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The New York Times
Opinion

Published: October 17, 2008
To the Editor:
Re “Korea Aims to End the Stigma of Adoption and Stop ‘Exporting’ Babies” (news article, Oct. 9):
That South Korea is working to encourage adoption within its own country is laudable. But even if South Koreans become more accepting of adoptive families, that will not address the underlying issue: the societal prejudice against unwed mothers and their children.

The New York Times
January 7, 2009
Ex-Prostitutes Say South Korea and U.S. Enabled Sex Trade Near Bases
By CHOE SANG-HUN
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea has railed for years against the Japanese government’s waffling over how much responsibility it bears for one of the ugliest chapters in its wartime history: the enslavement of women from Korea and elsewhere to work in brothels serving Japan’s imperial army.

Now, a group of former prostitutes in South Korea have accused some of their country’s former leaders of a different kind of abuse: encouraging them to have sex with the American soldiers who protected South Korea from North Korea. They also accuse past South Korean governments, and the United States military, of taking a direct hand in the sex trade from the 1960s through the 1980s, working together to build a testing and treatment system to ensure that prostitutes were disease-free for American troops.

The Korea Times
157,000 Children Adopted Overseas
By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
A total of 157,145 Korean children were adopted by foreigners during the past 50 years, the Overseas Korean Foundation reported Tuesday, and the majority of the children went to the United States.
The foundation, an organization affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said that 103,095 of the adopted children were sent to the U.S., while France, Sweden and Denmark received 11,090, 8,953 and 8,571, respectively.
The year 1985 saw the greatest number of overseas adoptions, with 8,837 children being received abroad. According to reports the number has steadily begun to decrease by 1,000 to 2,000 every year.

The New York Times International Edition
By CHOE SANG-HUN
Published: October 7, 2009
SEOUL, South Korea —
Photo:
Four years ago, when she found that she was pregnant by her former boyfriend, Choi Hyong-sook considered abortion. But after she saw the little blip of her baby’s heartbeat on ultrasound images, she could not go through with it.
Jean Chung for the International Herald Tribune

A Channel NewsAsia
November 1, 2008

Korean adoptees meet birthparents at homecoming
By Channel NewsAsia's Korea Bureau Chief Lim Yun Suk | Posted: 20 August 2008 0056 hrs

SEOUL : In recent years, South Korea has been promoting domestic adoption - partly to downplay the "baby exporting country" label.

North Korean Orphans: A Long-Running Story
Posted on November 16, 2007 by somefiercething

Three North Korean children found wandering in northeastern China have been granted refugee status in the United States, andoverseas rights groups say there could be thousands more. These “second-wave” orphans are mostly the children of North Korean women who were forced to marry Chinese men. But the problem isn’t new.Georgeta Mircioiu, 75, worked with North Korean orphans in her native Romania from 1952-59. Thousands of North Korean children had lost parents during the 1950-53 Korean War, and many were sent to like-minded Communist countries including China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern European countries. Here’s what she had to say about that experience. “Between 1952 and 1960, about 3,000 North Korean orphans were taught at special schools in Romania. About 1,000 were high-school and college students, and about 2,000 were younger,” Georgeta Mircioiu said in an interview.
“All of the other Eastern bloc countries offered to look after North Korean orphans, but Romania took the greatest numbers. Only about 500 orphans were sent to Bulgaria. All of them arrived in Eastern Europe after being housed in China for a while. Their voyage by train took about 10 days.”
“Some of the orphans were street children. Some were the children of deceased high-ranking North Korean officials, who still had families in the North, but were sent to Romania because the living conditions were better there. Romania was not great either, but at least they had good food, clean and decent shelter, and good sanitation and hygiene.”
“Many of the North Korean children were sick when they arrived in Romania. After the Korean War, due to poor nutrition and hygiene, many of them had parasitic diseases, such as intestinal worms or scabies. Some of them even had to be hospitalized for a while. When I arrived at the school in 1952, the school year was supposed to begin on Sept. 15, but it actually began on Oct.1, due to a quarantine caused by an infectious disease outbreak.”

The Hankyoreh
Ethical lapses aside, new health and welfare minister takes office
Civic groups protest appointment due to allegations of plagiarism and abuse of national health insurance system
Posted on : Mar.14,2008 13:23 KST
Despite objections from civic groups, President Lee Myung-bak has appointed Kim Soung-yee to head the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs. Kim has been under pressure to resign due to an array of ethical lapses, and has been accused of allegedly plagiarizing a research paper and illegally permitting his daughter, who has U.S. citizenship, benefit from South Korea’s national health insurance system.
Opposition political parties and conservative civic groups, which have demanded that Kim resign, criticized the Lee administration for pushing ahead with the nomination of Kim, saying that the administration made its “own decision after ignoring public opinion.”
Kim’s inauguration ceremony was held in Gwacheon, where the ministry is located. “While the process of getting to this place wasn’t smooth, it was an important opportunity to look back at my life,” Kim said in his inauguration speech. “Many changes, including the consolidation, job cuts and moving the offices have made it difficult for you, and I hope that everyone can cope with the changes in a positive way.” Under the new administration, the Ministry of Health and Welfare was merged with the family division of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, leaving the new ministry headed by Kim and the newly named Minstry of Gender Equality as separate entites.

The Korea Times
07-24-2007 18:31

Korean-American: Why Identity Does Matter

By Alex Lee
Contributing Writer

The Korea Times
By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter
The abortion rate of women who have sons is higher than those who have daughters. This was the finding of the College of Health Science at Yonsei University.
Professor Chung Woo-jin of the school has studied the delivery statistics of more than 6,000 women aged between 15 and 49 and found that a preference for sons along with religious beliefs greatly influenced the decision of women to seek abortions. Research results will be published in an international magazine, ``Journal of Biosocial Science,’’ next month.
In particular, women who have only sons have seen a 3.2-fold higher abortion rate than those who have only daughters. The abortion rate for women having only one son was 16.5 percent while that of women who have more than two sons was 71.7 percent.
In contrast the abortion rate for women who have only daughters was 15.9 percent while those with more than two daughters was 42.4 percent. Prof. Chung said that the result indicates that women having sons are more likely to seek abortions.

Chosun Ilbo
October 21, 2008
Korean-American Academics to Throw Light on Adoption
Korean-born academics who were adopted by Americans will attend a symposium titled “From Global to Glocal: The Future of American Studies” by the American Studies Association of Korea at Seoul National University to discuss adoption, still something of a taboo subject in Korea.
In a session titled “Korean Adoptee” on Friday, Eleana Kim (University of Rochester) will give a talk under the heading “Beyond Motherlands and Mother Love: Figuring Korean Adoptees in Global Korea,” and Kim Park Nelson (Minnesota State University) under the heading “Uri Nara, Our Country: Global and Translocal Communities of Korean American Adoptees”. They will describe how, based on their own experience, foreign adoptees who return to their motherland experience identity transformations through their new daily life.
ASAK president Kim Seong-kon said adoption, along with globalization, diaspora and immigration, has emerged as key topics in the culture review and theory field for the last three or four years.
The ASAK is a nationwide academic society whose members include American specialists in politics, economics, history, and culture.