Adoption reform: A file photo showing social workers caring for babies at a community church in southern Seoul. — AFP
THE nation is set to overhaul its adoption system by ending the decades-old practice of outsourcing adoptions to private agencies, which has led to widespread allegations of abuse.
South Korea, Asia’s fourth-largest economy and a global cultural powerhouse, sent more than 140,000 children overseas between 1955 and 1999.
But an official enquiry concluded this year that the international adoption process had been riddled with irregularities, including “fraudulent orphan registrations, identity tampering, and inadequate vetting of adoptive parents”.
The rights of South Korean children had been violated, the landmark investigation by a truth commission found.
The independent body established by the state called for an official apology and blamed the government for the issues, especially a failure to regulate adoption fees that effectively turned it into a profit-driven industry.
South Korea will introduce a “newly restructured public adoption system, under which the state and local governments take full responsibility for the entire adoption process,” South Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare said.
The change is a “significant step towards ensuring the safety and promoting the rights of adopted children,” the ministry added.
International adoption began after the Korean War as a way to remove mixed-race children, born to Korean mothers and American soldier fathers, from a country that emphasised ethnic homogeneity.
It became big business in the 1970s to 1980s, bringing international adoption agencies millions of dollars as South Korea overcame post-war poverty and faced rapid and aggressive economic development.
But the system failed children, the truth commission said in March, with a failure to follow “proper legal consent procedures” for South Korean birth parents resulting in highly-publicised reports of lost children being put up for overseas adoption.
Under the new system, key procedures – such as assessing prospective adoptive parents and matching them with children – will be deliberated by a ministry committee, in accordance with the principle of the “best interests of the child”.
Activists, however, say the measure should be merely a starting point and warn it is far from sufficient.
“The government should prioritise implementing the findings of the truth commission, issue an official apology, and work to help the tens of thousands of Koreans who were sent abroad for adoption, said writer Lisa Wool-rim Sjoblom, a Korean adoptee who grew up in Sweden. — AFP
