SEOUL, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA, March 19, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Recent data and developments have prompted adoptees to call for closer examination of the funding and operations of South Korea’s National Center for the Rights of the Child (NCRC). This comes as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) prepares to release findings and adoptee files are scheduled for transfer by July 2025, marking a significant period for South Korea’s adoption system.

Funding Details Emerge
Records published on March 1, 2025, indicate that the NCRC contributed 55% of the 2024 budget for G.O.A’L, a well-known adoptee-run NGO. G.O.A’L is also the sole adoptee-focused organization represented on the NCRC’s board, according to available documentation. This financial and governance connection has led some adoptees to raise questions about the NCRC’s structure.

Record Access Under Review
A January 14, 2025, MBC documentary, The Disappeared Adoption Records: The Country That Erased Me, detailed issues with a 2 billion KRW digitization project managed by the NCRC from 2013 to 2022. The NCRC responded on January 15, 2025, confirming internal reviews and audits initiated in 2024. Parliamentary data shows that between 2021 and 2024, only 16.4% of 6,087 adoption record requests were granted.

Notable Recent Cases
Several events have highlighted challenges with the NCRC’s processes:
On October 10, 2024, Norwegian adoptee Alice Andersen requested her biological family’s medical history due to health conditions but was denied access.
On October 7, 2024, Han Tae-soon filed a lawsuit against the government and Holt Children’s Services, claiming insufficient efforts to locate her family before her daughter’s 1976 adoption. Case: 2024-Ga-57382, Jihyang Law, Phone: +82(0)2.3476.6002.
A Danish adoptee’s lawsuit, filed August 4, 2024, seeks her late father’s identity under the Special Adoption Act, with the NCRC declining to provide the information. Case: 2024-Dan-39214, Jihyang Law, Phone: +82(0)2.3476.6002.

TRC Investigation Progresses
The TRC announced on March 5, 2025, that preliminary results from its review of 367 forced adoptions from the 1960s to 1980s will be shared by late March. Operating independently of the NCRC, the TRC’s mandate extends through May 2025, with adoptee files set to transfer by July 2025, a timeline noted by adoptee groups.

Government Outlines Changes
On May 10, 2024, the Ministry of Health and Welfare announced plans to transition adoption oversight to government entities, including the NCRC, by July 19, 2025. Historical issues, such as incomplete or altered records, continue to be documented.

Adoptees Request Further Insight
Adoptee advocates have expressed interest in reviews of the NCRC’s funding sources, board makeup, and record management procedures before the July 2025 file transfer. With the TRC’s findings approaching, they see this as a key moment to explore longstanding aspects of South Korea’s adoption system.

JK Song
Punch Digital Marketing
namelessadoptee@proton.me

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Onno uit Enschede was een rotjoch, een klootzak. Op z’n 30ste werd hij gevonden in de duinen van Hoek van Holland. Vermoord. Voor zijn zusje Joske Kuut een schok, maar de dag erop ging haar leven weer gewoon verder. Ogenschijnlijk, want op vakantie brak ze. „Ik kan nu zeggen dat ik van hem houd.”

Dit verhaal gaat niet over Onno, een van de beruchte ‘tattookillers’, mannen met Chinese karakters op hun rug die in opdracht liquidaties uitvoerden. Dit verhaal gaat over zijn zusje, zijn enige zusje. Het zusje dat op 26-jarige leeftijd haar grote broer verloor.

In the United States, an adopted child can be resold online like an object. This system, called rehoming, affects 25,000 children each year, transferred to other families without any oversight. A scandal that reveals the serious flaws in the American system.

Behind the facade of adoption in the United States lies a sordid reality: adopted children are being resold online as mere objects . This system, known as rehoming , allows adoptive parents to part with a child by giving them to another family without any oversight from the authorities . A frightening practice that affects approximately 25,000 children each year and takes advantage of a worrying legal loophole .

Rehoming: A market for unsupervised adopted children

In many US states, adopting a child requires only a few days of training and a clean criminal record. But if parents feel the child doesn't meet their expectations , they can simply resell them online . Private agencies, operating without any official regulation , offer platforms where children are listed with photos, detailed descriptions, and even prices . "Here, it's a money-back guarantee. After adopting a child, you can decide you don't want them anymore." - Seven  to Eight.

Het contrast is groot. De Hardenbergse Pullen werkt niet meer aan de rand van het Oegandese dorpje Mpigi, maar woont in een nieuwbouwwoning in Hardenberg. Met haar vijf geadopteerde kinderen van Oegandese afkomst is ze uit Afrika gevlucht. Haar woning is bekostigd door een Hardenbergse weldoener. Zelf geld om er een te huren of te kopen heeft ze niet.

