Korea 전현숙. He came to Germany to interview Sarah, a KAD chef who works at a restaurant and recently earned the coveted Michelin Star. During the filming of the program all guests were interviewed and asked a panel of questions. One of the questions was, “When was the first time you ate Korean food and do you remember eating Korean food as a child?”
Remembering distinct tastes: In 1990, I was mistakenly sent to the wrong training program by the US Army. Months before my training took place, I had signed up to be an engineer but cooking became my new profession. I was surprised to learn I was attending the Army’s culinary school at Fort Lee, VA. One of my instructors was from Korea and his name was SFC Park. He immigrated to the US in his teens and had a thick Korea accent. My friends and I would laugh every time he would tell us to place food on the cookie “shit” (sheet). A few weeks into the culinary program I became one of the top students and was recommended by SFC Park to be one of the students allowed to take an advance cooking course and train under a Master Chef in the evenings.
Several weeks into my training, SFC Park pulled me aside and asked me if I liked Korean food. I answered truthfully and stated I never grew up eating Korean food and did not remember ever eating it. That weekend I crawled into SFC Park’s car and we headed to Richmond for the area’s annual Korean festival and I feasted on numerous Korean dishes. All the flavors were new but wonderful! I gorged myself with Bulgogi (BBQ meat), Kimchee (fermented cabbage) and Japchae (sweet potato noodle dish). One dish caught my eye as I passed dozens of dishes and it contained a tupperware of what looked like tree leaves. I was informed they were not tree leaves and were “delicious” sesame leaves called Kkaennip. I grabbed a leaf and popped it into my mouth and began to chew. As soon as I tasted the distinct flavored leaves, I knew instantly that I had eaten this before. My face was filled with excitement and I rushed to my cooking mentor and told him that I remembered eating the dish when I was young.
Remembering clothing: When I was 5 years old I visited my grandmother’s farm. It was a last minute decision and my grandmother had to rummage through the closet to look for clothing I could wear outside whilst following her doing her chores. I remember seeing her toss out oversized scarves, gloves and hats as they were pulled out of the closet and compared to my small frame. A cap immediately caught my attention as she pulled it out of the closet. It was an olive drab green army cap with ear flaps. I became really excited and I told my grandmother that I remembered seeing a picture of my father wearing a similar cap when I lived in Korea. My grandmother looked at me and smiled. She said matter of factly, “I think you have a great memory or a great imagination”.
In 1996, I enlisted into the Active Component Army and signed up to go to the location of my choice. I turned down a chance of attending West Point and a full ride scholarship to St. John’s University for a chance to enlist in Korea and find my biological family. Newly assigned medics to Camp Casey, located in Dong-du-chon, were sent to the clinic to have their skills assessed and given on-the-job training for 30 days before being allowed to work in their assigned unit. During my training, I worked with the pharmacist Mrs. Kim. She took a look at me and asked if I was Korean. I explained to her that I was adopted from Korea. I also shared that I was looking for my biological family and she told me she would try to help.
Fate had it that Mrs. Kim so happened to attend College with the director of Eastern Social Welfare Society and she forwarded her friend a copy of my adoption papers. Within the first week, I was notified they were able to locate my aunt and she immediately traveled to see me at my base to introduce me to my father. During my initial meeting with my aunt, I inquired about a picture of my father that hung in the entrance of our home when I was a small boy. She immediately withdrew a black and white photo of my father wearing the hat from her purse and gave it to me to keep.
Remembering activities: I was overjoyed to learn that I would be heading to Korea at my first duty station as a newly minted second lieutenant. During my second tour to Korea I had my third physical trigger that reminded me of my childhood in Korea before moving to the United States. One weekend I was walking through the streets with my fellow lieutenant buddies from the s1/506th Infantry (Band of Brother’s Unit) near our base at Munsan to find a place to eat grilled meat. We walked several blocks looking for picture of cows or anything that gave an indication the restaurant served grilled meat. We found a sign with a picture of a cartoon pig and cow so we went inside to order food. George, the tall thin West Point graduate, made cow noises to indicate that he wanted to order bulgogi. I laughed at him and told him that Korean cows did not make the same sounds as American cows. We had a good laugh over his antics and I noticed the restaurant was using round cylinder-shaped charcoal to cook our meat. I pulled my buddies in and told themof how I remembered my grandmother cooking on these things when I was a boy in Korea.
That same year I met with my aunt again and asked her about my grandparent’s kitchen. I told her I remembered my grandmother cooking on top of the charcoal and she told me it was true. It wasn’t uncommon for country people to cook on charcoals that were used to warm the flooring of the houses. The charcoal cylinders served a dual purpose. She was surprised by the detail of things that I could remember from my childhood.
What the experts say: A week ago, on my drive to work I listened to a recent episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast. It is about how memory actually works and how understanding this relates to our relationship with the truth (podcast link is below). His multi-podcast lecture states that long term memories cannot be trusted. Individuals have a tendency to mask over memories with other stories that were told. The podcast indicates people are easily influenced by others and the environment around us and its not uncommon for our memories to change over time.
Jeffrey A. Vernon a physician summarized the podcast well by saying, “Literature shows our memories are more fluid and changeable with time than we’d like to believe; our memories are colored by our emotions both at the time of the event and the time of recall; and often contain details that never happened but, rather are “filled in” at a later point to “complete” the memory. The memory of our overworked brains often doesn’t have the attention span or processing power to constantly take in and record the entirety of life going on around.
I do agree with Mr. Gladwell and numerous studies that our memories become fragmented and do change over time. For instance, the fish I caught at the lake becomes bigger and the money I won at the poker game becomes greater. I do believe there are memories that we hold onto and can retain for the long term. Sure, some of the details can be fuzzy but the overall information is correct. We can often verify these important events with others that viewed the moment with us. I remember looking into my son’s big bright eyes when he was born. I remember being promoted to top position at the Korean Hospital in Afghanistan. I know these events to be real and validate them.
In Closing: I’ve spoken to several thousands of adoptees through face-to-face interactions and through social media. When I share my memories, many adoptees have expressed regret for not remembering their past. Many were several years older than I at adoption (I was 4.5 years when I was adopted to the United States). Some adoptees will question the authenticity when speaking about their adoption story because they have a hard time remembering details or events before a certain age. I don’t think individuals need to beat themselves up for not remembering anything. Sometimes the brain forgets in order to protect itself. I have witnessed this in the military. We often call the event battle fatigue, shell shock oder combat stress reactions. It’s not uncommon for the brain to shutdown and forget things during stressful situations.
Lastly, children can age at different times. I’ve experienced this with my own children, where one child had high cognitive abilities at an earlier age than my other child. This could be another explanation about why people can’t remember – they simply were not at an age where their brain was developed enough to remember. I think it is good for individuals to dismiss their thoughts altogether because of this uncertainty. Memory dissipates and becomes foggy even for the smartest of individuals. If you feel that you recall something that nobody else does – keep it in the back of your mind and try to validate those thoughts as you learn more about the situation. I did and I was able to validate them to be true.
