Teaser

Her name was Shin Gyeong-ha, and she was playing in her family’s front yard when she was approached by a woman she had never seen before. It was May, 1975, in the growing city of Cheongju, South Korea. Gyeong-ha was four years old. The strange woman told Gyeong-ha that her family didn’t want her anymore, pointing out that her mother already had another baby. The four-year-old girl was heartbroken and followed the woman to the station where the two boarded a train.

Geong-ha’s mother, Han Tae-soon, returned from the market that day and looked for her daughter. She was told by her daughter’s playmates, who were with Gyeong-ha earlier that day, that the little girl had gone to her grandmother’s house. The path to the grandmother’s house was a little more than a half mile long, and the 4-year-old girl had walked it so often before that she had it memorized. Tae-soon would find herself walking the path countless times in search of her daughter. There was no trace of Gyeong-ha.

Tae-soon and her husband, Shin Joong-ho, began a years-long search for their child. They visited orphanages, hospitals, and government agencies—even extending their search to some surrounding islands. Every day, Tae-soon went to the police station, carrying her 6-month-old and leading her second child by the hand. Every night, Tae-soon slept with her missing daughter’s picture under her pillow. 

In spite of the daily searches, advertisements, and public requests for help, Tae-soon wouldn’t learn the truth about her child’s whereabouts until decades later. In 2019, forty-four years after Geong-ha’s disappearance, Tae-soon and her husband were matched through a DNA test and finally able to clear the mystery surrounding their long-lost child. Geong-ha, now almost 50, was living in the United States under the name Laurie Bender. She had become entangled in South Korea’s adoption system, a well-oiled machine which would become known as the largest, longest-running international adoption system in the world. Over the course of six decades, the system has acquired and exported approximately 200,000 children; and Geong-ha (or Laurie Bender), like so many other children, was just one of its victims.

Podcast Intro:

You’re listening to Conceiving Crime, the podcast dedicated to investigating crimes past and present involving sex, procreation, pregnancy, birth, and all things human reproduction. I’m your host, Sami Parker. See the full show and links to resources from this episode at ConceivingCrime.com.

South Korea’s Adoption System in the 70s and 80s

In 2019, Geong-ha, who I’ll now refer to as Laurie Bender, spoke to her mother over the phone, hearing her voice for the first time in 44 years. 

Tae-soon: (Crying, speaking in Korean)

Laurie: “It’s ok. It’s ok.”

Tae-soon: (Continuing to cry)

Because Laurie was raised in the US since she was 4 years old, she can’t communicate with her biological family in their native language. For most of her life, she believed she had been abandoned by her parents and took a DNA test in 2019 only because her own daughter was curious about their heritage. Soon after submitting the test, Laurie received a call informing her that her biological mother had been searching for her. 

Laurie: “The whole time she kept saying she was sorry. It was just really shocking. I had no idea she was actively searching for me and missing me.”

After learning the truth about her adoption story, Laurie said she finally felt like a complete person, as if a hole in her heart had been healed. However, she wasn’t able to ignore the tragic side of her story either. In an interview with the Associated Press, Laurie stated, “It’s like you’ve been living a fake life and everything you know is not true.“ 

This is a sentiment that many Korean-born adoptees share. Since December 2022, hundreds of cases have been submitted to South Korea’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission to investigate human rights violations of children who were processed through South Korea’s international adoption agencies. So many cases have been submitted that the South Korean government granted an extension for the commission to continue their research. In many of these reports, adoptees believe their origin stories had been falsified—that they had not been legitimate orphans in South Korea but that their origin stories had instead been manipulated by agencies in order to make them appear adoptable. 

Throughout the 70s and 80s, the demand for adoptable children was so strong that South Korean agencies competed with each other to feed the market, shipping off thousands of children each year to Western countries such as France, Switzerland, Scandinavian countries, and Australia. Most adoptees ended up in the United States. In 2024, an Associated Press investigation, in collaboration with Frontline, uncovered records showing that during their peak, South Korea’s adoption agencies were acquiring children through unethical means, including bribes, falsified documents, and even kidnapping.

Contrary to an orphan agency’s mission to supply homes for needy children, something in this system had flipped and agencies were instead actively searching for orphans to supply to would-be parents. To understand the situation, we need to take a step back and look at how South Korea’s adoption system first started. The prevailing narrative of why and how it began goes something like this.

