Western nations were desperate for Korean babies. Now many adoptees believe they were stolen

Yooree Kim marched into a police station in Paris and told an officer she wanted to report a crime. Forty years ago, she said, she was kidnapped from the other side of the world, and the French government endorsed it.

She wept as she described years spent piecing it together, stymied at every turn to get an answer to a simple question: How was she, a bright, diligent schoolgirl, with known parents whom she loved, documented as an abandoned orphan in South Korea in 1984 and sent to strangers in France? She believes the government of France — along with many Western nations — allowed families to “mail order children” through international adoption, and did nothing to protect them. 

“They were reckless,” she said. “They never questioned anything. They never checked where I was from. They never checked whether my parents existed or not.”

Kim was caught in an adoption machine that sent hundreds of thousands of Korean children to families in the United States, Europe and Australia. Now adults, many have since discovered that their adoption paperwork was untrue, and their quest for accountability now has spread far beyond South Korea’s borders to the Western countries that claimed them. 

Those governments turned a blind eye to rampant fraud and sometimes pressured the South Korean government to keep the kids coming, an investigation led by The Associated Press has found. Documents show that at the peak of adoptions from South Korea, Western diplomats processed papers like an assembly line, despite evidence that adoption agencies were aggressively competing for babies to send abroad, pressuring mothers and paying hospitals. Governments focused on satisfying intense demand from Western families desperate for children. 

The AP, in collaboration with Frontline (PBS), spoke with more than 80 adoptees in the U.S., Australia and Europe and examined thousands of pages of documents to reveal evidence of kidnapped or missing children ending up abroad, fabricated names, babies switched with one another and parents told their newborns were gravely sick or dead, only to discover decades later they’d been sent to new parents overseas.

The seismic consequences are ricocheting around the world and challenging the entire international adoption industry, which was built on the model created in South Korea.

The Netherlands in May announced it would no longer allow its citizens to adopt from abroad. Denmark’s only international adoption agency said it was shutting down, Sweden stopped adoptions from South Korea, and Norway is investigating. Switzerland apologized for failing to prevent illegal adoptions. France in March released a scathing assessment of its own culpability. 

The U.S., the pioneer of this system and long the country to adopt the most foreign orphans, has not analyzed its own accountability, and some have questioned why. The State Department said questions from AP over several months have prompted it to begin trying to piece together its history from archives. An early review found that widespread practices in South Korea at the time “may have resulted in adoptions based on falsified documentation” but no indication yet that U.S. officials were aware of it. 

Kim believes Western governments clung to the narrative that they were saving needy children and ignored evidence that suggested otherwise. Foreign diplomats in the country surely would have noticed that Seoul’s streets weren’t packed with abandoned babies and street children, she said.

“We were commodified like a good to be sold,” she said. “They made fake orphans and fed the market.”

This story is the second in an ongoing investigation led by The Associated Press in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS). The first story is here. The investigation includes an interactive and the upcoming documentary South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning, premiering Sept. 20 on PBS and online.

‘Illicit practices of a systemic nature’

The Korean adoptee diaspora of around 200,000 children is thought to be the largest in the world. At the peak in the 1970s and ‘80s, South Korea was sending out babies by the hundreds per month. 

It’s impossible to tell how many adoptions involved fraud, and advocates argue most went well. But France, the country that took in Yooree Kim, acknowledged in March that its own government had long known of “the existence of illicit practices of a systemic nature.” 

“The public authorities were alerted early and were late in taking action,” the report said. “In France, diplomatic archives and the archives of associations effectively showed these practices existed in countries over long periods of time and they were alerted at times at the highest levels, often in isolation, without any political reaction to put an end to them.”

Access to birth control and abortion in the Western world had caused the number of domestically adoptable babies to plummet, and families clamored for children. The system was designed for the convenience of consumers, and most adoptive parents didn’t even have to visit South Korea.

“To put it simply, there was supply because there was demand,” said Park Geon-Tae, who leads a team with South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission now investigating its adoption practices. “Were there so many abandoned children in South Korea? We have yet to see this.” 

