Her greatest fear, dormant for decades, came back in an instant: Had she adopted and raised a kidnapped child?
Peg Reiff’s daughter, who was adopted from South Korea in the 1980s, sent her a link to a documentary that explained how the system that created her family was filled with fraud: documents were falsified, Children were exchanged, children were snatched from the street and sent abroad.
Reef cried.
She was among more than 120 people who contacted The Associated Press this fall in a series of stories and a documentary produced with Frontline that revealed how Korea created a baby pipeline that was fueled by Western demand. It was designed to send children abroad as quickly as possible to complete their education. The reporting rocked adoption communities around the world by revealing how agencies compete for children – pressuring mothers, bribing hospitals, forging documents. Most of those who wrote were adoptees, but some, like Reiff, were adoptive parents horrified to learn that they had supported the system.
“I can’t stand the idea that someone has lost their child,” Reiff said. “I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t know how to do it right. “I don’t know if I can.”
Forty years ago, she struggled with infertility. She and her husband, dreaming of starting a family by adopting a child from Mexico, paid thousands of dollars to an agency and waited for months. Then the agency directors were arrested, and they discovered that those Mexican children had been taken from their families against their will. Reif was heartbroken, but she still remembers looking at her husband and saying: “Thank God none of our children have been stolen.”
But now he does not believe in it. 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 came to their files with strangely similar stories: Their young unmarried mothers worked in factories with their fathers who disappeared after getting pregnant.
At the time, Reiff still believed the common narrative about foreign adoption: that it saved children who might otherwise spend the rest of their lives in orphanages, die or become trapped in poverty.
“I don’t believe in him anymore,” Reiff said. “I don’t know who to trust.”
Cameron Lee Small, a Minneapolis therapist whose practice cares for adoptees and their families, said many are feeling an intense sense of betrayal. Individual adoptees have long shared stories of false identification. But this year’s revelations pointed to systemwide practices that routinely alter babies’ origin stories to rush the adoption process, including listing them as “abandoned.” Even if they know the parents.
Smalls, who was also adopted from Korea in the 1980s, summarized what she has heard from adoptees: “I’m kind of back to square one. What should I believe now? “Who can I trust?”
Reiff’s daughter, Jane Hamilton, spent her life thinking he was unwanted, often quipping: “That’s what happens when you’re found in the trash as a baby.”
It has affected her entire life: She has been married for nine years, she said, but she has an insatiable insecurity: “I’m constantly asking my husband, ‘Are you angry at me?’ Did I do something wrong?’ do you want me to leave?”
She now has no idea that abandonment was ever really her story, with revelations of abuse so systemic that even the Korean government compared it to “trafficking.”
“You can’t make that many mistakes. This must be intentional. It was a huge tree of deception,” he said. “I feel disgusted.”
Holt International, the US-based agency that initiated the adoption from Korea, did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.
The reform is sweeping across Europe – countries have launched investigations, banned foreign adoptions and apologized to adoptees for failing to protect them. But the United States, which by far has the largest number of adopted children, has not reviewed its history or culpability.
The US State Department said this summer that it would work with its historian to piece together its history, and detailed preliminary findings that some documents may have been falsified. But it said there was no evidence that US officials were aware of it. The State Department has since said that it “has been unable to identify any records that could provide information about the U.S. government’s role in adoptions from South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Korea’s National Police Agency increased the number of adoptees registering their DNA for family searches – at both domestic police stations and diplomatic offices in North America and Europe – in the weeks following the release of the stories and documentary in September. Confirmed increase. More than 120 adoptees registered their DNA in October and November, compared to an average of less than 30 per month from January to August.
The government of Korea has stated that adoption is an essential tool to care for children in need, including children of unwed mothers or other children considered abandoned. However, Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare acknowledged that the boom in adoption in the 1970s and 80s was probably driven by a desire to reduce welfare costs.
Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating government accountability over foreign adoption problems from 2022, prompted by complaints filed by hundreds of adoptees, and is expected to release an interim report in February. The commission has posted the stories on its website.
A law passed in 2023 says all adoption records will be transferred by July from private agencies to a government department called the National Center for Child Rights to handle family search requests. The center has confirmed that private agencies have about 170,000 adoption files, but director Chung Ik-jong doubts it will find space to store and manage all of these records in time, due to financial constraints and other challenges. Will go. According to Chung, the agency expects family search requests to increase dramatically – “probably by 10 times”, yet it only has funding to add five staff members to its team of six searchers.
Chung acknowledged that loopholes in adoption laws had persisted for decades, and Korea only required courts to process adoptions after 2012 and preserve birth records.
“It is difficult to determine who was responsible for the inaccuracies in earlier records,” he said. “The adoption agency may have been at fault, the biological parents may have lied, or something may have gone wrong at the orphanage… no one knows what the truth is.”
Korean adoption agencies have frequently declined requests for comment in recent months, citing privacy concerns.
Advocates insist that most adoptive families thrive, with both parents and children living their lives happily without questioning the industry, as Reiff and Hamilton have done.
Hamilton grew up in a rural, almost exclusively white community in Wisconsin, and all she wanted at the time was to be accepted. But having children of my own changed that. When her first child was born, she looked at him and her breath stopped.
“It can’t be explained, like this is the first person in my life that I know I’m biologically related to,” she said.
She wanted to learn her history, so that her children could know theirs. She wrote a letter to her adoption agency, who within a few weeks connected her with a woman they said was her mother. It was emotional, shocking.
But he soon realizes he has more questions than answers. The woman’s name did not match the name listed on the paperwork, and the name she gave for the father was also different. The date of birth did not match, the birthplace also did not match. He said, they did not meet in any factory, they were pen-friends.
Hamilton asked the woman to take a DNA test, but she said she did not know how to get it. Hamilton became convinced that this woman was not his birth mother.
The reporting found several cases where agencies linked adoptees to alleged birth families, only to later discover, after emotional meetings, that they were not related at all.
Hamilton is trying to sort out his father’s DNA results, contacting distant relatives, 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, founder of Intercountry Adoptee Voice, the largest organization of adoptees in the world, said governments need to at least legally mandate that agencies provide adoptees with their completed and redacted documentation. , without payment which is now often necessary.
Long has said that parents like Reiff have an important role to play, because in Western countries, laws always support the wishes of adoptive parents – designed to make adoption quick and easy. Are. That said, many people stuck to the narrative that he saved needy orphans who should be grateful, especially in America, where Reckoning Rocking has not caught on in Europe.
“We really need adoptive parents in the United States, if they have any sense of guilt or shame or loss, to come forward and take responsibility and demand that these practices be decriminalized and prevent it from happening again.” A law should be made to stop it.” Long said.
Hamilton is close to his parents; She simply renovated the basement to accommodate their visits. She’s sad for herself, she said, but she’s sad for her mother, who is desperate to know if her children really have parents somewhere, and she’s looking for them.
“And I asked, ‘Why, so you can send us back?’ Hamilton said. “I don’t want to be a victim.”
She said she was happy she was adopted and did not long for that different, alternative life in Korea.
That said, Reiff loves her children very much. But she doesn’t think she would adopt from abroad again if she had known then what she knows now.
She said, “I would rather be childless than think that I have someone else’s child who doesn’t want to leave them.” “I feel like someone is taking my baby. Those poor families, I can’t even imagine.”
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