Historical Background

By the end of the Korean War in 1953, most major cities in South Korea had been bombed, millions of civilians were displaced, and the entire country had become stricken by poverty. With 90% of allied support coming from the U.S., the country had experienced a huge influx of American soldiers, many of whom lived in military “camptowns.” These camptowns primarily housed a combination of American GIs and Korean residents. They offered the allied soldiers many civilian comforts such as convenience stores, pawn shops, entertainment, bars, and a tightly regulated service from “military comfort women.” Prostitution had been permitted as a somewhat “necessary evil” among both the US and Korean military. US soldiers were allowed to be sexually active with Korean women, but their superiors strongly discouraged interracial marriage. If a US soldier did want to marry a Korean woman and bring her back to the states, he faced daunting administrative hurdles. Paperwork could take over a year to process and it wasn’t unlikely for a soldier to be transferred back to the states before his marriage application got approved.

Regardless of their relationship status, many military comfort women and intended brides became mothers, and the terms “Amerasian,” “Eurasian,” and “GI babies” became applied to the thousands of mixed-race children who sprung from these unions. The country that was already racked by war and poverty struggled with the means and the motivation to care for this new demographic. South Koreans valued racial purity. Ancestral origins were immortalized in their mythology, and they viewed shared bloodlines and ethnic unity as part of their national identity. The mixed-race children of women who already stood on the bottom rung of the social ladder became the most unwanted members of society. Already abandoned by their GI fathers, these war orphans seemed destined for a life of stigmatization.

In 1954, just one year after an armistice ended the war’s combat, the plight of these needy children was captured in a documentary from World Vision, a then new Christian humanitarian organization. Its depiction of the war orphans captured the hearts of an Evangelical Christian couple living in Oregon, Harry and Bertha Holt. The farming couple was so moved by the story that they wanted to adopt the children themselves.

Bertha: “We were devastated because we had so many things in our life. We had a nice car and plenty of food and shelter. And those people in the movie, they didn’t have anything. They were helpless babies.”

Despite being in their 50s and already having raised six children of their own, Harry and Bertha decided to adopt as many of the Amerasian children as they could manage. In 1955, after Bertha’s lobbying efforts, President Eisenhower signed a special bill into law, allowing the Holts to internationally adopt eight Korean orphans and raise them in the United States. But the Holts felt called to do more. In 1956, Harry moved to Korea and established what is now considered the first international adoption agency in the world.

The Oregon couple became flooded with requests from other Americans wanting to adopt. Before long, the Holts were booking charter planes and flying hundreds of children to new homes in the United States, fulfilling what they saw as a God-given mission to rescue mixed-race children from South Korea.  

“As the joyous holiday season draws on, there arrives in Seattle a small cargo of humanity which has never known peace on earth. But one man’s good will and love, that of Harry Holt, brings 80 Korean War orphans to America in time for Christmas. For them, as he has for hundreds before, he has found homes throughout the country.”

But this new adoption system did not turn into the “happily-ever-after” story portrayed in the media. Despite being lauded as good Samaritans in their home country, the Holts were as amateur in their mission as they were zealous. Attempting to make the adoption process as unhindered as possible, they forewent the minimum standards and safeguards that were being advocated by social workers. In lieu of serious background checks, the Holts’ only requirement for an adoptive couple was that they needed to be born-again Christians. Proxy adoptions meant that instead of traveling to the child’s country of origin themselves, parents could send an agent to complete the process for them. But with the Holts’ system, it was Harry who had the Power of Attorney, allowing him to complete the adoptions himself.

Then came an unforeseen development. Although through the Holts’ efforts the number of mixed-race orphans decreased, the number of requests for adoptable children continued to rise. In the United States, couples flooded their congressional representatives and government officials with letters begging for help finding children to adopt. The growing use of birth control and, later on, the advent of legalized abortion is the prevailing theory on why America saw a decrease in its own orphan population and why, over the next few decades, the United States faced a demand for more adoptable children than were domestically available.

The domestic baby shortage seemed to be an issue in other Western countries as well. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Norway were all relying on South Korea to supply the solution. When South Korean president Park Chung-hee attempted to phase out international adoptions in the 1970s, Western countries sent pleas for South Korea to continue its international adoption program, almost threatening foreign relations and public opinion if they did not. In 1975, South Korean Health Minister, Ko Jae-pil, reported that “Accepting the strong requests by related nations to resume adoptions is considered to promote international friendships.” At the same time, South Korea prioritized building up its military and economy rather than funding its welfare institutions, and the recent cuts in foreign aid crippled the financial support orphanages had been relying on.