„Ik ben het land ontvlucht na een hele hoop negatieve ervaringen die me gewoon te veel zijn geworden.’’

Overval en verkrachting

Vooral een overval begin 2020 op haar weeshuis van stichting Home of Hope and Dreams heeft er bij haar ingehakt. „Ik was in Nederland toen ik erover hoorde. Waarschijnlijk werd de overval gepleegd door vijftien mannen en onder aanvoering van een oud-medewerker. Er zijn wel mensen opgepakt, maar tot een berechting is het nooit gekomen.’’

The country that receives internationally adopted children is the receiving country, and the country that sends them is the sending country. Sending has a stronger meaning of 'mechanically transmitting goods, electricity, radio waves, information, etc.' than 'sending people abroad.' Receiving simply means 'accepting money or goods.' The reason I looked into the meaning again is because of a sentence written by Lee Kyung-eun, the representative of human rights beyond borders, in <A country that abandons its citizens> (Geulhangari).

Lee Kyung-eun, the representative of Borderless Human Rights, says, “International adoption is a transaction that takes place in a market of illegality and injustice.” Reporter Kim Jong-mok

“I am not an object.” “I” am the 15-day-old baby “SK (the initials of his name).” In one chapter of the book, CEO Lee uses the form of a dream to represent SK. SK was almost illegally adopted from Korea to the United States in June 2012. In the process, he was in danger of being sent to a U.S. refugee child detention center. CEO Lee, who was the director of the Child Welfare Policy Division of the Ministry of Health and Welfare at the time, took the lead in repatriation, even going to U.S. courts. It was not an easy task. High-ranking officials from the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs treated SK as “someone involved in illegal activities.” The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, “I don’t know anything about it” until a high-ranking U.S. official contacted him. CEO Lee also dealt with Americans, including employees at the U.S. Embassy in Korea. CEO Lee says, “I suffered so much that I had to trade a tooth.” The book is also an indictment against several public officials in powerful ministries, such as the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Adoptees demand concrete support following first-ever government acknowledgment of adoption misconduct

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Wednesday found that past Korean governments were responsible for human rights violations in overseas adoptions from the 1960s to the 1990s, pointing to falsified records and inadequate supervision.

This marks the first official acknowledgment by the Korean government of the irregularities in the nation’s previous overseas adoption system — issues that hundreds of adoptees have been raising in recent years.

Following a yearslong probe, the TRC concluded that legislative gaps, inadequate government oversight and administrative failures led to widespread misconduct.

Adoptees in Australia are calling for an inquiry and formal apology following allegations South Korea committed mass human rights abuses in its inter-country adoption program.

Pippa McPherson says when she gave birth to her son she started to search for answers about her birth family. Source: Supplied

Pippa McPherson came to Australia as a four-month-old in 1986, to live with her adopted family in Melbourne.

 

She's still never spoken to her birth family in South Korea and believes the adoption paperwork she has is false, so she's never been sure of where she really came from, or if she has siblings.

 

U.S. couples adopting from abroad often think they’re helping vulnerable children. The reality is more complex–and poorly regulated.

When Katie and Calvin Bradshaw adopted three young sisters from Ethiopia in 2006, they believed they were saving AIDS orphans from a life of poverty or near-certain prostitution. But after learning English, the girls told their new parents that they believed the adoption agency, Christian World Adoption, had paid their birthfather for them. The girls said they had expected to return to their extended Ethiopian family, who were middle-class by local standards, as both CBS News and Australia’s ABC News reported. The Bradshaws were rightly horrified. (Today, the two younger girls are still with them, while the oldest daughter lives with Katie Bradshaw’s mother; in a lengthy response to the CBS News report, Christian World Adoption said it had no contact with the girls’ birth family).

I’ve heard a string of similar tales from families in Italy, Canada, Austria, and other Western countries adopting from Ethiopia, the current hot adoption source. In the past five years, Ethiopia’s adoptions to the United States alone have expanded exponentially: Americans adopted 442 Ethiopian children in 2005, and 2,277 in 2009, ranking Ethiopia right behind China as a source for our international adoptions. The combination of skyrocketing numbers and troubling stories suggests that Ethiopia has become the latest country beset by an all-too-common problem: a poor country in which unscrupulous middlemen are sometimes buying, defrauding, coercing, or even kidnapping children away from their families to be sold into international adoption.

