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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.

JoongAng Daily
April 03,2009
Fostering families
[Changing attitudes to raising children]‘I always knew these children would leave someday, but the pain of separation was unimaginable.’
A constant runny nose plagued the baby boy, who looked like he’d never had a haircut. The social worker who had brought the 10-month-old child to the home of Yun Ik-sang, a 48-year-old pastor, said the problem was rhinitis.
The social worker handed the pastor a bag containing three diapers and a half-finished bottle of baby formula. She said the child’s mother had handed Yeong-su (not his real name) over to the foster care organization and would come back for him when her situation improved.
Yun and Lee greet their children after school. There are only 10 pupils in total at the village school.

A fight to change adoption law
By Shannon Heit
The Korea Herald 2009.11.13
Leveraging the help of a group of lawyers and a Korean unwed mothers organization, a group of expats in Seoul are driving a movement to create a major shift in how the country deals with adoptions.
With the support of Democratic Party Representative Choi Young-hee, this coalition presented its bill to revise the current Special Act Relating to Adoption Promotion and Procedure law at a National Assembly public hearing on Nov. 10.
The coalition has been working together for over a year to draw up a proposal for a new adoption law. Involved are three adoption-related groups - Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoptee Community of Korea (TRACK), Adoptee Solidarity Korea, KoRoot - an unwed mothers group, Miss Mama Mia, and the Gonggam Public Interest Lawyers Group.
What initially began last year as a request to the Anti-corruption and Civil Rights Commission for a probe into cases of allegedly inaccurate or falsified adoption records has expanded into a movement that could change the course of Koreas adoption program.

Adoption Mosaic
The Constellation
Fall 2008 Newsletter
Kim Park Nelson
Interview by Livia Montana
Livia Montana: You’re working on an oral history project with Korean adopted adults. How did you get interested in the project?
Kim Park Nelson: I’d been thinking about it for quite a long time, but I actually started it in 2002 as my Ph.D. dissertation project. I’d seen research that was supposed to be about adoptees but that didn’t really take adoptees’ voices into account. For instance, there’s a lot of adoption-related social work research where researchers would ask parents about their kids. Those answers were then used to represent the point of view of adoptees. Of course that’s not actually the point of view of adoptees, that’s the point of view of adoptive parents. So my initial intent was to work on a project that focused on the experiences of Korean adoptees.

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

Mother Jones
March/April 2009
Meet the Parents: The Dark Side of Overseas Adoption
Listen to an interview with the author.
http://www.motherjones.com/podcast/mojo-5-questions-international-adoption-scott-carney
After hours hunched behind the wheel of a rented Kia, flying past cornfields and small-town churches, I'm parked on a Midwestern street, trying not to look conspicuous. Across the way, a preteen boy dressed in silver athletic shorts and a football T-shirt plays with a stick in his front yard. My heart thumps painfully. I wonder if I'm ready to change his life forever.
I've been preparing for this moment for months in the South Indian metropolis of Chennai, talking to khaki-clad officers in dusty police stations and combing through endless stacks of court documents. The amassed evidence tells a heartrending tale of children kidnapped from Indian slums, sold to orphanages, and funneled into the global adoption stream. I've zeroed in on one case in particular, in which police insist they've tracked a specific stolen child in India to a specific address in the United States. Two days ago, the boy's parents asked me to deliver a message to the American family via their lawyer, seeking friendship and communication. But after traveling across 10 time zones to get here, I'm at a loss for how to proceed.

The Hankyoreh
New family registry system causes problems
Posted on : Mar.19,2008 15:29 KST
This year, the South Korean government abandoned its male-dominated family registration system, known as the “hoju,” or “family headship system,” and adopted a new system for registering families, but it has sparked a series of ill effects. Because the new system defines family members as being the descendants of the mother and father to whom the child is born, but does not allow for other kinds of family ties, it is impossible for divorced people who remarry, who do not share the same family bloodline, to register their new spouse’s children under their own names.
In one case, a divorced woman, who was recently remarried, had difficulty when she realized that her son was not listed on her family record. The son is the child of her new husband and his estranged wife. On March 13, the woman, who is only identified by the surname Park, was surprised upon seeing a copy of her “Family Relations Certificate,” a government document that lists the members of one’s family. The only person listed on the document is her new husband, and her son does not appear, even though she is the person currently raising the child. It was with this sense of surprise that Park requested that officials place her son on the document. She was surprised again when she discovered that the child’s biological mother was still registered as the child’s mother, even though she is unaware of where the biological mother lives now. “According to the record, my son and I are unrelated,” Park said. “I’m worried that my child will be hurt if he happens to find out that I’m not his mother when the document is submitted to his school.”
Another woman, who is only identified by the surname Seo and is also remarried, was shocked when she recently found that her son, who is the biological child to whom she gave birth with her former husband, was still registered as one of her family members on the document, along with two daughters she had had with her new husband. When she asked a government official whether she could remove her son’s name from the document, in effect saying that he is no longer a member of her family, the official said, “No.”
“It doesn’t matter to my husband because he knows that I got remarried. But I have sleepless nights because I worry that my husband’s family, his colleagues at work and our two daughters may become aware of this fact,” Seo said. “Does the document define a family member as a person who lives with a person now?”

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.

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.