In 1974, South Korea tried to stop adoptions to Scandinavia, after its political rival, North Korea, charged that children were “being sold like animals in the foreign land.” South Korean government records from the time show that diplomats from Sweden, Denmark and Norway began begging for babies.

“The adoption of Korean orphans by Swedish parents is not because Korea is neglecting its orphans, but because Swedish couples without children are desiring to adopt them, so it would be good to continue the transfers of orphans,” the Swedish ambassador said in a meeting with South Korea’s deputy foreign minister in January 1975.

South Korean Health Minister Ko Jae-pil wrote in a report that the countries sent nine pleas for adoptions to continue, citing at least 1,455 requests for Korean children. Ambassadors visited Korean officials multiple times and “have kept badgering by sending diplomatic documents” that practically threatened halted adoptions would damage relations, the report says. One wrote that he was “concerned that the public opinion against South Korea would worsen” if they halted adoptions to Scandinavia. A Danish citizen wrote to the South Korean president directly to plead for him to expedite the adoptions of two Korean boys.

Under pressure, South Korea reversed course. 

“Accepting the strong requests by related nations to resume adoptions is considered to promote international friendships,” Ko wrote in 1975.

In July of that year, Choi Young-ja’s toddler ran out of the house to chase a cloud of insecticide sprayed by a fumigation truck with friends and never returned.

She and her husband reported him missing and created posters with his photo and name, Paik Sang-yeol. They carried the posters into the country’s largest adoption agency, Holt Children’s Services, every month for years. Each time, they were told there was no information. 

Nearly 50 years later, after exhausting all other options, she submitted her DNA to a police unit that helps Korean adoptees find their families. Choi has been fighting stomach cancer. As she was rolled into the operating room, all she thought was that she could not die without seeing her son. 

When she learned last year that they had found him, she fell to the ground and wept.

He’d been adopted to Norway in December 1975, five months after he went missing. The documents that went with him made up a new name, and included a photo — black-and-white, his lips pursed tight, his hands curled inward. His adoption case number, K-8818, was taped to his chest. 

The adoption agency that sent him away was Holt, the same agency she had visited so many times. She stormed into Holt’s offices in Seoul, demanding her son’s full adoption files, she said. When a worker refused without her son’s signoff, Choi snapped: She flipped a chair, hurled a trash bin, and swung a roll of paper.

“Did you get me to sign off when you sold away my 4-year-old?!” Choi recalled shouting. Holt did not respond to a request to verify Choi’s account of the meeting.

She’s working with lawyers to file a lawsuit against the South Korean government and Holt for sending her son to Norway.

Norwegian authorities “are aware of serious findings that have come to light” about adoptions, said Ingeborg Gloppen Johnsen, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The country launched an investigation last year to uncover whether illegal or unethical practices happened, and if Norwegian officials failed to control them.

In late October, Choi nervously paced her narrow living quarters, double-checked flight arrival times and dug through an album of fading photographs. She hadn’t slept for days.

Her boy — now a graying 52-year-old fashion designer — was coming to visit. 

Choi quietly stood at the Incheon International Airport, sporting freshly styled hair and a vibrant pink cardigan she handpicked for the reunion. She’d been rehearsing what to say, and practiced “I’m sorry” in English. 

Then he emerged from the crowd. She knew him immediately — the familiar round cheeks, the prominent ears, the wide, grinning eyes. 

She buried her face into his chest and wailed, managing to choke out the words: 

“I’m sorry.”

‘We constantly dropped the ball’

Americans pioneered the modern adoption system and brought home far more South Korean children than any other nation. 

In the 1950s, Harry and Bertha Holt, evangelical Christians from Oregon, said they’d received a calling from God to save Korean War orphans. Until then, international adoptions were not common. But after the war, biracial babies born to Korean women and American soldiers were shunned by a society that valued racial purity and saw them as a painful reminder of U.S. imperialism.

