Archive

Adoption and the Best Interests of the Child
Chantal Saclier - Coordinator of the ISS / IRC
Written for : Intercountry Adoption - Developments, trends and perspectives - Chapter 3 Editor : Peter Selman - Publisher : BAAF - British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering - Skyline House, 200 Union Street, London SE1 OLX, UK - ISBN 1 873868 84 7 - Year 2000
A presentation of this book is available on ISS web site in the IRC Library data bank.
Introduction
Having lived for several years in developing countries, where I was able to observe the conditions in which poor families have to survive, in which numerous children live and are looked after in institutions,and where I had the opportunity to meet professionals involved in child welfare from both local NGOs and governments and having worked for some time on matters relating to intercountry adoption while
living in receiving countries, I can appreciate the complexity of the issues involved when considering the bests interests and the rights of the child in international adoption.

The Progressive, January 1988
Babies for sale. South Koreans make them, Americans buy them
by Matthew Rothschild
Seoul, South Korea. Five pregnant women sleep on blankets on the tile floor of a small room. They keep their personal belongings in three wooden closets on one wall above their feet. This is home, at least until the babies come. The dormitory is called Ae Ran Won, and it is one of a dozen homes for unmarried women in South Korea. Ae Ran Won can hold fifty pregnant women in its ten rooms, but when I was there in November, it had only thirty-five. These women supply the raw material for a peculiar South Korean business: the export of babies to the United States. U.S. families are adopting 6,000 Korean children a year, most of them infants, at a price of about $5,000 a head.
Korea is by far the largest supplier of foreign babies for the U.S. adoption market; 62 percent of all babies adopted from abroad are South Korean. That amounts to 10 percent of the total adoptions in the United States by families unrelated to the adoptees. Many of the babies come from unwanted mothers' homes, about 250 a year from Ae Ran Won alone. At first, the women do not want to give up their babies. According to the questionnaire that we distribute at the orientation interview, 90 percent want to keep the babies, says Kim Yongsook, the director of Ae Ran Won. But after counseling, maybe 10 per cent will keep them. We suggest that it's not a good idea to keep the baby without the biological father, explains Kim Yong Sook, and if the unwed mother and biological father are too young or too weak financially, we suggest that they give the baby up for adoption. We can't push, we can suggest.
After delivery at a hospital, the baby is taken from the mother and given to one of four adoption agencies licensed by the South Korean government. The agencies then place the baby with a foster mother until an American or European family can be found to adopt it. For some of the Korean mothers, the experience hurts. Just after delivery, they are very upset, says Kim Yong Sook, who was a social worker and an unwed mothers' counselor for eleven years for Holt Children's Services, the largest adoption agency in Korea, before joining Ae Ran Won. They have guilt feelings and avoidance feelings. I'd like to see my baby again, they say. Sometimes they have bad dreams. They miss the baby and have a lot of pain. Most of the mothers are poor women from low-paying factory or clerical jobs. They do not receive payment for their babies, though medical expenses - including delivery costs - are picked up by the adoption agency that takes the baby. Ae Ran Won provides free room and board for up to a year, free vocational training, and as much as $100 to help the mother adjust when she leaves Ae Ran Won. Like most of the homes for unwed expectant mothers, Ae Ran Won is supported by the Korean government, the adoption agencies, and charitable donations. On the other side of Seoul, at the end of a narrow open-air fruit and vegetable market in a poor section of town, a two-year-old boy pees in the street and a mangy white dog prowls about. Two houses down is Sung Ro Won Babies' Home, an orphanage for infants under three. It, too, is a supplier for the U.S. market. The orphanage, which had 106 infants when I visited, turns over at least that number each year to Holt and other agencies for foreign adoption. Almost all are abandoned and brought here by the Seoul police, says Kim Chong Chan, the superintendent of the babies's home. Some kids are waiting now, in jail or some other place. Son Migu was born on December 8, 1986, and was abandoned in a motel that same day. She has a pony tail standing straight up on the top of herhead. Dressed in a pink frilled shirt and white thermal stockings, she sits up in one of the twenty-four white crated cribs that crowd the room. All are occupied. In one month, Son Migu will go to her American family. In a nearby room, eleven girls who are two-and-a-half sing Kumbaya, My Lord. Some clutch my blue blazer. Ten boys in the next room greet me in unison, then some call me "appah" or dad. They bring out brown envelopes with pictures of Americans. Kim Chong Chan goes over the photos with them, explaining about their new parents.
Kim Chong Chan takes me to his office. On his desk, under the glass top, is a long poem from a grateful American couple, praising God for sending such a wonderful child: He picked up out baby; "Our daughter so fine/And delivered her to us Via Northwest Airlines."

