International Adoption Series

Some adoption advocates, including Miller, call the Hague Convention perhaps the single-largest factor behind the decrease in international adoptions. The single-largest decline too, when international adoptions fell from more than 17,000 children to 13,000 in a single year.

However, it is also telling that the number of children and teens adopted internationally has remained relatively stable since 2004. When international adoptions are broken down by age, only two categories show marked declines — school-aged children and infants under a year old. That largely reflects changes in countries’ own policies to allow only domestic adoptions of healthy young children.

Miller worries about children whose chances of adoption have decreased because their home countries don’t comply with the Hague. “There are just so many children who don’t have families, and it makes me hurt, all the time,” she said. “I think about the children left behind, and I pray.”

Still, Simmons sees a bright side. When children are being sold, infants are usually the victims, and the decreased availability of infants may encourage a couple to adopt an older child, as he did.

“A 5-year-old is more tired of waiting for a family than you are of waiting for a baby,” he said.

Foreign policies keeping kids home

While the Hague is certainly a factor behind the decline, Pertman doesn’t believe it is the sole force driving international adoptions down. Top countries such as China put new policies in place in an effort to keep their children home. Other countries made other changes. For example, last December Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that Americans would no longer be able to adopt Russian children, although adoptions that were already to a certain stage in the process could be completed.

The international adoption process has always varied according to the child’s country of origin. When Miller adopted her daughters from China, little participation from the parents was needed. She and her husband put in their papers through an agency and heard next to nothing until they received notice they had been selected to receive a daughter. The couple flew in with a group of other adoptive parents and picked up their daughter within hours of arriving. They remained in China for two weeks while the adoption was processed.

When she adopted from Guatemala, Miller received photos and information about her son within days of his birth; he had not even been named. The agency offered to introduce Miller to the birth mother.

Americans can no longer adopt from Guatemala because it fails to comply with Hague regulations. China has put up barriers that increase the length of the international adoption process to between three and five years. Infants in particular, Pertman said, are saved for domestic adoptions in China.

That’s one harsh reality of adoption, Simmons said. Parents’ high preference for healthy infants limits their availability internationally.

“There’s always a home for newborn babies,” he said, “and almost always in country.”

Still, if foreign countries desire to take care of their own kids, “that’s a positive,” Pertman said. “We don’t need children to be adopted to other countries, we just need them to be in stable homes.”

The children most likely to be available for international adoption are those with special needs, older children or even sibling groups, Cox said. Dark skin can make one what she called “a waiting child,” available for adoption. The United States, too, allows adoption of American children by foreign families if willing American parents aren’t found. Black biracial American newborns, for example, sometimes find new homes in Canada, Israel and Europe.

You can still adopt

Families that hope to adopt internationally have more likelihood of success if they are open to possibilities, Cox said.

If you say you want a healthy child as young as possible, it’s going to be difficult. If you are open to a child with special needs — and that can be all across the map, from severe to something not so difficult — it opens up,” she said.

Families that reject the idea of a “special-needs child” are often very amenable to considering a child with a correctable medical condition. Often, it’s the same child, Cox said. Special needs means many things. That’s why it’s important to work with an agency or organization that will learn as much about a child as possible and share it with families so they can make realistic choices. That includes knowing if the group has people in that country who, even if they can’t get in to see specific children, know how an orphanage treats the children, whether they have access to medical treatment and more.

Would-be adoptive parents who want a healthy child will be assigned one, if it’s even possible. With special-needs children, parents typically get to look at pictures and read profiles and find out about the child’s abilities or limitations in order to make decisions about what they can handle and expect, Cox said.

Successful international adoptions start with research, she said. She recommends the State Department’s website, Adoption.state.gov, which is neutral and fact-based. It tells what countries are open to adoption by American parents, and what types of children are available, rules and more. Importantly, it provides a list of questions to consider in selecting an agency with which to work.

Cox said the questions you ask an agency are key, from how long they’ve worked in a country to services they provide the birth mothers, post-adotpion services for adoptive parents, what fees pay for, and more.

She also recommends broadening your search. If you thought you’d adopt in one country, it doesn’t hurt to consider other options. Find parents who adopted in different countries. Parents who have been through the process tend to be very outspoken about their experience and supportive of others, she said.

An imperfect system

Despite the new rules and regulations, a number of problems with international adoptions remain.