Harry Holt, a farmer and timberman, flew to Korea and rounded up a dozen orphans — eight for himself and four for friends. The Holts were “deluged” with letters from others who wanted orphans of their own, Bertha Holt wrote in a memoir.

Harry Holt began flying planeloads of babies to the U.S. The only qualification for adoptive families was that they were born-again Christians. 

The government knew its citizens were desperate for children: Aching letters had been pouring into U.S. government offices from hopeful parents, begging for help finding someone to adopt, according to archives. A woman wrote she felt she was “cheating” her husband out of a family. Another said they wanted a child born to parents suitably intelligent. Yet another asked for a baby “or one as young as I can get it.”

U.S. officials wanted to process the adoptions as quickly as possible to avoid bad publicity, according to internal government memos at the National Archives. A social worker wrote that an immigration official told her his boss “wants no reports to reach Washington of dissatisfied customers due to delays in processing.”

The mothers of biracial children didn’t always want to give them up, records show. In a letter to his wife in 1956, Harry Holt wrote: “One poor girl almost had hysterics in the office. She thought she could keep track of her baby after he had gone to America. I had to tell her it was a clean break and forever. Poor girl, her baby wasn’t weaned yet and she cried and cried.”

The adoption business boomed and attracted competitors, including Eastern Social Welfare Society, Korea Welfare Services and Korea Social Service. Holt remained the largest, sending about half of Korean adoptees abroad. Holt split in 1977, forming a separate Oregon-based agency, Holt International, that often partnered with its Korean sister. By then, South Korea was climbing out of post-war poverty, yet the numbers of adoptions kept skyrocketing. 

An International Social Service social worker who visited the U.S. Embassy in Seoul around that time found what she saw “distasteful,” according to documents at the agency’s archives at the University of Minnesota Libraries.

“It showed the callous way in which children going to the US. were processed, to me, it was a real assembly line type method,” Patricia Nye, the east Asia director for ISS, wrote. “Only documents are seen, children are never seen by the visa officers.”

American officials seemed to defer entirely to the agencies, she wrote: “I was told that it is the US embassy’s feelings that each agency should be left to their own cognizance.” Nye has since died.

At a hearing in 1977, a U.S. Congressman asked why so many children were still coming from South Korea. Immigration officials acknowledged it was because of “the active cooperation of the Korean government” and “very active adoption agencies.” 

An official testified that an officer in Tokyo would fly to Seoul for one week a month to make sure the children were adoptable orphans. But with hundreds of stories to verify in a single week, only a tiny fraction of adoptions were denied. 

“We didn’t pay attention when we should have been in the beginning. Somebody should have said, what is going on? How is that possible?” said Susan Jacobs, a retired State Department official who has worked on adoption reform efforts. “We were wrong, we were totally wrong, we constantly dropped the ball.” 

Laws tended to favor the desires of adoptive parents, she said, and there were few safeguards built into the system. International adoptions were shoehorned into a process built for domestic adoptions. After the federal government issued the initial visas, adoptions were finalized through thousands of local courthouses with different judges, laws and standards. 

In 1985, Judge Homer Stark in Gwinnett County, Georgia, noticed the adoption file before him for twin Korean boys included no acknowledgement of the birth parents or proof that they consented. The only paperwork submitted was a statement signed by a guardian, and it was unclear how the person came into possession of the children. 

“That opens a lot of holes for illegal things,” Stark remembers thinking, in a recent conversation with AP. “I don’t know where this child came from, he might have been picked up off the street.”

Stark asked the attorney general for an opinion. Assistant Attorney General David Will wrote that granting adoptions without documentation of the birth parents’ consent “would condone the practice of the sale of kidnapping of foreign children for ultimate adoption in this state.”

Will soon got a call from his boss to look in their office lobby, he told AP. Mothers had pushed their adopted children in strollers into the attorney general’s office for a sit-in, claiming he was trying to shut down adoption. 

He says he tried to tell them: “We just want adoptions to be done right, to respect the rights of the parents and make sure that no one is stealing a child or buying a child.”

