International adoption of South Korean children started after the Korean War which lasted from 1950 to 1953. When the war was over, many children were left orphaned. In addition a large number of mixed race ‘G.I babies’ (offspring of U.S. and other western soldiers and Korean women) were filling up the country’s orphanages (Jang, 1998).
Touched by the fate of the orphans, Western religious groups as well as other associations started the process of placing children in homes in the USA and Europe (Jang, 1998). Adoption from South Korea began in 1955 when Harry Holt, a born again Christian from Eugene, Oregon, went to Korea and adopted eight war orphans (Rotschild, The Progressive, 1988). His work has been followed by the Holt International Children's Services. The first Korean babies sent to Europe went to Sweden via the Social Welfare Society in the mid 1960s. By the end of that decade, the Holt International Children's Services began sending Korean orphans to Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland and Germany (Hong, Korea Times, 1999).
For the next decade, most of the children adopted from Korea were fathered by American soldiers who fought in the Korean war. But Amerasians presently account for fewer than 1 % of adoptees. Today, Korea is exporting its own. Foreign adoptions serve many purposes for the government (Rothschild, The Progressive, 1988).
Korean traditional society places significant weight on paternal family ties, bloodlines, and pureness of ‘race’. Children of mixed race or those without fathers are not easily accepted in Korean society (Jang, 1998). Many families would go through excessive and expensive procedures such as surrogacy or in vitro fertilization to ensure that their offspring are at least related than to accept a child of a complete stranger into their family. Indeed, it was the case until recently that Korean citizenship was directly tied to family bloodline. Children not a part of a Korean family (i.e., orphans) were not legal citizens of Korea. Another reason is the stigma of adoption. Ninety-five percent of families who do adopt choose babies less than a month old so that they can pass them off as their natural born offspring, overlooking older adoptable children (Yun, Korea Times, 1997).
In addition, most Western countries started to face a shortage of healthy, domestic babies available for adoption in this period, as a result of social welfare programs, legalized abortions and use of contraception. Many Western couples became open to the idea of adopting children from abroad.
This was the start of a popular trend which is still present today, as the demand for foreign babies from infertile, upper- and middle class couples in the West is rising (Jang, 1998). The procedure of international adoption is today a growing and often favoured method for couples to build their families and new countries are constantly opening up for international adoption, both as sending and receiving countries.