“We can’t come up with solutions until children really are front and center,” said Pertman, whose foundation is seeking a different approach than the Hague. “You really have to put kids front and center, and you really have to mean it. That’s not easy. Once you start acknowledging these realities, you spend dollars differently. You don’t throw out the baby with the bath water, which is what we have done in some countries. The solutions, I think, are less blanket solutions. Blanket solutions are less child-friendly than more tailored solutions.”

Cox supports the Hague, which she said highlights and bans abuses in international adoptions. Congress viewed it favorably, too, enacting a law that will in the future mean all international adoptions are held to Hague standards, not whether the country involved has ratified the convention or not.

“That’s a very good thing,” Cox said. “There will not be two tiers of adoption. All children deserve to have the protections” it provides. But she, too, believes children are not a political or fiscal priority and they should be.

Simmons believes there may be no perfect solution, simply because of the natural dynamics of the adoption process. He recalled filling out his own adoption paperwork, and arriving at the form that interrogated parents about the severity of special needs they were able and willing to provide for. At that moment, he said, he realized that whatever he signed up for was exactly what he was going to get.

As more nations move toward domestic adoption, international adoption trends will move toward serving the children who are traditionally more difficult to adopt because they are older, have special needs or belong to large family groups.

“That’s what makes it hard,” Simmons said. “That’s why it will never be a perfect system.””

International adoptions in decline as number of orphans grows [CNN 9/17/13 by Kevin Voigt and Sophie Brown] says in part “The decline isn’t due to fewer orphans worldwide nor waning demand from prospective parents, experts say. It is due to rising regulations and growing sentiment in countries such as Russia and China against sending orphans abroad.

The number of children finding new homes in the United States — the number one location for adopting children — fell to 8,668 in 2012 after peaking at 22,884 in 2004, according to U.S. State Department statistics. A survey by Britain’s Newcastle University of the top 23 nations that adopt children from abroad recorded 23,626 international adoptions in 2011 — down from 45,299 in 2004.

“I think it’s both a surprise that it’s been dropping, and it’s a surprise that significant forces are opposed to international adoption,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, professor of law and director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School. With the growing forces of globalization, “why wouldn’t this be expanding?” added Bartholet, a proponent of international adoption who adopted two boy from Peru in the 1980s.”

“Transnational adoptions grew in popularity following the World War II — at least 50,000 took place from 1948 to 1969.

With the opening of China and Russia in the 1990s, international adoption exploded — 410,000 children were adopted by citizens of 27 countries between 2000 and 2010, according to Peter Selman, an international adoption expert from Newcastle University and statistical adviser to the U.N. Hague Convention on international adoption.

“In Russia it was the breakup of the Soviet Union. In China it was the discovery of the impact of the one-child policy,” said Susan Caughman, publisher of Adoptive Families Magazine [run by the adoption industry], who adopted a daughter from China in 1992.

“Chinese orphanages then were stuffed with abandoned infants,” largely girls, Caughman said, as boys were preferred by families after the implementation of the one-child policy. “Russia was on its knees in a catastrophic situation as the social fabric unraveled.””

They try to show that China is stringent in who they accept as PAPs! They fail to mention how EASY it is to get multiple waivers: “China also now prohibits adoptions to foreigners who are morbidly obese or have facial deformities. People who have taken antidepressants for serious mental disorders in the past two years are also not eligible, as are applicants who are blind, have schizophrenia or a terminal disease. Couples must be married at least two years, unless either person has been previously divorced — in which case they aren’t eligible to adopt until five years after their wedding. China also now requires prospective families to have an annual income equal to $10,000 per family member and at least $80,000 in assets.”

Outgoing Adoptions

Overseas adoptions rise — for black American children [CNN 9/17/13 by Sophie Brown] tells about a child adopted from Indiana to Netherlands and how pathetic the US government is in tracking children. Excerpts:  “This past June on Father’s Day, about 70 Dutch families who have adopted children from the U.S. gathered at a park outside Amsterdam”

“Why the Netherlands?

Reliable data on overseas adoptions of American children is hard to come by. Last year the U.S. State Department officially reported that 99 American children were adopted by foreign families. But the real number is almost certainly higher, said Peter Selman, an expert on international adoption at Newcastle University in the U.K. who acts as a statistical adviser to the U.N. body that oversees international adoptions.

For example, in 2010 the U.S. State Department counted only 43 U.S. kids who were adopted overseas, but the same year five countries — Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Ireland — reported adoptions of 205 children born in the U.S., Selman said. According to statistics by receiving countries, there were 126 U.S. children adopted overseas in 2004, steadily rising to 315 in 2009.

