Brief History of International Korean Adoption

Korean adoption started in 1953, and today there are upwards of 200,000 Korean Adoptees that have been sent worldwide. In the 1950s thru part of the 1960s, the larger percentages of children that were sent for International Adoption were those who were mixed "blood." These were children born to Korean women and American or UN soldiers. It was then-President Syngman Rhee’s ‘one nation, one people (ilguk, ilmin)’ policies which emphasized ethnic homogeneity and fueled the drive to purge the country of its half-Korean children. Since the advent of international adoption from South Korea, many children relinquished or lost to adoption have been orphaned, abandoned and even taken to orphanages by people other than the biological parents. Many were children whose families may have been in crisis (death, divorce, etc.), and many still were born to unwed mothers. Single mothers today remain castigated in Korean society.

“At the peak of the adoption exodus, in the mid-1980s, 24 babies left their birth country every day to be taken into the care of foreigners” (The Economist, May 23, 2015). It was during the 1988 Seoul International Olympics that South Korea attracted the attention of journalists, including Bryant Gumbel of NBC who commented that Korea’s primary export was its babies.

The United States has been the largest receiving country for international adoption from Korea, receiving well over 50% of all Korean Adoptees. The second and third largest receiving countries have been France and Sweden. While the majority of adoptees were sent to the US and Europe, Korean Adoptees have been sent to countries including New Zealand, Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands (a territory of Denmark).

15,000 Korean adoptees live in Minnesota alone and currently over 200,000 total in the United States.