Eleana Kim
The adoption of South Korean children into Western families has been ongoing since the end of the Korean War (1950-1953). Since then, more than 200,000 children have been sent overseas for adoption, with more than half adopted to the United States, and the rest to Western Europe, Canada, and Australia. South Korea’s foreign adoption program is the longest running program in the world, and is also a source of continual political controversy and public debate. The following presents a brief overview of the history of adoption from Korea and addresses some of the cultural and social factors that are related to the adoption issue.
Adoption in Korean History
It is often said that one reason children from Korea need to be adopted by families in foreign countries is because there is no tradition of adoption in Korean culture. This is, in fact, only partially true. In his book Korean Adoption and Inheritance (Cornell University 1983), anthropologist Mark Peterson argues that adoption in pre-modern Korea was historically linked to the problem of family inheritance and continuity of the bloodline. Since the Confucian transformation of Korean society in the 17th century, adoption has been a solution for ensuring the continuation of the father’s bloodline in the case of infertility or the inability to have sons.
In the 17th century, the ruling class (yangban) adopted an orthodox form of Confucianism from China, and instituted the Confucian Clan Code as a state ideology. This code excluded women from inheritance and thus drastically reduced their social status, whereas it gave men, especially first-sons, exclusive control over politics, property, and the family. A woman’s value under this system was directly related to her ability to produce sons for her husband’s family, in order to ensure the continuity of the patrilineal bloodline. With this transformation to neo-Confucianism, males became the exclusive heirs to family property and were the only ones permitted to perform ancestral rites. According to this code, only male relatives of a younger generation could be adopted from the patriline, usually between the ages of 20 and 30, so that they could inherit property and uphold the tradition of ancestor worship. After the yangban class instituted this conservative system, it gradually spread through Korean society, becoming the ideal model for family and social organization.
Before this conservative transformation of Korean society, however, women and men had equal rights to inheritance and women’s family genealogy was as important as men’s. There is evidence that until the 17th century, unrelated abandoned children were often adopted, as well as children related through the wife’s family. In addition, widows and unmarried women also adopted children. Despite this evidence of Korean adoption practices that share similarities to contemporary Western adoption, Mark Peterson in 1977 reported that Koreans understood adoption only in neo-Confucian terms, and that they found the American adoption of non-relatives to be “incomprehensible.”
International Adoption
The international adoption of South Korean children first began as a humanitarian response to the needs of thousands of children who were orphaned or separated from their families as a result of the Korean War. Many of these children, born to Korean women and fathered by American and European servicemen, were stigmatized because of their racial difference and illegitimate backgrounds. Immediately following the war, the South Korean government established Child Placement Service in 1954, and the following year, Harry Holt, a evangelical Christian from Oregon, responded to the plight of the mixed-race children by adopting eight of them. By 1956, Harry and Bertha Holt had established Holt Adoption Agency, and the Seventh Day Adventists and the Catholic Relief Service had also set up placement services for overseas adoptions. Between 1953 and 1960, around 3,500 Korean children were sent for adoption abroad; more than 90% of this first wave was of mixed-race parentage.
By the 1960s, full-Korean children began to be adopted overseas through the four government approved adoption agencies, Holt Adoption Agency, Social Welfare Society (formerly Child Placement Service), Eastern Child Welfare Society and Korea Social Service. The postwar period in Korea was one marked by massive poverty and large-scale social and economic transformations. South Korea, once a predominantly rural, agricultural economy of extended family households, became, within one generation, an urban, industrialized economy of nuclear family households. By the mid-1980s, three-quarters of the population was living in urban areas. The social implications for this transformation have been widespread. Young women from the countryside traveled alone to the cities to find work in factories, often being exploited physically and sexually. During the 1960s and 70s, poor female factory workers relinquished their children for reasons of poverty and illegitimacy. As the Korean economy improved in the 1980s, more liberal sexual practices among young people as well as the loosening of the traditional family structure contributed to the problem of unplanned pregnancies among single college-age women. Today, the majority of babies relinquished for adoption are born to middle- or working-class unwed mothers in their teens and early 20s.
