Keeping Them Home : Orphan--A Shame Fades in S. Korea

In the wake of a surge of pride after the 1988 Seoul Olympics, South Korea has discovered a new national shame.

Decades after a war that created thousands of homeless children and the ensuing poverty that made it impossible to find them homes in their native land, South Korea remains one of the world’s leading exporters of “orphans.” Its deep-rooted Confucian beliefs that work against adoption have been barely affected.

Indeed, more than half of all foreign children adopted in the United States come from South Korea.

But now, with national per-capita income approaching $5,000 a year, the government has declared, publicly for the first time, that it intends to seek change.

‘For Sake of the Image’

“For the sake of the image of the nation, which has achieved notable economic development, it is time for us to depend on domestic, rather than foreign, adoption,” the minister of health and social welfare declared early this year in launching a campaign to embrace parentless children at home.

Income-tax breaks are now being offered to make adopting more attractive. Adoption agencies that once specialized in overseas placements of children are being encouraged--some say coerced--to seek adoptive parents in South Korea.

And, perhaps most significantly, a government-led campaign has been launched to change the Confucian mentality against “orphans”--a word used by Koreans to include both children whose parents are dead and those who have no legal parent.

Confucian Emphasis

The Confucian emphasis on the importance of the family and upholding its generation-to-generation continuation through an unbroken blood line has made adoption an alien idea to many Koreans, who have resisted bringing up children who are not directly related to them.

As a result, Koreans for years viewed overseas adoption as a “positive” program that benefited unfortunate children who otherwise would find no homes, Moon Tai Joon told the Korea Herald in an interview early this year before he was replaced as minister of health and social welfare in a Cabinet reshuffle.

Now, the rallying call is what Cho Yong Won, director of the newly established Holy Family Catholic Adoption Agency, summarizes this way: “We should solve our own problem with our own hands.”

Since 1954, the year after the Korean War ended, 109,579 children have been sent overseas for adoption--63% of them to the United States--while only 24,317 have been adopted at home, the Health and Welfare Ministry acknowledged in October, 1988, when it announced adoption statistics for the first time.

Moreover, most of the foreign adoptions occurred not in the days of poverty but in the last eight years, during which South Korea has risen to relative affluence, the ministry admitted.

So deep is the Confucian ethic against adoption that even Roman Catholics are affected “deep in their hearts,” said Father Choi Song Un, chairman of the Catholic Social Welfare Promotion Commission.

Even worse, in a society which demands marriage and procreation as a “badge” of full manhood or womanhood, the act of adoption itself is viewed as a disgrace for couples unable to have children.

Couples who do decide to adopt often keep it a secret from their own parents. They might even set a date well in advance to accept a newborn baby--so that the wife can pretend to be pregnant for an appropriate period. Some couples, unfettered by parental scrutiny, nevertheless time the adoption to coincide with a move into a new neighborhood to make such pretense unnecessary.

Although the new government-led campaign has yet to produce quantifiable results, social changes that began to take root several years ago appear to be reducing the number of parentless children adopted overseas.

If the present rate of decline continues, all overseas adoptions will come to a halt within three years, predicts Kim Young Hee, executive director of the Korean Social Service, one of the licensed adoption agencies.

Fewer Adoptable Babies

The thrust for change is coming less from a surge in Koreans’ willingness to adopt through standard procedures than from a drastic drop in the number of children officially recorded as abandoned. Their numbers, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare said, fell sharply by 36% to 9,136 last year from 14,230 in 1985, with a plunge of 4,000 occurring in 1988 alone.

In the last 12 months, “the number of babies available for adoption has dropped by more than 50%,” Kim said, adding that until two years ago, “we never had difficulty securing babies for adoption.”

A rapidly rising level of education in South Korea has made women more aware of the availability of abortions. Economic gains have brought abortions within reach of even the poor. The increasing practice of birth control, meanwhile, has reduced the rate of pregnancy itself. And average couples, who used to have four or five children, now have only two, diminishing the economic burden of child-rearing.