“The United States has sent an increasing number of children for overseas adoptions in recent years,” Selman said. Goldstein, the New York attorney, also says that the number of outgoing adoptions he facilitates now is higher than a decade ago.

The State Department’s system for tracking international adoptions only includes reports from certain adoption providers, such as those accredited under an international treaty known as the Hague Convention, a spokesperson said. Other adoptions involving U.S. children, like those completed through the foster care system, are not counted. “In order to address that shortcoming, we have increased our outreach efforts to encourage receiving countries and public domestic authorities to report the outgoing adoption information to us,” State Department spokesperson Elizabeth Finan said by email.

Canada is the number one destination for children adopted from the U.S. — 148 went there in 2010 — likely owing to its proximity, experts say. But the Netherlands has consistently ranked second each year; about 250 U.S. children were adopted by Dutch families from 2004 to 2010.

The popularity of American children for Dutch families appears to have grown by word-of-mouth after Steven Kirsh, the Indiana adoption attorney, helped an acquaintance’s sister — who lived in the Netherlands with her Dutch husband — adopt from the U.S. in the 1990s. Similarly, Goldstein began providing adoptions for the Netherlands after a Dutch family working for the U.N. sought his help for a U.S. adoption.

“Most American families were, and still are, interested in adopting a white infant. The Dutch families were just interested in adopting an infant. The color of the child’s skin didn’t matter to them,” said Kirsh, former president of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys. “We were getting some incredible families adopting — just the best of the best. It was easy for the birth moms to fall in love with these couples.”

Children with special needs

Following the decline in international adoptions, most children being adopted from overseas are defined as having special needs, such as developmental disabilities. The U.S. babies are often not special needs children, although some states prioritize adoptions for non-Caucasian children. U.S. babies going to the Netherlands might have a “minimum exposure to drugs, but usually some kind of lighter type of drugs like marijuana,” said Goldstein.

An open adoption

Foreign families are generally more willing to have some level of openness than American families, according to Kirsh, and this can make them more attractive to birth mothers. “The Dutch families would, for example, want the birth mother to help name the child, because they wanted the child to have that connection to the birth mother. Almost never does an American family do that.”

Dana Naughton, an adoption researcher at the Pennsylvania State University said that the foreign families were involved in some of the first open adoptions in the U.S., where a culture of secrecy around adoptions was once common and children may not even have known they were adopted.

“In some ways these adoptions are pioneering international open adoption. That’s not a process that’s common in terms of communication between adoptive families and birth families. And to varying degrees it is what underpins this process,” Naughton said.”

Saving or Trafficking

International adoption: Saving orphans or child trafficking? [CNN 9/18/13 by Kevin Voight] excerpts “Healing or ‘hostage taking’?

As international adoption becomes more difficult, a growing number of voices in the U.S., Australia and elsewhere are pushing to reduce restrictions that limit adopting from abroad.

“In every human endeavor, there is a chance for abuse,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School, who adopted two children from Peru in the 1980s.

“But if a plane goes down, they don’t ground the whole airline industry … the only institution I can think of that when there’s a problem, they shut it down, is international adoption.”

Critics argue the hunger to adopt children from developing nations helps feed nefarious practices, as families are often deceived or coerced into giving their children up for adoption.

“The same story happens again in country after country,” said David Smolin, director of the center for Children, Law and Ethics at Samford University.

Smolin became a legal expert on international adoption issues after he and his wife adopted two daughters from India in 1998 only to discover that the girls were stolen from their mother.

Smolin, along with many other experts and organizations — including UNICEF and the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption — believe that orphans being adopted from abroad should be a last-case scenario, with more emphasis placed on helping keep children in their home country, such as providing day care, foster care, better orphanages and more domestic adoption.

Asked whether abuse in a minority of adoption cases should result in the closure of entire countries, Smolin said: “That’s a false choice. I don’t appreciate our family or my daughters’ family in India being used as collateral damage. That’s like hostage-taking.”

LIES: “International adoption ‘Stuck’

Adoption advocates argue the current system is holding children hostage, that developing in-country programs are at least a generation away — time that the millions currently languishing in orphanages can ill afford.

“The de facto result (of in-country preference) is they would prefer to have the children in institutional life rather than intercountry adoption,” Bartholet said. “The results are more developmental problems, more kids on the street and more cost to the government to institutionalize these kids.” [No one has ever said that they want children in institutions]

Until the global decline of transnational adoption in 2004, “40,000 kids a year were getting really good homes and moving from devastating circumstances,” according to Bartholet. “That’s an amazing social program that changes people at no cost to the home country. To shut that down is tragic.””