Most nations’ adoption programs are relatively clean. But during some periods, in some countries–Cambodia between 1997 and 2002, for instance, or Vietnam between 2005 and 2009–evidence from government, newspaper, and NGO investigations strongly suggests that many international adoptions involved fraud. Serious problems have also been documented in such countries as Liberia, Nepal, the Marshall Islands, Peru, Samoa, and most notably, Guatemala, whose processes were so riddled with corruption that it was finally closed to adoption in 2009, after 10 years during which Americans adopted more than 30,000 of its children, in some years bringing home an astonishing one of every 100 babies born there.

By Jon Herskovitz

SEOUL, May 26 (Reuters) - An Olympic hero reminds South Korea of the pain of exporting its children, while an actress expounds the joys of parenthood and the government the rewards. But South Koreans still don't like adopting other people's children.

South Korea marked its home-grown adoption day earlier this month with incentives to encourage domestic adoption, telling citizens of the world's 12th largest economy its orphanages should not be filled with abandoned children.

But despite a sense of disgrace for once being one of Asia's largest providers of babies for adoption abroad, it has struggled to overcome ingrained attitudes about fostering them at home.

"Koreans have viewed adoption as something very shameful, embarrassing and fearful," said Stephen Morrison, an activist with a group called Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea.

A system of carefully kept family registries -- which normally go back several centuries -- places a premium on preserving blood lines and so discourages bringing in outsiders.

Those South Koreans who do adopt, often do so secretly. A wife might leave for the countryside, returning months later with an adopted child she says she gave birth to.

Morrison, himself a Korean adopted overseas, said attitudes have changed slightly over the past few years. Now, about a third of South Korean couples adopting children are willing to go public compared to almost none in the late 1990s.

Actress Sin Ae-la openly adopted a daughter in 2005 and the press coverage helped spur domestic adoptions in South Korea.

INCENTIVES AND ORPHANS

Olympic skier Toby Dawson is a reminder of South Korea's failure to adopt its own.

Dawson, born in South Korea and adopted by American ski instructors, became an overnight sensation in South Korea when he won a bronze medal at the Turin Olympics in 2006.

Since then, he had a tearful reunion in February 2007 with his biological father and is helping the South Korean city of Pyeonchang with its bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Thousands of babies are still abandoned every year due to divorce, economic hardship and the difficulty of raising children in a society that sometimes looks on single mothers with scorn.

In a bid to spur domestic adoption, the government has pledged to cut adoption fees and subsidise medical care.

"We now have the ability to take care of abandoned children and orphans within our borders," said Kim Geum-chan, a welfare ministry official.

Since 1958, when orphans from the Korean War and the abandoned children of foreign soldiers and Korean women began to be taken in by overseas families, about 160,000 South Korean children have been adopted abroad, the welfare ministry said.

Well over half of them ended up in the United States.

In the years leading up to the 1988 Olympics when South Korea was emerging as an economic power, it sent about 8,500 children a year abroad for adoption -- a statistic which became a national embarrassment. Now, the number is a little under 2,000 a year.

At Holt Children's Services in Seoul, rosy-faced babies who will likely soon be leaving South Korea, wait in a toy-strewn room for health checks with doctors.

Holt, named after Oregon farmer Harry Holt who adopted eight Korean war orphans in the 1950s, is one of the few international adoption agencies sanctioned by the government.

"I feel so proud and happy when I see pictures of those children with their new families and they are happy and healthy," said Holt spokeswoman Kim Eun-hee.

But some child welfare advocates want to halt international adoptions, saying they leave children emotionally scarred and in search of an identity.

"It is just not right that one of the world's biggest economies is still sending its abandoned babies overseas," said Jeon Soon-geol from the Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea.

(Additional reporting by Jessica Kim)

In September 2016, just as the presidential race was entering its final weeks, the State Department quietly proposed new regulations governing international adoption. Adoption advocates sounded the alarm, saying the regulations would severely hamper Americans’ ability to adopt overseas. I wrote about this for The Federalist just days before the November election.

Then, to almost everyone’s surprise, Donald Trump was elected president. On the day of his inauguration, Trump began a regulatory reform effort, announcing a moratorium on all new regulations from executive agencies. Ten days later, he issued an executive order requiring agencies to repeal two regulations for every new one they proposed.

Under this new scrutiny, the State Department soon withdrew its proposed adoption rule. Adoption advocates breathed a sigh of relief.

“If Trump hadn’t been elected, those regulations would have been implemented,” says Ron Stoddart, president of Save Adoptions. “It was his ban on new regulations that stopped them.”