Korea's Adoption Boom: A System Built on Lies

Eleni Zampelis,

Athens, Greece

Photo by Robson Hatsukami Morgan on Unsplash

For years, South Korea wasn't just renowned for its technological boom or cultural exports but for a far more sinister reputation. It was the planet's leading baby exporter. Over 200,000 kids had been exported, their fate bound up with stories of second chances and hope. But the gleaming stamp of approval that South Korea peddled to the rest of the world had a stomach-churning underside: a few of these kids weren't orphans. They were kidnapped.

This was no botched experiment in humanitarianism. It was a business enterprise, an adoption business fueled by institutional dishonesty, government collusion, and unlimited longing in the West. Something which began in reaction to the Korean War, when, in fact, there were war orphans to be rescued, became increasingly a lucrative cycle of fabricated documents, erased histories, and pilfered lives .

Mothers young, single, and alone, were put in lose-lose positions. They were promised that their babies would be sent to better lives via adoption: some were convinced, some were misled, and many were simply not told the details. There are documented cases of babies being given out as stillborn at birth and then adopted abroad under assumed names. Years later, over every warm family reunion, there looms a grotesquely unfair image, a life built on government dishonesty and shattered trust.

Adoption agencies, some of them religiously affiliated, were part of the scam. They fabricated new histories, manufactured abandonment narratives, and peddled these children to unsuspecting foreign parents. Along the way, the government of South Korea was a willing and enthusiastic partner, not passive but encouraging this practice as a quick solution to national shame over unmarried motherhood. Rather than reforming a culture unfairly severe toward single mothers, Korea shipped its problem abroad.

Adoptees grew up with entire generations assuming their names were pseudonyms. They were exported abroad and raised knowing they were lone beings worldwide. But the truth lay in wait for them, most times hidden deep in closed files and fabricated papers. When they matured, most embarked on discovering who they were, only to realize that the past on which they were indoctrinated to remember was a fabrication. Their names were not their own. Their birthdays were made up. Their families had been searching for them all along.

Adoptees continue to fight for access to their actual birth certificates to hold accountable the institutions that misled them, and to recover their stolen names. What were once individual quests have now become a loud cry of outrage. They are now suing agencies. They are fighting governments. They are reclaiming their stories.

The world cannot stand by. What occurred in Korea was not one isolated error but a willing profiteering on the backs of the weak for the sake of love and charity. It requires more than sympathy, it involves justice, it needs truth, and it requires reform. Governments must be held accountable. Agencies must be held responsible. And policy in the future must be founded not upon cover-up but openness.

Adoption, if honest and moral, is a beautiful fragment of virtue. But built on deception, it is a human rights violation. To all the Korean adoptees searching for the pieces of an unremembered past, the struggle isn't personal but one that can alter the world. It is about the right to be told that they exist, that they are from somewhere, and why they were taken away. No child should ever have to live a lifetime wondering who they are. And no nation should ever permit its most vulnerable to be auctioned off to the highest bidder on the premise of love.