Although overseas adoptions fell 27% to 6,463 in 1988 from a peak of 8,837 in 1985, domestic adoptions have remained constant at about 2,300 a year. Too few Korean couples seek to adopt even the diminishing number of “orphans,” adoption agency officials Cho and Kim said.

Mentality Changing

“Only recently has Korean mentality begun to change,” Cho says.

Experts, however, say they suspect that the statistics do not reflect a complete picture of what is actually happening.

Legally, South Korean couples must go through licensed adoption agencies to adopt a child. Parents, however, are not required to present a birth certificate or any other document when registering a baby with government authorities, a situation that makes illegal adoptions easier. Doctors and midwives also do not report births.

Furthermore, unlike neighboring Japan, where the “stigma” of adoption becomes part of the official registration, no trace remains on Korean records. Only the adoption agencies keep records, which are confidential.

Illicit Means Utilized

Koreans, therefore, are free to obtain babies through illicit means--such as arrangements made through clinics or midwives who deliver babies of unwed mothers, Kim says. Although admitting he has no evidence, Kim says he suspects that an increase in surreptitious domestic adoptions is accounting for at least part of the sudden reduction in the number of officially recorded abandoned children.

“Otherwise, where are the babies going?” he asks.

With the government trying to promote birth control and cut down “orphan exports,” enforcement of the legalities involving both abortion and adoption is notably lax.

Dr. Hong Sung Bong, chairman of the obstetrics and gynecology department at the College of Medicine at Korea University says deductive evidence exists to show that many Koreans, indeed, do take other people’s children as their own without going through legal procedures and have been doing it for years.

South Korea’s sterility rate--the percentage of couples unable to have children--is about 4.5%, compared with 12% to 15% in the United States, says Hong, who is also president of the Korea Assn. of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

“Biologically, I simply can’t accept that,” he declares. The only assumption that can be made, he says, is that unrecorded adoptions inflate the statistics of families with children and create an exaggerated fertility rate.

Careful screening by adoption agencies and their inability to meet a long list of specifications that Korean couples typically have make adoption through agencies cumbersome.

First, Korean couples “absolutely favor a male to assume the family inheritance,” Kim says. “By long tradition, a son carries on the family lineage”--which many Koreans trace back more than 70 generations, he says. “Daughters are only sort of ‘half-family.’ ”

So strong is the Confucian preference for sons that abortion of female fetuses has become a social problem, according to Dr. Hong. One gynecologist in Taegu has become so proficient in helping pregnant women abort female fetuses that boys born in South Korea’s third-largest city outnumbered girls by an extraordinary ratio of 130 to 100 in 1985, says Hong.

Korean couples also demand that the blood type of the babies they adopt match their own, place high priority on good looks, insist that the baby be healthy, and demand a newly born infant--”within a week of birth so that they can fool those around them,” Kim says.

Couples even insist that the baby have a “good background,” he says, with some insisting on a child of a college-educated mother.

“We tell Korean couples that raising a child is not romantic--that they should be prepared to make sacrifices. But after we say this to them, only one or two of every 10 come back,” Kim says.

In addition, adoption agencies offer only one baby on a “take-it-or-leave-it” basis and do not allow a couple to choose from a selection.

All of the bureaucracy at an adoption agency, however, can be avoided by a doctor or a midwife “asking around and finding a baby to meet the specifications of a couple willing to pay,” Kim says.

Another reason Kim suspects that illegal adoptions are on the rise is that “unwed mothers no longer come to adoption agencies for help.” Babies born out of wedlock account for between 70% and 80% of children classified as “abandoned” and constitute virtually all of Korea’s “orphans.”

Communist North Korea’s propaganda exploitation of the “orphan exports” issue as well as unsubstantiated charges that adoption agencies here “sell” babies for profit overseas have made the subject an extraordinarily sensitive one. Officials of three of the five adoption agencies, as well as bureaucrats at the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, refused requests for interviews.

There is one element in the adoption picture in South Korea on which agreement is widespread: No one is trying to promote domestic adoptions of mixed-race children.

With widespread discrimination--even the government rejects them for military service--there is no possibility of finding homes for racially mixed children without a home, says Cho of the Holy Family Catholic Adoption Agency.