It seemed that continuing international adoptions could benefit South Korea on multiple fronts. The country could save costs in social welfare, bring in millions of dollars into its economy, boost relations with wealthy Western countries, and remove the presence of its most unwanted citizens—children who were mixed-race or came from poor, unwed mothers. The next year, 1976, Park passed a law that removed judicial oversight, broadened the definition of adoptable children, and gave more power to the heads of private agencies. 

With Park’s new law, the doors to South Korea’s international adoption industry opened wider, and the work was more than the Holt agency could handle. As demand for adoptable children skyrocketed from the thousands to the tens of thousands, other South Korean welfare agencies became interested in joining the business. The adoption boom of the 70s and 80s had arrived.

The 70s and 80s Adoption Boom

It’s worth noting here that Harry Holt had died in the mid-60s and his agency had split into two entities a decade later—the US-based agency known as Holt International and the South Korean-based agency known as Holt Children’s Services. So from here on, when referring to “Holt,” I’ll be referring to Holt Children’s Services.

The South Korean government allowed four adoption agencies to operate throughout the 70s and 80s — Korea Social Service, Korea Welfare Services, Eastern Social Welfare, and Holt Children’s Services. All four of the agencies were rivals. An official from International Social Services, a Geneva-based organization, noticed the aggressive tactics, stating: “There is quite a bit of rivalry and competition among the different agencies, and it is not beyond agencies to bribe or pressure mothers for the release of these children, and not beyond agencies to try to compete with each other for the same child.” According to one adoption worker, the profit made from sending an orphan overseas was at least $3,000 per child. Earning an income of less than $200 per month, the profit made from one adoption was more than enough to pay her salary for an entire year. 

By the mid-1970s, South Korean adoption agencies were shipping out hundreds of children per month to foreign countries. Regarding the process of sending children to the US, Susan Jacobs, former Special Advisor for Children’s Issues, doesn’t believe so many orphan case files could have been adequately investigated in such a short period of time.

Susan Jacobs: “There couldn’t have been any rigour in that process whatsoever. They were probably filling out… I mean, I hate to say this—they were doing what they were told to do. They were signing off on these forms and letting the children go on their way to the United States.”

Facilitating adoptions became such a lucrative business and children became a commodity in such high demand that when agencies couldn’t supply the market with enough legitimate orphans, they would ensure a supply of adoptable children with methods that one Korean social worker at the time described as “sickening.”

A 1983 audit by the Health Ministry showed that Holt had doled out larger-than-allowed payments to impoverished birth mothers, bribing them to relinquish their children. Workers would sometimes guilt trip parents, stressing that their child could have a better life if sent to a wealthy Western country. Not relinquishing them for adoption was portrayed as selfish. One former worker who was employed at two agencies throughout the 70s and 80s stated, “Many of the children we gathered would have stayed with their biological parents with a little help. … But what we heard (from management) was always the same – if we don’t take that child, another adoption agency will.”

Gathering children from outside orphanage walls was a common practice for the adoption agencies, and officials would tour places like hospitals and maternity homes to scalp for healthy, adoptable children, leaving older and disabled children behind. This baby hunting method proved very effective, sometimes providing agencies over 60% of their supply of children. A report from the Health Ministry in 1988 stated: “In paying rewards for childbirth delivery costs to hospitals, maternity homes, local administrative offices and others when acquiring children for adoption, the social welfare institutions (agencies) have lost their morality and have descended to become trafficking institutions.” In 1989, a government audit revealed that Holt had given out nearly 100 illegal payments to hospitals in just six months while Eastern Social Welfare Society had given out even more during that same period.

While some agencies resorted to pressuring parents or offering bribes, some of their sources used methods that were even more disturbing… In 1986, Lee Sung-soo and his wife welcomed their firstborn son at The Red Cross Hospital in Daegu. The couple overflowed with joy. But the night before being discharged from the hospital, the father was taken aside by a hospital administrator. The news wasn’t good. The administrator said that their baby boy had severe heart and lung problems and that their only hope would be a high-risk and very expensive surgery which, if the child made it through, would likely result in the child being severely disabled. Taking the advice of the administrator, the devastated father relinquished their newborn to Holt Children’s Services which, he was assured, would pay for the expensive surgery and find a good home for their child if he were fortunate enough to survive. The father wept as he signed the papers. Thirty-four years later, the parents learned that they had been told a lie. They were contacted by their son who had been adopted to the United States and given the name Robert Calabretta.

Robert:“He became emotional but also a little confused. We started video calling. He was like, ‘Your mother and I thought you were dead.’” 

“What do you do when you have someone come back from the dead 30 years later?”