When Stark rejected the petition, it was granted by a judge in another Georgia county where the U.S. adoption agency was based. The adoptive father, who asked to not be named, still treasures the photo from that day — him and his wife, the judge and their twin sons, all smiling. 

The year after his boys arrived, the adoption industry took its case to the legislature. Georgia’s governor signed a bill into law in April 1986 that exempted the requirement to prove that birth parents gave their consent for foreign adoptions. It fell to federal officials to determine whether a child was truly an adoptable orphan.

“For us, it seemed like we were sending children to a better situation — whether that’s true or not, I can’t tell you, but that’s what it seemed like,” said Donald Wells, who was chief of the State Department’s immigrant visa unit in Seoul from 1980 to 1984. “I’ve always considered that we were doing a good thing.”

He estimates they processed more than 12,000 visas, and immigration officers checked if the child met the definition of an eligible orphan. If the paperwork then looked right to the State Department, they accepted it.

“We saw paperwork, we did not see children,” he said, “and we did not have the resources to go out and investigate the background and find out where this child came from.”

The immigration officer he worked with there did question where all the kids were coming from.

Robert Ackerman, immigration attache at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, told reporters in 1988 that he had heard allegations of birth mothers being bribed. But he said he saw “no evidence of fraud or profiteering” in his five years at the embassy, despite complaints that he was too tough with adoption applications. Ackerman, who has died, said then that he was “bothered” by the business.

“When I see 500 kids going out of the country a month, I have to ask, ‘Do we have a humanitarian effort or just a baby pipeline?’” Ackerman told United Press International. “Where does humanitarianism end and business begin?”

‘That day has come’

Today, the United States is in the middle of an emotional debate about how best to move forward with adoptions built on a model some call deeply flawed.

Maureen Flatley, a consultant who’s helped write reforms of the international adoption system, believes it can only do so after looking at its past. She recalled telling a lobbyist fighting against safeguards in the 1990s that one day, adoptees would grow up and tell their own stories, and that would force a reckoning. 

“I think that day has come and I’m glad it’s here,” she said. “I think it’s long past time for the U.S. government to conduct a deep and thorough and searching investigation into what these practices have been. There’s a reason the old saying is ‘Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’”

Michelle Bernier-Toth, the State Department’s special adviser for children’s issues, said the agency is tracking developments in Europe, and has been in contact with South Korea’s truth-finding commission on adoptions. They are sympathetic to adoptees who believe their lives were shaped by fraud and deceit. The State Department just started working with an archivist to understand its own history, she said, but records are sparse and difficult to find. 

The department emphasized that adoption now is very different. The United States in 2008 ratified the Hague Adoption Convention, an international treaty meant to safeguard intercountry adoptions. Agencies must now be accredited, there are far more regulations and a more stringent process for evaluating orphans. Most children now are older or have special needs, and the number of intercountry adoptions to the U.S. has plummeted from 20,000 in 2004 to less than 2,000, with just 47 from Korea last year. 

That has caused some to warn of the danger of stringent regulations making it too hard to save children from dire conditions abroad.

“Of course, I, like all adoption advocates, would prefer that we have even better systems… to make sure that there are as few as possible illegal adoptions that happen,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard law professor and adoptive parent. “But if you set the standard to be ‘we want zero,’ you are going to deny millions of kids homes. And that’s enormously destructive.” 

The lobby of Holt International, on a leafy street in Eugene, Oregon, is a museum to its origin story and Christian mission: to find families for the world’s neediest children. It is a well-respected agency that works all over the world, and has called for stricter safeguards in the industry. 

Holt asked Susan Soonkeum Cox, who retired last year after working for 40 years at the adoption agency, to speak to AP and Frontline. Holt brought Cox from Korea to the U.S. at around 4 years old in 1956.

Cox rejects the allegations that agencies foraged for babies to send abroad. 

