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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.”

The attached presentation, "Earning a Secure Attachment Style," is the property of Eli Fehler of Adaptable Human Solutions and cannot be reproduced without permission. Please send all requests for permission to: [email protected].
The presentation was originally given at the ASK Forum on Mental Health and Adoption IV: Interpersonal Relationships on Aug. 27, 2011.

JoongAng Daily
October 29, 2008
Searching for the holy grail amid the ruins of war
[Perspective]
With the won’s tailspin causing much expat distress these days, and with the “worst of the panic” clearly not over (despite what you may have read in my last column), I decided to stick to a good, old-fashioned inspirational story this week.
As such, it was very lucky that I happened to meet Misty Ann Edgecomb, a journalist from Maine in the United States. She came here in late September on a Fulbright grant to research just such a story - an account of what she says is the first international adoption of a Korean child by a single parent.
It begins when Edgecomb’s then 24-year-old grandfather-in-law, Paul Raynor, arrives in Seoul during the Korean War as a U.S. soldier.

Mother Jones
November/December 2007 Issue
Did I Steal My Daughter? The Tribulations of Global Adoption
The answers are never easy when you enter the labrynth of global adoption.
By Elizabeth Larsen
I FIRST MET MY DAUGHTER in the lobby of the Westin Camino Real, the grandest hotel in Guatemala City. The night before, my husband Walter and I had soothed our nerves running on the treadmills in the fitness center, where a polite attendant handed us plush white towels and spritzed the equipment with a flowery disinfectant. Afterward I wrote a series of letters to our daughter. Because children adopted from overseas usually have little information about their history, parents are advised to document the trip as best they can, creating what is known as an "adoption story."
Reading the journal now, more than two years later, it feels so self-conscious. "We've been waiting so long to meet you—almost seven months!" the first entry reads. "Ever since you were seven days old and the agency emailed us your beautiful photos, we've wondered what you will be like. We fell in love with you that minute!" Gone is any sense of the surreal. Walter and I already had two biological sons; now we were jetting into a Third World country with the sole aim of leaving with one of its daughters. (Wanting a girl, we'd opted for the sure bet that adoption offers.) I mentioned, but didn't dwell on, the brutal poverty outside our hotel windows, focusing instead on how my sons were looking forward to meeting their little sister.

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.

Joongang Daily
11.26.2008

Loving message for a lost mother
Donald Gordon Bell, known only as A-20 when he was a child at a Seoul orphanage, has long sought his biological mother to give her a message. But this 56-year-old adoptee’s message is not one of resentment, as one with a stereotypical view of adoptees might assume.
Instead, it is to convey his gratitude for her decision to give him away. He said it comes from an understanding of the situation she found herself in. “I want her to know I don’t have any grudge against her,” said Bell, who grew up in Los Angeles after he was adopted at the age of four.

Aired on KBS Thursday May 15, 2008
Link to Kim Sunee's KBS documentary:
http://www.kimsunee.com/video.html
- go to #3: KBS Documentary of Kim's Trip to Korea
Kim Sunee is the author of the memoir "Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home" published in January 2008. This documentary follows her from Birmingham to Korea.
www.kimsunee.com

Information, Danish newspaper
Lørdag 24. maj 2008 (2008.5.24)
MED ANDRE ØJNE
Red en voksen, køb en spæd kineser
Den lave fertilitetsrate i de vestlige lande er i dag den primære grund til, at nogle vælger at adoptere. Det danske adoptionsselskab AC Børnehjælp kunne i virkeligheden lige så godt hedde AC Voksenhjælp, siger Maja Lee Langvad, der selv er adopteret - og i øvrigt lesbisk
22. maj 2008
Af: KRISTINA NYA GLAFFEY

Information, Danish newspaper
16. juni 2008
Af: MAJA LEE LANGVAD
ADOPTION
International adoptioner en industri
Forskellen på adoptionsbranchen og andre brancher er, at der i adoptionsbranchen handles med mennesker. Men i og med, at det er en industri, har adoptionsselskaberne også en interesse i at fokusere på de gode historier
Information bragte den 23. maj en kronik af Anders Christensen (formand for adoptionsselskabet AC Børnehjælp) (AC) og Gitte Cordes (næstformand for AC Børnehjælp) (GC), som er bekymrede over den stigende kriminalitet i international adoption. AC og GC tegner et forsimplet billede, og deres forklaringer er kun overfladiske. Man må grave et spadestik dybere for at forstå dynamikken i international adoption og dermed også den voksende kriminalitet.