Era ending in international adoption

Publication date: 16 November 2014

LAST UPDATED: Sunday, November 16, 2014, 1:09 AM

By the age of 12, he refused to remove his hat, concealing the curly hair he inherited from his African American father.

His Korean playmates told him his skin was the color of "fried batter."

His soccer coach said he'd be a slave if it wasn't for Abraham Lincoln.

Andrew Bossard was born to a Korean mother and an American serviceman in South Korea in the mid-1960s, a time when mixed-race children were still very much taboo. He left on his 14th birthday, finding a home with his parents - Marilyn and David - on the Main Line.

Bossard was brought to America through Pearl S. Buck International in Bucks County, a nonprofit that shuttered its international adoption operations during the summer. The program is believed to be one of the first of its kind in the United States, ushering in an era of intercountry adoption that is also coming to an end.

A paradigm shift is taking place in countries across the globe, including the United States, that have enacted more restrictive adoption policies. As a result, the international adoption rate has plummeted by 70 percent since 2004 and squeezed out some long-established programs, such as the one founded by Buck.

"What we're seeing is the end of an era," said Adam Pertman, president of the Massachusetts-based National Center on Adoption and Permanency and author of the book Adoption Nation. "International adoption as we've come to know it is morphing into something new and something different and something that involves far fewer children."

The changes have been spurred in part by nationalism and improving economies in some countries as well as allegations over the years of baby-selling, kidnapping, and profit-driven corruption.

The U.S. role

South Korea, which allowed more than 150,000 children to leave since the Korean War, passed a 2012 law that limits international adoptions, promoting instead domestic ones and efforts to keep children with their birth parents. China's tighter restrictions include limiting overseas adoptions mostly to healthy, heterosexual married couples. Some countries, such as Romania, banned intercountry adoption for much of the last decade, only recently allowing adoptions by people with strong ties to the country.

The U.S. government also has played a role in the declining numbers. It joined an international treaty in 2008 known as the Hague Adoption Convention, which requires more stringent oversight of U.S. agencies and the foreign officials with which they work.

The new regulations, which advocates support, have added extra financial burdens in the way of more social workers as well as more costly insurance and fees. For Pearl S. Buck International, the confluence of higher costs and fewer children led to the program's demise, CEO Janet Mintzer said.

"You can't really support an adoption program when you have seven adoptions," she said. "It just doesn't make sense for us as an organization."

She added: "We had families waiting seven years to adopt a child from China. That's a long time to provide support."

The group's roots

Pearl S. Buck International will continue its mission of serving children through child sponsorship and running cultural exchange programs with countries such as China. The organization marks its 50th anniversary of those efforts this year.

But the organization's roots are in adoption. Buck, a Nobel Prize-winning author, founded it as the Welcome House in 1949 to adopt "unadoptable children."

At first they were mixed-race kids in the United States, but her efforts expanded in the 1950s to include children in war-torn countries such as Korea, and particularly mixed-race children fathered by American servicemen. The first U.S. organization to oversee international adoptions is believed to have been Holt International, which started in the 1950s.

Bossard, the son of an American GI and a Korean woman, was a sponsored child through Buck's nonprofit for years before he was adopted. His Korean mother raised him after his American father left when he was still a toddler. Each month, a woman from Maryland sent him money, postcards, and gifts.

As Bossard grew older, his mother believed he would have a better life in the United States. He arrived in May 1979, greeted at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York by Marilyn and David Bossard of Lower Merion.

Bossard said he had some struggles academically at Harriton High School, in Lower Merion Township, gravitating more toward sports such as soccer. But he found his career path at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, studying computer science and joining the Air Force ROTC.

After graduating, he delved fully into the Air Force and computer programming. As he rose through the ranks, he contributed to designing the computer programs that operated the SR-71 "Blackbird" spy plane.

Bossard also found his way back to South Korea during one of his deployments, eventually marrying a Korean woman. They have two daughters.

Bossard retired from the Air Force in 2010. He and his wife now live in South Korea. And he works as a civilian supporting U.S. and South Korean efforts to gather intelligence on North Korea.

Bossard favors South Korea's change in policy to promote domestic adoptions. For him, it shows that the country is economically strong enough to examine its past and address the issues that led so many children to leave. But he said the country has a ways to go.

"For most Koreans, it's natural for an American family to adopt mixed-race Korean children because 'they are not Korean,' " Bossard wrote in an e-mail. "I think mixed-race Korean adoption by a Korean family is not a 'normal/accepted' practice, yet. I hope that day will come sooner rather than later."

Countries: United States of America

Organizations: Pearl S. Buck International (Welcome House)

Persons: Adam Pertman