“What I’m aware of is the franticness of so many children being brought to orphanages,” she said. “It would be wonderful if every child born in Korea and every other country could stay with their biological family and live a happy, fulfilling life. But that’s not the reality.”

Holt’s South Korea operation, a separate company from the U.S. Holt International, declined to comment on specific allegations, as did the three other Korean adoption agencies. Holt Korea in recent years has denied wrongdoing, attributing adoptees’ complaints to misunderstandings and the country’s problems with social welfare. Kim Jin Sook, president of Eastern, said the agency was just carrying out government policies to find Western homes for “discarded children.”

Cox said that as a representative of Holt, she’s often at an “uncomfortable juxtaposition” where some fellow adoptees blame her. But she believes the majority are happily living their lives.

Cox still refers to Bertha Holt as “grandma,” and remembers finding a snapshot of a little girl staring off into the distance in a giant scrapbook when she first began working for Holt.

“Oh my God, that’s me,” she gasped at the time. “Any kind of hint or a clue is so precious.” 

She later learned that her father was a Western soldier, and her mother, now dead, gave her the name Soonkeum — “pure gold” in Korean.

On her 40th birthday, she reclaimed that name as part of her own.

‘Answer me!’

Most adoptees were babies and have no memories of their own. But Yooree Kim remembers.

She was 11 when she and her younger brother were sent by the Korean agency Holt to a couple in France who’d requested siblings around their ages. After a divorce, her impoverished single mother had put them in an orphanage so at least they could eat, a common practice then in Korea. Two days before Christmas in 1983, an orphanage worker pulled her aside to say they would be sent away.

She was terrified. She claimed she was abused at her new home, which her adoptive parents deny. Her brother also denies it, she said, but he did not respond to AP requests for comment. A judge dismissed a complaint she filed against her adoptive father for insufficient evidence.

Ten years after her traumatic move to France, she remembered her Korean family’s names, their addresses. So she found them.

“Why did you abandon me?” she asked her mother.

Her mother said she never did. When she returned to the orphanage, Angel’s Home in Seoul, she learned her daughter was already gone.

Angel’s Home has since closed. From 1973 to 1990, at least 390 children from there were sent to foreign adopters, including 217 to the U.S. and 127 to France, according to information AP obtained through a records request. All but seven were handled through Holt.

Kim’s paperwork contains three conflicting stories of how she and her brother were turned into orphans.

One said they were relinquished by their paternal grand-aunt, whom Kim never recalls meeting. Korean law made clear that consent for adoption can only come from parents, direct-line grandparents or legal guardians. Another document says Kim’s mother agreed to the adoption. A third says the siblings were found “roaming” the streets and were “emotionally hardened” by the experience. She wondered: How did no one in this system, from South Korea to France, catch such discrepancies?

She called the former president of Holt in Korea, who signed her paperwork.

“How can you say you knew nothing when you were the president?” she asked on the call, which she recorded and provided to AP. He scolded her.

“You are now 50, you should know better,” he said to Kim. “This was something that happened 40 years ago.”

Then he hung up.

When reached by AP, the president, Kim Han-Kyu, refused to comment on individual cases.

“What would I know? The president stamps the paperwork as the guardian and the nuts and bolts are handled by working-level employees,” he said.

He added that he didn’t know where Holt got its children, but insisted it “didn’t do bad things” and agencies didn’t compete for children.

“No, no, no, the children were sent abroad as a government policy,” he said. “Holt and other social welfare organizations had the role of transport stations. You sent them because the government approved it, otherwise you couldn’t.”

Kim’s French agency, Les Amis des Enfants du Monde, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Kim wants the world to know what happened to her and to so many others. She stormed up to the home of a French adoption agency leader with a Korean film crew, pressed the buzzer and held it down for a full minute.

“Why did you steal me from my Korean parents?...They never abandoned me,” she screamed, unsure if anyone was listening.

“Answer me!”

AP researcher Rhonda Shafner and reporter Lori Hinnant and Frontline’s Lora Moftah and Emily Sternlicht contributed to this report.