For International Adoption by Tobias Hubinette & Anna Hubinette
- This material was presented at G.O.A.L's Conference, August, 1999
1. Presentation
My Swedish name is Tobias Hubinette, and my Korean name is Lee Sam-dol. I was found on a train between Seoul and Yosu somewhere around Chonju on the 22nd of September 1971. I was named Chonju-Lee, and my birth date was set as the 12th of August 1971.
I was adopted to Sweden at seven months age and grew up in a small industrial town called Motala in the mid-south of Sweden. My mother was a pre-school teacher at a kindergarten and my father a welder at a workshop. I have a three years younger sister also adopted from Korea, born in South Cholla. When I was seven years old my parents divorced, and I grew up together with my mother and sister. Today my father has a new wife and my mother a new husband.
I studied classical languages at college, and I have a bachelor´s degree in Irish Gaelic at Uppsala university. This coming term I will take a bachelor´s degree in Korean at Stockholm university.
I am working as a media researcher and I am the editor of Um & Yang, magazine for the adopted Korean association in Sweden.

Texas Wesleyan Law Review
Spring, 2004
10 Tex. Wesleyan L. Rev. 343
SYMPOSIUM: INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION AND CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION: INTERNATIONAL ASIAN ADOPTION: IN THE BEST INTEREST OF THE CHILD?
Kathleen Ja Sook Bergquist, Ph.D.+

+ Assistant Professor, Illinois State University, School of Social Work. M.S.W., Norfolk State University; Ph.D. in Counselor Education, The College of William and Mary.

A Permanent Solution to a Temporary Problem?
50 years of Korean adoption
GOA’L Seminar
Eleana Kim, NYU
Notes from talk given at the UNESCO Building on July 17, 2004
For the past several months, I have been volunteering at different organizations, talking to lots of people related to adoption, doing historical, media and academic research. I have no personal connection to adoption in the sense that I am not a member of the adoption triad—as birth parent, adoptive mother or adoptee. What I hope to offer, as an anthropologist, a Korean American, and as someone who’s been following adoption-related issues for since 1999, from both the American and Korean sides, is a perspective on Korean adoption as it has developed over the past fifty years into what we now know as “international adoption,” a phenomenon that has become naturalized in the West as an alternative form of family making. I also want to discuss the expansion of post-adoption services over the past decade and the emergence of adult Korean adoptees as a new kind of Korean diaspora.
Part I

Prepared for Canada-Korea Social Policy Symposium II
January 27-28, 2005
Gender Dimensions of Family Policy in Korea
Yeong-Ran Park (Department of Social Welfare, Kangnam University)
I. Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to explore the gender dimensions of family policy in Korea, and to draw some implications for constructing more effective responses to family issues that are posing grave concern to contemporary Koreans. Korean society will enter a new phase in the development of family policy as “the Ministry of Gender Equality” will be changed to “the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family” in the year 2005. This was the decision made by the Presidential Committee on Government Innovation and Decentralization in order to strengthen and coordinate family related policies and to respond to the low fertility problem that has emerged as a top priority national agenda.
Many people hope that this will be an opportunity to reshape and develop new family policies that will help prevent and solve “family crisis” and restore family stability. Yet, for some, this shift is perceived as rather disturbing and disappointing event since the Ministry, which has stood for gender equality and has worked for the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, seems to be clouding its fundamental identity and mission.

Adoption in Korea, Then and Now
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.”