TRUTH: “To debunk the idea that corruption is the exception in the current international adoption systems, critics point to Guatemala, which was shut down in 2007 for adoption after allegations of families being coerced and children kidnapped to feed U.S. demand.

Before Guatemala closed to U.S. adoptions, the ratio of children adopted hit one per every 100 live births, according to the Adoption Council — more than double the rate in Latvia, the next-highest nation.

Two years later, the number of foreign adoptions from Guatemala dropped 90%.

As Guatemala closed, adoptions in Ethiopia — now the second-largest supplier of orphans to American families — skyrocketed from fewer than 900 in 2003 to 4,564 in 2009.

“International adoption tends to work in this boom-bust cycle … one country closes, and another country becomes this popular hotspot,” said Kathryn Joyce, author of “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption.”

Many adoption agencies went from Guatemala to Ethiopia where “the number of agencies leaped from five to 50 in a few short years,” said Joyce, who traveled to Ethiopia while researching her book.

Brokers who source children for agencies can earn as much as $5,000 per child — “five times the amount they might expect to earn a year,” she said. “The influence of all this U.S. money can be distorting.”

Whole economies can emerge when international adoption blooms in a developing nation. Employment from agencies, new guesthouses and hotels for the influx of prospective parents, and even a rise in “searchers” — people paid to investigate the birth origins of a child like Lemma when U.S. families begin to doubt the stories agencies provide.”

Removing money: “Can the system be fixed?

Smolin of Samford University says the problem with the current international adoption system comes down to one issue: money.

“I’m not a proponent of shutting down intercountry adoption,” Smolin said. But when a large amount of cash comes to developing countries with weak governments, “it reproduces systematic problems over and over again.”

Smolin wants to see limits on the amount of money and number of agencies that can operate in a given country.

Bartholet of Harvard says limiting agencies will place more control in weak governments of developing countries.

“If you shut down private intermediaries, you shut down international adoption,” she said.”

“Juntunen’s group wants a U.S.-led effort to help developing countries with technology and training that will improve records — such as the creation of accurate birth certificates — and faster adoption procedures”

Adoption Scandals-Tarikuwa’s story and other corruptive placements

Are you sure they’re orphans? – Paternalism, the saviour complex and corruption in the international adoption industry [This is Africa 7/22/13 by Cosmic Yaruba] says

“The first time I voiced my objections to international (transnational and transracial) adoption in the company of friends or colleagues, the general reaction made it seem like I had just cruelly snatched the hopes and dreams of all the unwanted babies in the world. What could possibly be wrong with wealthy, privileged people saving the lives of less privileged children? What could be wrong with rescuing orphaned children from developing countries and giving them a chance to prosper in a developed nation? It turns out a lot could, and in fact does, go wrong with international adoption, starting with the fact that a large number of so-called abandoned or orphaned babies are actually not abandoned or orphaned at all. The United Nations defines an orphan as a child living with one (or both) parents dead, but a disturbingly large number of “orphans” are “created” by social workers, agencies, organisations and churches, leading ignorant adoptive parents to separate children from their families. In 2009 an international adoption scandal erupted after a van carrying young children and babies was stopped outside Shamshemene, a central Ethiopian town. The seven children in that bus had been declared abandoned and the bus was owned by an adoption agency that helped parents from the United States to adopt Ethiopian children. By declaring the children abandoned, their adoption process would be hastened. At the time when the adoption industry was booming in Ethiopia, more than 2,000 children were sent to the U.S. and 4,000 to other countries around the world. As is the case with other countries heavily involved in international adoption, substantial revenue flowed to Ethiopia, with foreign money supporting adoption agencies, as well building schools, boarding schools and orphanages. Wealthy Westerners who visited the country with adoption in mind injected money into hotels, restaurants and the taxi business.

A Daily Beast article from March this year takes a closer look at the bus that was stopped at Shameshemene, the adoption agency behind it, Better Future Adoption Services (BFAS), and the adoptive parents in the US. The parents were later confronted with the reality: the children who they’d been told were abandoned orphans or the product of rape did, on the contrary, have birth parents who the children were likely to ask about once they learned how to speak English. A former deputy country director with the agency claims to have witnessed children’s records changed so that they were adopted under false names, women employed with the agency pressured into giving up their own children for adoption, and parents cajoled into relinquishing custody of their children in court. Even where Ethiopian parents were aware of the adoption, there was still a great deal of misunderstanding because in the Ethiopian worldview it is not strange for parents to send their children to wealthier relatives or guardians who will “adopt” them while still retaining parental ties. This traditional view of adoption is present in communities across Africa and differs starkly from the western Eurocentric view of adoption where one lays claim to another’s child.

