South Korean adoptees and families rocked by fraud allegations

Her greatest fear, dormant for decades, came rushing back in an instant: had she adopted and raised a kidnapped child?

Peg Reif's daughter, adopted from South Korea in the 1980s, had sent her a link to a documentary detailing how the system that made their family was rife with fraud: documents falsified, babies switched, children snatched off the street and sent abroad.

Reif wept.

She was among more than 120 who contacted The Associated Press this fall, after a series of stories and a documentary made with Frontline exposed how Korea created a baby pipeline, designed to ship children abroad as quickly as possible to meet Western demand. The reporting shook adoption communities around the world with details about how agencies competed for babies — pressuring mothers, bribing hospitals, fabricating documents. Most who wrote were adoptees, but some were adoptive parents like Reif, horrified to learn they had supported this system.

''I can't stand the thought that somebody lost their child,'' Reif said. ''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 ago, she was struggling with infertility. She and her husband pinned their dreams for a family on adopting a baby from Mexico, paid an agency thousands of dollars and waited for months. Then the agency's directors were arrested, and they learned that those Mexican babies had been taken from their families against their will. Reif was heartbroken, but recalls even now looking at her husband and saying: ''thank God we don't have a child who was stolen.''

But now she isn't sure of that. Because then they adopted two Korean children, and brought them to their home in rural Wisconsin, first a son and then a daughter. The two were not biological siblings, but both arrived with strangely similar stories in their files: their young unmarried mothers worked in factories with fathers who disappeared after they got pregnant.

Back then, Reif still believed the common narrative about foreign adoption: it saved children who might otherwise live the rest of their lives in an orphanage, die or be damned to poverty.

''I don't believe that anymore,'' Reif said. ''I don't know what to believe.''

Cameron Lee Small, a therapist in Minneapolis whose practice caters to adoptees and their families, said many are feeling an intense sense of betrayal. Individual adoptees had long shared stories of falsified identities. But the revelations this year pointed to systemwide practices that routinely changed babies' origin stories to process adoptions quickly, including listing them as ''abandoned'' even when they had known parents.

Small, who was also adopted from Korea in the 1980s, summarized what he's been hearing 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 thinking she was unwanted, often 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 happily married for 9 years, she said, but 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 idea anymore if abandonment was ever really her story, with revelations of abuses so systemic that even the Korean government likened it to ''trafficking.''

''You can't make that many mistakes. It has to be intentional. It was this huge tree of deception,'' she said. ''I feel disgusted.''

Holt International, the US-based agency that pioneered adoptions from Korea, did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.

Reform is sweeping across Europe — countries have launched investigations, halted foreign adoptions and apologized to adoptees for failing to protect them. But the United States, which has taken in the most adopted children by far, has not done a review of its own history or culpability.

The U.S. State Department told AP this summer that it would work with its historian to piece together its history, and detailed initial findings that some documents might have been falsified. But it said there was no evidence that U.S. officials were aware of it. The State Department has since said that 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 National Police Agency confirmed an increase in adoptees registering their DNA for family searches — both at domestic police stations and diplomatic offices across North America and Europe — in the weeks following the release of the AP stories and documentary in September. More than 120 adoptees registered their DNA in October and November, compared to an average of less than 30 a month from January to August.

Korea's government has maintained that adoptions were a necessary tool to care for needy children, including babies of unwed mothers or other children deemed as abandoned. However, Korea's Ministry of Health and Welfare acknowledged to AP that the adoption boom in the 1970s and 80s was possibly fueled by a desire to reduce welfare costs.

Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been investigating government accountability over foreign adoption problems since 2022, prompted by complaints filed by hundreds of adoptees, and is expected to release an interim report in February. The Commission has posted the AP stories on its website.

A law passed in 2023 mandates that all adoption records be transferred from private agencies to a government department called the National Center for the Rights of the Child by July, to centralize the handling of family search requests. The center has confirmed that private agencies hold about 170,000 adoption files, but director Chung Ick-Joong doubts it will acquire a space to store and manage all these records in time, due to financial constraints and other challenges. The agency expects family search requests to increase dramatically – ''possibly by 10-fold,'' according to Chung — yet has funding to add only five staff members to its team of six searchers.

Chung acknowledged that flaws in adoption laws had persisted for decades, and Korea only required adoptions to go through courts and birth records to be preserved after 2012.

''It's difficult to determine who was responsible for the inaccuracies in records before then,'' he said. ''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 agencies have mostly declined AP's requests for comment in recent months, often citing privacy concerns.

Advocates insist that most adoptive families thrive, with both the parents and children happily living their lives without questioning the industry as Reif and Hamilton have.

Hamilton grew up in a rural, almost exclusively white community in Wisconsin, and back then all she wanted was to be accepted. But having children of her own changed that. When her first child was born, she looked at 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 said.

She wanted to learn her own history, so her children could know theirs. She wrote a letter to her adoption agency, which within weeks connected her with a woman they said was her mother. It was emotional, shocking.

But soon she felt like she had more questions than answers. The woman's name didn't match the one listed on paperwork, and the name she gave for the father was also different. Birthdates didn't match, the birthplace didn't either. They had not met in a factory, she said, they had been pen pals.

Hamilton asked the woman to take a DNA test, but she said she didn't know how to access one. Hamilton came to believe this woman was not her birth mother.

The AP's reporting found numerous cases where agencies connected adoptees with supposed birth families, only for them to later discover after emotional meetings that they weren't related at all.

Hamilton has been trying to untangle the DNA results on her father's side, contacting people distantly related, cousins once removed, half great aunts.

''It becomes an obsession,'' Hamilton said. ''It's like a puzzle that you start, and you have to find the missing pieces.''

Lynelle Long, the founder of InterCountry Adoptee Voices, the largest organization of adoptees in the world, said governments at the very least need to legally mandate that agencies provide adoptees with their full and unredacted documents, without the payment now often required.

Long said parents like Reif have an important role, because in Western countries, laws always favored the desires of adoptive parents — designed to make adoptions quicker and easier. Many clung to the narrative that they saved needy orphans who should be grateful, she said, especially in the U.S., where the reckoning rocking Europe has not taken hold.

''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,'' Long said.

Hamilton is close to her parents; she just renovated the basement to accommodate their visits. She's sad for herself, she said, but she's sadder for her mother, who is desperate to learn if her children actually had parents somewhere, searching for them.

''And I'm like, 'why, so you can send us back?'' Hamilton said. ''I don't want to be a victim.''

She said she's glad she was adopted, and does not long for that different, alternative life in Korea.

Reif loves her children profoundly, she said. But she doesn't think she would adopt from abroad again, if she'd known then what she knows now.

''I'd rather be childless than think I have somebody else's child that didn't want to give them up,'' she said. ''I think of somebody taking my child. Those poor families, I just can't imagine it.''

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This story has been updated to correct that Long said governments should mandate agencies provide adoptees with unredacted documents.