Her biggest concern, dormant for many years, got here speeding again immediately: had she adopted and raised a kidnapped baby?
Peg Reif’s daughter, adopted from South Korea within the Eighties, had despatched her a hyperlink to a documentary detailing how the system that made their household was rife with fraud: paperwork falsified, infants switched, kids snatched off the road and despatched overseas.
Reif wept.
She was amongst greater than 120 individuals who contacted The Related Press this fall, after a sequence of tales and a documentary made with Frontline uncovered how Korea created a child pipeline, designed to ship kids overseas as rapidly as doable to satisfy Western demand. The reporting shook adoption communities all over the world with particulars about how companies competed for infants — pressuring moms, bribing hospitals, fabricating paperwork. Most who wrote have been adoptees, however some have been adoptive mother and father like Reif, horrified to study that they had supported this method.
“I can’t stand the thought that somebody lost their child,” Reif mentioned. “I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t know how to make it right. I don’t know if I can.”
Forty years in the past, she was scuffling with infertility. She and her husband pinned their goals for a household on adopting a child from Mexico, paid an company hundreds of {dollars} and waited for months. Then the company’s administrators have been arrested, they usually realized that these Mexican infants had been taken from their households towards their will. Reif was heartbroken, however remembers even now taking a look at her husband and saying: “Thank God we don’t have a child who was stolen.”
However now she isn’t positive of that. As a result of then they adopted two Korean kids, and introduced them to their house in rural Wisconsin, first a son after which a daughter. The 2 weren’t organic siblings, however each arrived with surprisingly comparable tales of their recordsdata: their younger single moms labored in factories with fathers who disappeared after they obtained pregnant.
Again then, Reif nonetheless believed the widespread narrative about overseas adoption: it saved kids who may in any other case dwell the remainder of their lives in an orphanage, die or be damned to poverty.
“I don’t believe that anymore,” Reif mentioned. “I don’t know what to believe.”
Cameron Lee Small, a therapist in Minneapolis whose apply caters to adoptees and their households, mentioned many are feeling an intense sense of betrayal. Particular person adoptees had lengthy shared tales of falsified identities. However the revelations this yr pointed to systemwide practices that routinely modified infants’ origin tales to course of adoptions rapidly, together with itemizing them as “abandoned” even once they had identified mother and father.
Small, who was additionally adopted from Korea within the Eighties, summarized what he’s been listening to from adoptees: “I’m kind of back to nothing. What do I believe now? Who can I believe?”
Reif’s daughter, Jenn Hamilton, spent her life considering she was undesirable, usually quipping: “that’s what happens when you’re found in a dumpster as a baby.”
It has taken a toll on her all her life: She’s been fortunately married for 9 years, she mentioned, however she has this insatiable insecurity: “I constantly find myself asking my husband, ‘Are you mad at me? Did I do something wrong? Do you want to leave me?’”
She has no thought anymore if abandonment was ever actually her story, with revelations of abuses so systemic that even the Korean authorities likened it to “trafficking.”
“You can’t make that many mistakes. It has to be intentional. It was this huge tree of deception,” she mentioned. “I feel disgusted.”
Holt Worldwide, the U.S.-based company that pioneered adoptions from Korea, didn’t reply to repeated requests for remark for this story.
Reform is sweeping throughout Europe — nations have launched investigations, halted overseas adoptions and apologized to adoptees for failing to guard them. However the US, which has taken in probably the most adopted kids by far, has not completed a evaluation of its personal historical past or culpability.
The U.S. State Division instructed AP this summer time that it could work with its historian to piece collectively its historical past, and detailed preliminary findings that some paperwork may need been falsified. Nevertheless it mentioned there was no proof that U.S. officers have been conscious of it. The State Division has since mentioned it has “been unable to identify any records that could provide insight into the U.S. government role in adoptions from South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Korea’s Nationwide Police Company confirmed a rise in adoptees registering their DNA for household searches — each at home police stations and diplomatic workplaces throughout North America and Europe — within the weeks following the discharge of the AP tales and documentary in September. Greater than 120 adoptees registered their DNA in October and November, in comparison with a mean of lower than 30 a month from January to August.
Korea’s authorities has maintained that adoptions have been a essential software to look after needy kids, together with infants of unwed moms or different kids deemed as deserted. Nevertheless, Korea’s Ministry of Well being and Welfare acknowledged to AP that the adoption increase within the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s was presumably fueled by a want to scale back welfare prices.