As a child, Tarikuwa Lemma was taken from her birth family in Ethiopia after her widower father was tricked by an adoption agency into believing that he was sending his daughters abroad for an educational exchange program that would bring them home every summer. Little did he know that his children had been placed with adoptive families and that he would not be seeing them for a long time. Essentially sold to a white family from the United States, Tarikuwa Lemma now a grown up victim of yet another international adoption scandal has chosen to speak up about her experience. “After all, as an adoptee, I have already been saved,” she writes, “and no longer feel attached to the Ethiopian ways, since everything in America has been so much better”. Upon being adopted, Tarikuwa Lemma was forbidden from speaking her native language and had her name changed against her will, thus severing her ties with her heritage. She also points a finger at the rising number of evangelical Christians who believe that they are on a mission to save those who they believe are the world’s orphans. This brand of Christians have apparently become the dominant group in adoption today, and they are the focus of the book The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce. Describing adoption as “too often a zero-sum game”, Joyce reveals that in scores of adoption cases, birth families do not give up their children for adoption by choice. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that families go out to places like Ethiopia to adopt children in the belief that they are saving the souls of these children and doing the work of their God.

While it is necessary to bear in mind that not all adoptions are illegitimate, that caring families can and do adopt real orphans, it is also incumbent upon us not to ignore the thin line between child adoption and child trafficking. Human trafficking is apparently the second largest global criminal enterprise, and it is estimated that approximately 1.2 million children are victims of human trafficking, with a good number of them trafficked under the guise of adoption. Adoption, these days, has morphed into an industry worth billions of dollars, one in which poor families in developing countries become the supply side to the largely western demand. As we well know, whenever a not-well-regulated industry provides opportunities for lots of money to be made, corruption and fraud will follow.

The dark side
International adoption scandals are not unique to Ethiopia; they have happened in Haiti, India, Vietnam, Guatemala, China and South Korea, among other places. In countless countries, impoverished families have been coerced into giving up their children, all in the best interests of the children, of course, and also in the interests of those who profit from adoption. Things become even more sinister when tricking parents into giving up their own children is no longer enough. In 2008, police raided a “baby farm” in Nigeria, rescuing more than 30 teenagers who were kept there and forced to give birth to children for trafficking. Most media reports talk about the children being sold for manual labour, as sex slaves or for rituals (black magic), but not has been said about how the children end up being adopted by childless couples in the West.  Four months ago, a white British couple was caught trying to smuggle a baby to the UK from Nigeria, among a dozen other couples including a Nigerian-British couple. Baby “factories” have been raided in several south-eastern Nigerian cities, such as Imo, Aba and Anambra where the baby farms are tied to orphanages, and Britain now mandates DNA testing for couples trying to get their child a passport under “suspicious means” in Lagos.

Although the mainstream narrative of international adoption is of a “win-win” situation in which parents have a child, and a child has parents, the dark side of the industry spells trauma for all parties involved.  A rethink of how international adoption works is needed, with a clear distinction between legal adoption and the sponsorship of children. And in the latter case, ties with the families of the children must be maintained by law. The paternalism, saviour complex and “white man’s burden” that, at the moment, is deeply engrained in the modern adoption complex has to be gotten rid of, though it’s going to be far from easy, seeing as it’s closely linked to the way people in the West – especially white people – see people in developing countries. We need to question why rich Westerners are supposedly better suited to raise a child better than the child’s actual parents. Why on earth should wealth and financial comfort supersede parental and ancestral ties? Child trafficking under the guise of adoption is real, and the consequences range from trauma, dislocation and alienation to suicide.”

Opinions

Srey Powers’ story is told to CNN and can be read here.

Tarikuwa tells her story to CNN here . Be sure to read the comments in which her original family and adoptive grandmother share important details.

Ending South Korea Adoptions

“Jane Jeong Trenka, adopted from Korea at the age of six months in 1972, never felt she belonged growing up in a rural Minnesota town. But decades later the 40-year-old discovered her adoption began with a lie.

