AP finds widespread adoption fraud has separated generations of South Korean children from their families

Noh, now a researcher at Soongsil University in Seoul, said Holt employees knew the agency charged adopters about $3,000 per child.

“My salary was 240,000 won, which is less than $200 a month,” Noh said. “If you send one child … that amount could pay for at least one employee for a whole year.”

Documents obtained by the AP show that agencies likely charged even more, about $4,000 to $6,000. But they misappropriated some of that money, for example by charging adoption workers for travel expenses but arranging for commercial passengers to transport the children.

The workers tried to accommodate specific requests from adoptive families. Some asked for siblings, Noh said, so she and her colleagues competed for the small number of twins in their networks.

Another former employee, who worked at two agencies from the 1970s to the early 1990s, said anyone struggling to raise children would be strongly encouraged to surrender them.

“A lot of the kids we placed would have stayed with their biological parents with a little help,” the former employee said. “But what we heard (from management) was always the same — if we don’t take that child, another adoption agency will.”

Private counseling records in Holt’s 1988 document, obtained by the AP, show that some parents who abandoned their children soon begged for their return. Agency workers told them that their children would thrive under the care of good Western parents and might one day return home rich or “with Ph.D.s.”

In one case, a mother returned and asked to see her son. The boy was still in Seoul, but a Holt employee told the mother he had been flown to the U.S.

“After hearing the lie,” the employee wrote, “the biological mother began to regain peace of mind, as was expected.”

Susan Soonkeum Cox, who has long worked for Holt International, the U.S. arm of the Oregon-based Holt adoption network, denied widespread problems. She said the goal has always been to find good homes for children who would otherwise grow up in orphanages.

“Was there some activity that shouldn’t have happened? Probably. We’re human beings and we’re all different. There are good social workers, there are bad social workers, there are good workers, bad workers,” she said. “But … the accusation of systematic, deliberate misconduct, which I reject.”

Seoul-based Holt Children’s Services, which spun off from the U.S. agency in the 1970s, and three other Korean agencies declined to comment on specific cases.

Holt Korea has denied wrongdoing in recent years and attributed the adoptees’ complaints to misunderstandings and Korean social problems. Kim Jin-sook, Eastern’s president, said the agency was implementing a government policy to find homes for “abandoned children.”

However, some other agencies in the field have begun to shut down their programs due to ethical concerns.

In the 1970s, Francis Carlin ran Catholic Relief Services in South Korea, which facilitated about 30 adoptions a month, compared with hundreds for larger agencies. The demand from the West was enormous, and there weren’t enough legitimate orphans to feed them, he said, leading to “a lot of compromise, a lot of conmanship.”

He added that larger agencies visited orphanages, taking healthy babies and leaving older and disabled children behind.

“These people, what I would call the middlemen, were going out and trying to get more and more children,” Carlin said when contacted by the AP. “They were making the rightful parent feel guilty and saying, ‘What are you doing? You can’t afford to take care of this child. … Why don’t you just back off and let them have a better life? You’re so selfish.”

One Korean social worker expressed his disgust in words so devastating that he has stuck with Carlin all these years: “It’s disgusting, just disgusting.”

Catholic Relief Services ended its adoption program in 1974. Carlin recalls standing at a meeting of relief organizations: “We’re starting to slide into the abyss,” he said.

Four decades later, Laurie Bender took a DNA test because her own daughter was curious about their ancestry. In 2019, she got a call: “Your mother has been looking for you.”

Bender dropped the phone.

“It’s like the hole in your heart is healed, and you finally feel like a whole person,” Bender said. “It’s like you’re living a fake life and everything you know isn’t true.”

Bender and her daughter flew to South Korea just a few weeks later. Her mother, Han Tae-soon, put on her best outfit and lipstick for the first time in a long time. She recognized her daughter at the airport immediately and ran to her, screaming, whining, running her fingers through her hair.