Since the 1970s, there have been attempts to reduce the numbers of adopted children, to completely stop international adoptions, and to encourage domestic adoption by Koreans. Negative press coverage by the international media during the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games focused on the adoption issue, calling South Korea’s children its “greatest export.” In response to this criticism, the government implemented a quota system, intending to increase domestic adoption, and to gradually reduce international adoptions by three to five percent a year, with a projected end to adoptions by 2015. From a peak of more than 8,000 children sent abroad in 1986 alone, adoptions were reduced to around 2,200 per year by the early 1990s. During the 1997-98 IMF economic crisis, however, the decline in the number of adoptions was reversed, as financial woes created desperate situations for families, and increasing rates of divorce, domestic violence and bankruptcy coincided with thousands of children being relinquished to the state. Adoptions increased by nine percent between 1997 and 1998, and since then, overseas placements have hovered above 2,000 per year. This history indicates that adoption policy and practice in South Korea are exceptionally sensitive to economic fluctuations and international opinion.
International adoption quickly became institutionalized in the early 1960s to become a population and social welfare policy that hindered the development of alternative approaches for dealing with the needs of women and children. Despite South Korea’s dramatic economic and political development over the past 50 years, children continue to be born and relinquished. Imagining an end of adoption from South Korea requires finding an adequate solution for the estimated 7,000 children who are in need of state welfare intervention every year. In-country adoptions have been encouraged by the government through media campaigns and education, and domestic adoption reached a high of around 1,700 children in 1999. Still, adoption among South Koreans is still predominantly parent-centered, and physically or mentally disabled children often have no alternatives but to be placed in institutional care or adopted by families overseas. There is no easy solution to the adoption issue. Nevertheless, understanding the factors that help perpetuate international adoption is an important first step towards finding a solution.
The Status of Women
The status of women in Korean culture is one factor that is essential to understanding the adoption issue. After the Korean War, the new South Korean government embraced the conservative Confucian ethics of pre-modern Korean society. Although the South Korean constitution was influenced by American democratic principles and included protections for civil rights, personal liberties and the right to vote, the South Korean Family Law of 1960 effectively undermined the democratic rights of women by instituting male patriarchy as a legal fact. Despite opposition from women’s groups, the new South Korean government claimed neo-Confucianism as an essential part of Korean “heritage” and indigenous values, and ignored the pre-Confucian tradition that gave greater equality and opportunity to women. The Family Law essentially adapted the ancient Confucian Clan Code into modern law.
Under the Family Law, only the eldest male member of the patrilineage was recognized as the legal head of the household. He controlled the family registry, inheritance, and the legal status of all members of the family. Children born out of wedlock, therefore, were not legally recognized unless they were included in their maternal grandfather’s family registry. When a woman divorced her husband, she had no claims on the child, who was considered the father’s legal property. Women’s rights groups challenged the Family Law for nearly four decades, arguing for greater equality for women, but it was not until 1991 that the contradictions between the constitutional rights of women and the lack of rights afforded under the Family Law began to be addressed by the government.
Under the reformed law of 1991, it became possible for family members other than the eldest son to serve as the head of household. It also allowed husband and wife equal power in deciding issues of residence and property and prohibited age discrimination in inheritance. With this revision, women were also able to include their children on their own family registry, instead of having to petition their fathers or husbands.
These important legal changes, along with the many advances made possible by democratization, modernization, and globalization have helped improve the status of Korean women, yet many barriers to equal rights and opportunities for women still exist. The preference for sons in South Korea is one of the strongest in the world, and is reflected in unbalanced gender ratios and higher rates of female infant mortality, although there are some signs that this preference is softening among the young urban population. Nevertheless, job discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace are still prevalent, and women’s wages continue to lag behind men’s. As became clear during the IMF crisis, women are the last to be hired and first to be fired during periods of economic difficulty, and it is often assumed that once a woman has children she will give up her profession.
A primary reason that couples from Western countries have turned to places like South Korea to adopt is because they are unable to adopt healthy white babies in their own countries. Cultural acceptance of single motherhood in the West, along with family support and government aid for single parents has created a situation where more than 90% of single women decide to raise their children on their own. Korean culture is very family-oriented, and the shame accompanying single motherhood is often too great for a woman to endure. For a woman without financial or emotional support from her family, social network, or from the government, to raise a child on one’s own is an impossible choice. Effective sex education programs to help prevent unplanned pregnancies among young women and teenagers are key to reducing the numbers of children relinquished for adoption every year. In addition, greater financial and emotional support for single mothers, and increased openness among South Koreans to domestic adoption are vital to seeking an end to South Korea’s dependence on international adoption.