Robert had found his parents in 2020 with the help of a South Korean organization called National Center for the Rights of the Child. The reunited family saw that Robert’s adoption papers gave him a very different description than what had been described at the hospital: “A normal healthy baby… Well developed… Adoptable.” There was no mention of a surgery.

Something else that’s interesting to note about Robert’s case is that in his adoption paperwork, his origin story claimed that his parents were unmarried, that the couple had met in an office, and that they had given him up because they were too young to take care of him. This, of course, was not true. However, when processing a child’s paperwork, agencies would often fabricate a fictitious background story like this in order to make a child more adoptable.

Adoptee Yoori Kim found that her paperwork was not only falsified but that it had three conflicting stories about her origins. Since Yoori was 11 years old at the time of her adoption, she knew her mother and couldn’t believe that she would relinquish her.

Yoori Kim: ”I told her that my mother was unable to do such a thing. She said it was done and that my mother will never come back.”

Yoori and her younger brother had been brought to the orphanage by their mother for caretaking. At the time, it was commonplace for struggling single mothers to seek aid from orphanages that could provide shelter and regular meals for their children. But one day, when Yoori’s mother returned to the orphanage, she learned that her children were gone. The young siblings matched the gender and age specification that had been requested by a couple in France, and the siblings’ paperwork had been written to make them appear adoptable. Years later, when she was finally able to verify her history, Yoori went to the Police station in Paris to report her own kidnapping.

Yoori Kim: “So I was separated for 40 years from my mom and dad, and I have no idea what’s like having a family. never know what it’s like having a family. It’s an immense sense of loss.”

In most cases, the agencies zeroed in on one background story in particular—abandonment. Checking off the “abandoned” status on a child’s paperwork meant that not only would the child qualify as an “eligible orphan” in the US and more easily obtain a US visa, but it also meant the agency was not required to verify the child’s origins or seek parental relinquishment. According to Helen Noh, a former worker at Holt, it was “almost customary” to document a child as abandoned. The protocol in South Korea was that an abandoned child was to be reported to city officials first and then the officials would assign that child to an orphanage. So it’s highly suspect that in the 1980s, the number of orphans being sent away for adoption was often 10 times higher than the number of children who had been reported as abandoned. 

One female worker who processed adoptions in the early 80s claimed her agency put in zero effort to verify a child’s origins. One of the few safeguards in their system required that an abandoned child had to wait six months before being sent away for adoption, just in case relatives returned to claim them. The worker recalled the case of a one-year-old girl, allegedly abandoned, who had been brought in for processing. The date of the child’s abandonment was less than six months prior, so the worker refused to process the child for adoption until the six-month waiting period had been met. A short time later, the worker saw the same little girl brought in, but her name and background story had been changed, stating that she had been abandoned much earlier, making the little girl eligible for adoption.

The Ramifications

Records show that through most of the 1980s, approximately 90% of children sent away for adoption almost certainly had known relatives, and yet inadequate or inaccurate documentation has left many adoptees questioning their origins. Eleana Kim, Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine, says the way agencies conducted their business in the past had made adoptees’ future search for their biological family almost insurmountable. 

Eleana Kim: “Built into the design of it was not a returning adoptee who later in life would want to know where they came from, who they might be related to. The paperwork produces a child that’s adoptable. It doesn’t record a history.”

Since 2012, of the 15,000 adoptees who asked the government for help, fewer than 3,000 have managed to reunite with family members. The bureaucratic maze of consent and privacy laws can restrict the search process and the limitations created by inaccurate or missing information can make the search last for years.

Adoptee Alice: “Looking for my birth mother has been an exercise in extreme frustration.” 

ABC Adoptee Interview: “Did they find me on the street? If they did, then the police should have made a lot of documentation. If I was relinquished, then the father and mother should sign papers. If this was a legal adoption, they should have those documents. But there’s no paper. So did the child just fall down from the heaven?”

If a child who had been processed for adoption became ill or died, agencies preferred to swap them out with another child of the same age and gender. Rather than start the adoption process all over again with a new child, it was more efficient to simply switch the child’s case files and assign them a new identity. This means that some adoptees who have found their families by following the paper trail have the devastating realization, sometimes years later, that the family they thought they belonged to are actually not related to them at all. 

Robyn Joy Park: “The moment that I learned about the results for the DNA test, um was a, a really surreal moment. All the profile markers that should have indicated that we were biologically related were showing that we weren’t.”

“Initially it was kind of denial, like ‘No, this can’t be true.’ You know, that, like, all the paperwork that I, I’ve had shows otherwise.”

