Archive

JoongAng Daily
April 1, 2009
Unwed moms brave stigma, lower incomes
[First in a two-part series]
Aeranwon trains, shelters, counsels women with nowhere else to go
She might not have much money, but she still has her son.
Despite deeply embedded prejudice against unwed mothers in Korea, Kim, 36, decided to keep her child after she broke up with her boyfriend.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Sunday, March 15, 2009

International adoptions by Americans get really tough
By Sally Kalson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Katie Houser tried to adopt a child from Honduras four years ago, but gave up when that country's government stopped releasing children.
Late last year, she shifted her focus to Ethiopia, where the process was taking about six months.

The Korea Times
2.25.09
Network for Unwed Mothers Established
By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
An American physician is working to support unwed mothers in Korea.
Richard Boas has recently established the ``Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network'' to support tens of thousands of unmarried mothers in the country. From supporting research on the actual lives of these women to meeting policymakers to emphasize the importance of their livelihood, the network is striving to help single mothers raise their children on their own.

SUSANNE'S CALL
Stop Sending Babies Abroad
Susanne is an adoptee in Sweden who published the following text in the Korea Herald, 17 December, 2003 calling for an immediate end to international adoption from Korea.

Please stop sending Korean babies for adoption to Sweden and other countries. Why? From my point of view as an adoptee, I want to emphasize several reasons.
The first is racism and discrimination against Korean women which, as an adult woman with an East Asian appearance, I and other Asian women face on a daily basis.
From Sweden, and other Western countries, there is a flourishing sex tourism to East and Southeast Asia. Some travel agencies have specialized in these kinds of tours and the horrifying business is affecting the adoptees. We become victims of this tragic sex tourism, as we are perceived and treated as prostitutes in Swedish society. Many Korean adopted women have been assaulted by words such as "whore, go home to your country," and some adoptees have even been attacked physically by Swedish people. The racism among Swedes toward Asians is very strong. This affects our lives and is a big burden on our sense of happiness and quality of life.

JoongAng Daily
February 16, 2009
Even fertile parents are deciding to adopt kids
Kang Eun-mi, living in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi, is happily married with three children: a 12-year-old son and two daughters, one aged six years and the other 17 months.
Kang said she loves all of her children, though only one of them is biologically hers. Kang adopted the two daughters when they were newborns.
“I wanted my son to have siblings,” Kang said. She adopted her two daughters though she was still physically capable of bearing more children, she said. Kang has been open about adoption with her family, relatives and neighbors as well as her two daughters.
“I see them as my own children. Sometimes I’m confused about which one is an adoptee and which one is not,” Kang said.

Adoption & Fostering
Volume 32 Number 3 2008
Degrading attitudes related to foreign appearance: Interviews with Swedish female adoptees from Asia
Frank Lindblad and Sonja Signell
The Stress Research Institute, Stockholm
Key words:
international adoption, transracial adoption, degrading attitudes, prejudice, racism, discrimination, women

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.

Oh My News
Published 2008-12-17
Genes, Schemes and International Adoption:
Solo show 'Black Tie' puts Korean adoptee Miriam Yung Min Stein's search for identity on the stage
Jan Creutzenberg (RhusHeesen)

In the Old Testament, Miriam is the Hebrew woman who hides baby Moses in a reed basket at the shores of Nile and watches how an Egyptian princess finds and subsequently adopts the future prophet. The story of another Miriam begins quite similar, but it did not happen in biblical times.

From Hampshire Public Radio
Word of Mouth
THE PROBLEM WITH GLOBAL ADOPTION
By Virginia Prescott on Monday, November 10, 2008.
http://www.nhpr.org/node/18966
LISTEN: WINDOWS MEDIA | MP3
International adoptions are steadily rising in the U.S., Canada and Europe. In 1995, around 22,000 children were adopted from developing countries. In 2006, that number swelled to just under 40,000. More than half of those kids were brought to homes here in the U.S. Behind those numbers is mounting evidence that some of those babies are not really orphans at all.

Foreign Policy
www.foreignpolicy.com
November/December 2008
The Lie We Love
By E. J. Graff
Foreign adoption seems like the perfect solution to a heartbreaking imbalance: Poor countries have babies in need of homes, and rich countries have homes in need of babies. Unfortunately, those little orphaned bundles of joy may not be orphans at all.
ALEXANDER MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images