While trying to apply for a visa in 2006, Trenka was told her legal birthday didn’t match birth papers supplied by her orphanage. After an investigation, Trenka unraveled the mystery: an adoption agency in Korea had given her a fake identity to make her more attractive for adoption, she said.

“I could see where they lied to get me adopted,” said Trenka. Her family history and physical description was rewritten to hide the fact that she was in poor health, having been abused by her father. And the agency had lied to Trenka’s Korean mother, saying she would be sent to a pair of wealthy Dutch lawyers.

South Korea was a pioneer on international adoptions. In the aftermath of World War II and Korean War, more than 200,000 children were sent to live with families abroad, according to the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare. As recently as 2005, South Korea was the fourth largest provider of children to U.S. families, sending more than 1,600 orphans that year, according to the U.S. State Department.

But Trenka, who repatriated to South Korea in 2008, is part of a vanguard of American adoptees who have led the fight to stop overseas adoptions from Korea and change the cultural stigma tied to unwed mothers. “The best option is always for a child to be parented by his or her birth parent,” she said. “Then domestic adoption, and only then intercountry adoption.”

“If you take a look at what’s going on in (Korean) adoption reform, all of it is led by adoptees,” said Kevin Haebeom Vollmers, a 36-year old Korean adoptee in Minnesota and publisher of Gazillion Voices, an online magazine on adoption issues. “We’ve been disenfranchised for so long, and we’re finally writing our own history, for the first time, on our own terms.”

In 2012, the Korean National Assembly implemented the Special Adoption Law, crafted by Trenka with a coalition of adoptee activists and allies. The law explicitly discourages sending children abroad.

Under the law, birth mothers must nurse babies for seven days before the child can be considered for adoption. If a mother chooses adoption, her consent must be verified and her child’s birth registered. Finally, a mother may choose to revoke the adoption up to six months after her application.

“It’s a paradigm shift,” Trenka said. “We’re checking to make sure things are done ethically and properly. In my generation, people did things with blindly, deadly, and unethical speed.”

Even before the new law took effect, the number of children being adopted abroad from South Korea has been in decline. Only 621 South Korean children were adopted by U.S. families in 2012, compared to nearly 1,800 in 2002, according to the U.S. State Department.

‘Ungrateful’

Not all adoptees are cheering the reform.

Steve Choi Morrison, 57, is a defender of intercountry adoption and the founder of the Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea (MPAK). “God came down to adopt human beings as his own children, even when we did not deserve it,” he said. “I believe it is our human duty, that if we have more than people from other nations — then we should share.” [So those that have less should share their children with those who have more?]

Born in the aftermath of the Korean War and orphaned at age 5, Morrison spent his early childhood wandering streets and sleeping under bridges, he said. After moving to an orphanage, he was finally adopted at age 14 to a Christian family in Utah. “They didn’t have to adopt me, but they did,” he said. “I really, really love them for what they did.”

He opposes the new Korean law’s requirement for mothers to register their children’s birth before adoption, arguing that it counters cultural norms. “In Korean culture, face-saving is very important,” he said. “Mothers are afraid the birth record will later show up, and that husbands will not marry them later. If you force birth mothers to register for adoption, they’re just going to abandon their children.”

Korean adoption activist Kim Stoker, 40, disagrees. Morrison’s criticism is based on “incorrect information,” said Stoker, who was adopted as an infant in 1973 and returned to live permanently in South Korea in 1995. “After a child is placed in a family, that child will be removed from the birth mother’s registry.”

Stoker rejects the idea that the law is not suitable for Korean culture. “There’s the idea that Korean culture, as large as it is, and as vast as it is, is somehow static. That is not true. I’ve lived in the country since 1995, and there’s been tremendous cultural change.”

Fight for single-mother rights

Korean returnee activists are now fighting to improve government support for single women who have children. “Mothers are mothers,” she said. “If you give them a real chance, most will want to parent their children. Who is the parent should not be a contest of who has the most stuff.”

Stoker believes South Korea’s adoption reform movement will set an example for other countries. “We’re the first generation of international adoptees that are telling our own stories,” she said. “A lot of the adoptees leaving China, for example, are going to look at our model to see what’s important.”

But Jane Trenka said she’s not ready to celebrate. Single mother welfare remains lacking and adoption agencies as well as groups like Steve Morrison’s MPAK are fighting to overturn the Special Adoption Law.

“The Koreans have a saying, after a mountain, there’s another mountain,” she said with a sigh”

Raised in America, activists lead fight to end S. Korean adoptions

[CNN 9/16/13 by Wilfred Chan]