Korea’s Reality and Reconciliation Fee has been investigating authorities accountability over overseas adoption issues since 2022, prompted by complaints filed by lots of of adoptees, and is anticipated to launch an interim report in February. The Fee has posted the AP tales on its web site.
A legislation handed in 2023 mandates that each one adoption data be transferred from personal companies to a authorities division known as the Nationwide Middle for the Rights of the Baby by July, to centralize the dealing with of household search requests. The middle has confirmed that personal companies maintain about 170,000 adoption recordsdata, however director Chung Ick-Joong doubts it is going to purchase an area to retailer and handle all these data in time, as a consequence of monetary constraints and different challenges. The company expects household search requests to extend dramatically — “possibly by 10-fold,” in keeping with Chung — but has funding so as to add solely 5 workers members to its workforce of six searchers.
Chung acknowledged that flaws in adoption legal guidelines had persevered for many years, and Korea solely required adoptions to undergo courts and delivery data to be preserved after 2012.
“It’s difficult to determine who was responsible for the inaccuracies in records before then,” he mentioned. “The adoption agency might have been at fault, the biological parents may have lied, or something might have gone wrong at the orphanage … no one truly knows what the truth is.”
Korean adoption companies have principally declined AP’s requests for remark in current months, usually citing privateness considerations.
Advocates insist that the majority adoptive households thrive, with each the mother and father and youngsters fortunately residing their lives with out questioning the business as Reif and Hamilton have.
Hamilton grew up in a rural, virtually completely white neighborhood in Wisconsin, and again then all she wished was to be accepted. However having kids of her personal modified that. When her first baby was born, she checked out him, and it took her breath away.
“It can’t explain it, like this is the first person I know in my life that I’m biologically related to,” she mentioned.
She wished to study her personal historical past, so her kids might know theirs. She wrote a letter to her adoption company, which inside weeks linked her with a girl they mentioned was her mom. It was emotional, stunning.
However quickly she felt like she had extra questions than solutions. The girl’s identify didn’t match the one listed on paperwork, and the identify she gave for the daddy was additionally totally different. Birthdates didn’t match, the birthplace didn’t both. They’d not met in a manufacturing unit, she mentioned, that they had been pen buddies.
Hamilton requested the girl to take a DNA take a look at, however she mentioned she didn’t know how you can entry one. Hamilton got here to consider this girl was not her delivery mom.
The AP’s reporting discovered quite a few instances the place companies linked adoptees with supposed delivery households, just for them to later uncover after emotional conferences that they weren’t associated in any respect.
Hamilton has been attempting to untangle the DNA outcomes on her father’s aspect, contacting folks distantly associated, cousins as soon as eliminated, half nice aunts.
“It becomes an obsession,” Hamilton mentioned. “It’s like a puzzle that you start, and you have to find the missing pieces.”
Lynelle Lengthy, the founding father of InterCountry Adoptee Voices, the most important group of adoptees on the earth, mentioned governments on the very least have to legally mandate that companies present adoptees with their full and unredacted paperwork, with out the fee now usually required.
Lengthy mentioned mother and father like Reif have an necessary position, as a result of in Western nations, legal guidelines at all times favored the wishes of adoptive mother and father — designed to make adoptions faster and simpler. Many clung to the narrative that they saved needy orphans who must be grateful, she mentioned, particularly within the U.S., the place the reckoning rocking Europe has not taken maintain.
“We really need adoptive parents in the United States, if they have any inkling of guilt or shame or loss, to step up, take responsibility and demand that legislation be put in place to criminalize these practices and prevent it from ever happening again,” Lengthy mentioned.
Hamilton is near her mother and father; she simply renovated the basement to accommodate their visits. She’s unhappy for herself, she mentioned, however sadder for her mom, who’s determined to study if her kids truly had mother and father someplace, looking for them.
“And I’m like, ’why, so you can send us back?” Hamilton mentioned. “I don’t want to be a victim.”
She mentioned she’s glad she was adopted, and doesn’t lengthy for that totally different, various life in Korea.
Reif loves her kids profoundly, she mentioned. However she doesn’t suppose she would undertake from overseas once more, if she’d identified then what she is aware of now.
“I’d rather be childless than think I have somebody else’s child that didn’t want to give them up,” she mentioned. “I think of somebody taking my child. Those poor families, I just can’t imagine it.”