Rebecca Kimmel: “From a very early age, and I can’t remember exactly when, it may have been when I was 10 or in my early teens, I didn’t think that the photo looked like me. But my parents’ response was sort of ‘Oh, babies change.’”

Michaela Dietz: “They said, in looking back at their records, the only thing that they could determine was that two girls were born on the same day and perhaps their paperwork was switched.”

“But I actually tracked down the man who was very close with my birth father.”

“…This man told me, ‘why’d you wait so long? Your birth father, he wanted to meet you and he left all the information for you in your files. His name, his phone number, contact. Everything.’ And that’s, I think, one of the hardest things to hear, is like, he was expecting me to, you know, reach out. And even if I wanted to, I couldn’t because our records were switched. I mean, it’s just Shakespearean in a way.”

To empower the agencies to process adoptions faster, the South Korean government did not require agencies to follow up on the status of children after they left the country. Many American citizens eager to adopt were unaware of their responsibility to secure citizenship for their newly adopted child. Since 2002, at least 11 adoptees have been deported to South Korea, unfamiliar with the culture and language from which they were taken decades earlier. One of the deportees, Adam Crapser, filed a lawsuit in 2019 against both the Korean government and the Holt adoption agency for malfeasance that contributed to his adoption into an abusive home that did not secure his citizenship. Another deportee, Phillip Clay, committed suicide while living in Seoul.

Conclusion

The adoption boom began to dissipate, interestingly enough, during the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. As South Korea proudly debuted its growing economy to the world, its adoption system also came under the global spotlight. The system that had thrived for so long now became a national shame. As South Korea transitioned from a military dictatorship to a democracy, agencies were becoming more susceptible to scrutiny, and from 1988 to 1989, the Korean Board of Audit and Inspection audited the adoption system, uncovering its many wrongdoings and unethical practices. By the 1990s, South Korea’s adoptions dropped from an average of 6,000 per year to approximately 2,000 per year. 

In 1998, South Korean president Kim Dae-jung invited 29 South Korean adoptees from eight different countries to meet with him as he gave a public apology for the country’s failure to raise them. In recent years, Western countries such as Norway, Switzerland, and France are investigating and acknowledging their own culpability while other countries are stopping adoptions from South Korea altogether. As of 2024, the U.S. has not yet investigated its own accountability, however, in 2008, it ratified The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption in an effort to ensure adoptions would be in the best interest of the child. As for the four South Korean adoption agencies, they have denied any wrongdoing, saying that in sending children abroad, they were “just following government policy.” Eleana Kim believes that state policies played the ultimate role for what is possibly the largest adoptee diaspora in the world.

Eleana Kim: “There was interest in adoption as a form of population control. Each moment in South Korean modernity has had adoption fulfill a certain function. So mixed-race children were a problem—adoption. Oh, you have children who are poor and in institutions, or you have children born out of wedlock, or you have children from divorce… Whatever the issue, decade by decade, adoption has been seen as a solution.”

For many of the 200,000 South Korean children who were sent abroad, adoption was seen as a solution because they were seen as the problem—a problem to be erased as well as a product to be sold. But the repercussions indicate that the cost of being treated with anything less than human dignity has irreversible effects. As children, the adoptees were unable to speak for themselves, but now, as adults, many are forming communities, offering support, and helping each other locate their biological families. Some just want to find their parents and let them know that they’ve had a good life. Others struggle with depression and a sense of abandonment. Many are grappling with their identity, searching for peace, or seeking a reckoning with the injustices of their past.

Robyn Joy Park: “And really kind of flipped my world upside down, um, and had me really questioning then, like, ‘Well, well, who am I then?’”

Rebecca Kimmel: “It’s very very traumatic to say the least, to not understand what happened, to not be able to get answers about what the truth is, and to experience so many layers of gaslighting over time regarding what your real identity is.”

Robert Calabretta: “What do you do when you find out your origin story is marked with grievous injustice?”

In October 2024, Laurie Bender’s mother, Han Tae-soon, filed a lawsuit against the South Korean government and the Holt adoption agency for wrongfully sending away her daughter overseas. Although the mother and daughter finally reunited and uncovered the truth about the past, Tae-soon, now in her 70s, laments over what has been lost. The separation over so many years has left her feeling robbed of the decades-long relationship they were meant to have. When the two first reunited, Tae-soon couldn’t hold back tears of both joy and grief, holding and caressing her 50-year-old daughter as if she were still the 4-year-old child she had lost but had never stopped searching for.