Fraud allegations shake South Korean adoptees and their families

Her greatest fear, dormant for decades, returned in an instant: had she adopted and raised a kidnapped child?

Peg Reif’s daughter, adopted from South Korea in the 1980s, sent her a link to a documentary detailing how the system that made up their family was riddled with fraud: falsified documents, babies swapped, children snatched off the street and sent abroad.

Reif cried.

She was among more than 120 people who contacted The Associated Press this fall, after a series of stories and a documentary made with Frontline revealed how Korea created a baby pipeline, designed to ship children to abroad as quickly as possible to meet Western demand. The report shook adoption communities around the world with details of how agencies competed for babies — pressuring mothers, bribing hospitals, fabricating documents. Most of those who wrote were adoptees, but some were adoptive parents like Reif, horrified to learn that they had supported this system.

“I can’t stand the thought of someone losing their child,” Reif said. “I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know if I can.”

Forty years ago, she suffered from infertility. She and her husband based their dream of starting a family on adopting a Mexican baby, paid thousands of dollars to an agency and waited for months. Then the agency directors were arrested and learned that these Mexican babies had been taken from their families against their will. Reif was heartbroken, but to this day she remembers looking at her husband and saying, “Thank God we don’t have a stolen child.”

But now she’s not sure. Because they then adopted two Korean children and brought them to their rural Wisconsin home, first a son, then a daughter. The two were not biological siblings, but both arrived with eerily similar stories in their files: Their young single mothers worked in factories with fathers who disappeared after becoming pregnant.

At the time, Reif still believed in the common narrative about foreign adoption: she was saving children who might otherwise live the rest of their lives in an orphanage, die, or be doomed to poverty.

“I don’t believe it anymore,” Reif said. “I don’t know what to believe.”

Cameron Lee Small, a therapist in Minneapolis whose practice serves adoptees and their families, said many feel an intense sense of betrayal. Individual adoptees have long shared stories of falsified identities. But this year’s revelations exposed system-wide practices that systematically changed babies’ origin stories to quickly process adoptions, including classifying them as “abandoned” even when they had known their parents .

Small, who was also adopted from Korea in the 1980s, summed up what he heard from adoptees: “I kind of went back to nothing. What do I believe now? Who can Do I believe?”

Reif’s daughter, Jenn Hamilton, spent her life feeling unwanted, often joking, “That’s what happens when you’re found in a dumpster as a baby.”

It’s cost her her whole life: She’s been married for nine years, she says, but she suffers from insatiable insecurity: “I find myself constantly asking my husband, ‘Are you mad at me? Have- Am I doing something wrong?’ Do you want to leave me?

She’s no longer sure if abandonment was really her story, with revelations of abuse so systemic that even the Korean government compared it to “trafficking.”

“You can’t make that many mistakes. It has to be intentional. It was this huge tree of deception,” she said. “I feel disgusted.”

Holt International, the pioneering U.S. adoption agency in Korea, did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.

The reform is spreading across Europe: countries have launched investigations, stopped foreign adoptions and apologized to adoptees for not having protected them. But the United States, which has received by far the largest number of adopted children, has failed to examine its own history and culpability.

The U.S. State Department told AP this summer that it would work with its historian to piece together its history and detailed initial findings that some documents may have been falsified. But he added that there was no evidence that U.S. officials were aware of it. The State Department has since said it “was unable to identify any documents that might provide insight into the U.S. government’s role in adoptions from South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.”

The Korean National Police confirmed an increase in the number of adoptees registering their DNA for family tracing – both at national police stations and diplomatic offices in North America and Europe – in the weeks following the AP articles and documentary published in September. More than 120 adoptees registered their DNA in October and November, compared to an average of less than 30 per month from January to August.

The Korean government has argued that adoptions are a necessary tool to care for children in need, including babies of single mothers or other children considered abandoned. However, Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare acknowledged to the AP that the adoption boom in the 1970s and 1980s may have been fueled by a desire to reduce social costs.

The Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been investigating government responsibility for overseas adoption issues since 2022, following complaints from hundreds of adoptees, and is expected to release an interim report in February. The Commission published the AP articles on its website.

A law passed in 2023 requires all adoption records to be transferred from private agencies to a government department called the National Center for Children’s Rights by July, to centralize the processing of family search requests. The center confirmed that private agencies hold around 170,000 adoption records, but director Chung Ick-Joong doubts it will acquire space to store and manage all these records in time, due to financial and other constraints. challenges. The agency expects family tracing requests to increase significantly — “perhaps tenfold,” according to Chung — but it has the funds to add just five staff members to its team of six researchers .

Chung acknowledged that loopholes in adoption laws persisted for decades and that Korea only required adoptions to go through the courts and birth certificates to be kept after 2012.

“It is difficult to determine who was responsible for inaccuracies in the records before this date,” he said. “It could be that the adoption agency was at fault, the birth parents lied, or something went wrong at the orphanage…no one really knows what the truth is.”

Korean adoption agencies have mostly declined AP’s requests for comment in recent months, often citing privacy concerns.

Advocates insist that most adoptive families thrive, with parents and children living their lives happily without questioning the industry as Reif and Hamilton did.

Hamilton grew up in a rural, almost exclusively white community in Wisconsin, and at the time, all she wanted was to be accepted. But having children of your own changed things. When her first child was born, she looked at him and it took her breath away.

“It can’t explain it, like this is the first person I know in my life that I’m biologically related to,” she said.

She wanted to learn her own history so her children could learn theirs. She wrote a letter to her adoption agency which, within weeks, connected her with a woman who they believed was her mother. It was moving, shocking.

But soon she felt like she had more questions than answers. The woman’s name did not match what was listed on the documents, and the name she gave for the father was also different. The dates of birth did not match, nor did the place of birth. They hadn’t met in a factory, she said, they were pen pals.

Hamilton asked the woman to take a DNA test, but she said she didn’t know how to access it. Hamilton came to believe that this woman was not his biological mother.

AP reporting has revealed numerous cases where agencies matched adoptees with supposed biological families, only to discover, after emotional reunions, that they were not related.

Hamilton attempted to untangle the DNA results from his father’s side, contacting distant people, once-distant cousins, half-great-aunts.

“It becomes an obsession,” Hamilton said. “It’s like a puzzle that you start and you have to find the missing pieces.”

Lynelle Long, founder of InterCountry Adoptee Voices, the world’s largest adoptee organization, said governments must at least legally require agencies to provide adoptees with their complete, redacted documents, without the payment now often required.

Long said parents like Reif have an important role, because in Western countries, laws have historically favored the wishes of adoptive parents — designed to make adoptions quicker and easier. Many cling to the narrative that they saved needy orphans who should be grateful, she said, particularly in the United States, where the toll rocking Europe has yet to take root .

“We really need adoptive parents in the United States, if they have any sense of guilt, shame or loss, to step up, take responsibility and demand that legislation be put in place to criminalize these practices and prevent this from happening again.” Long said.

Hamilton is close to his parents; she has just renovated the basement to accommodate their visits. She’s sad for herself, she says, but she’s sadder for her mother, who is desperate to know if her children really had parents somewhere and is searching for them.

“And I’m like, ‘Why, so you can send us away?’ Hamilton said. “I don’t want to be a victim.”

She said she was happy to have been adopted and didn’t long for this different, alternative life in Korea.

Reif loves her children deeply, she said. But she doesn’t think she would adopt overseas again if she had known then what she knows now.

“I’d rather not have a child than think I have someone else’s child who doesn’t want to give it up,” she said. “I think of someone taking my child. These poor families, I just can’t imagine it.”