Structural Violence, Social Death, and International Adoption: Part 4 of 4

This broadcast (online in six parts) aired in Korea in 2009 and uncovered many irregularities in Korea’s adoption system. This mother relinquished her baby because the baby was born prematurely and she did not have the money to care for her. You can see in Part 4 how the mother is treated by the adoption agency when she starts to search. The program reveals that the daughter had actually started searching two years before, but the agency failed to contact the parents at that time. The adoptee is eventually contacted by the TV station, which tracked her down in the Netherlands using the internet.

IV. Sweet False Generosity Makes “Bitter Adoptees”

Adoptive parents and adoptees – and perhaps even the Western adoption agencies themselves, which operate based on the information that Koreans give them – have been led to believe that the high rate of relinquishment of these children is because of unwed mothers’ individual choices. “Your mother made a choice for you,” adoptees are told. I have been told, very sincerely, that “big people make choices for little people.” For frogs that can’t see outside the well they live in, this sweet logic is enough. For people who think, it is not.

The testimony of individual mothers, when seen as a group, does not show a picture of women making personal selections out of a menu of equally viable and healthy choices. The more realistic picture that emerges is one of vulnerable women navigating a web of misinformation created by a highly developed system driven by the adoption agencies’ economic need to secure children for adoption. The unwed mothers have emphatically stressed that in Korea, the most encouraged and easiest choice for an unwed mother is to relinquish her child; the least-encouraged and hardest choice is to responsibly raise her child.

Writes Choi Hyong-Sook, an unwed mother who once lost her child to adoption, but who fought to take him back and is now raising him as an unwed mother:

Just as five years ago — when I first got a consultation — or now, adoption agencies advise unwed mothers before they give birth to sign a written consent for adoption and relinquishment of parental authority. However, the consultation or education regarding a single mother’s child custody is barely undertaken if at all.

The biggest problem is that it is very hard to get “proper” information about adoption or rearing children through adoption agencies.

Recently, most unwed moms are using the internet to find information about pre-delivery or consultation, and when they search the web with the term “unwed mother,” they can see the list of unwed mothers’ facilities run by adoption organizations.

Furthermore, it is almost impossible to get information from adoption agencies or from consultations about how to raise your children, while it is not hard to get much information about adoption.

To many Americans, these coercive tactics are reminiscent of the U.S. situation 40-60 years ago, before abortion was legalized in the U.S. and before the widespread use of oral contraceptives. Ann Fessler in her book The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade gives an excellent account of this history. The long-term negative effects of this practice of separating children from their mothers under the guise of the best interests of both mother and baby have since been revealed. If it was not good for American women then, why should it be good for Korean women now?

As Paulo Friere writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

Any situation in which “A” objectively exploits “B” or hinders his and her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence even when sweetened by false generosity.

In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity” … That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.

In this era, adopting an infant from Korea whether domestically or internationally is equivalent to enabling the behavior of agencies and their business partners, which punish unwed mothers by taking their children away through coercion and relentless pressure. This very unjust, anti-feminist regime of discrimination against unwed and economically disadvantaged mothers and their children will continue to perpetuate itself, with the help of the advertising of adoption agencies, as long as relatively wealthier prospective adoptive parents do not bother to ask what is what made these children “available for adoption,” as long as prospective adoptive parents use ignorance as an excuse to unquestioningly swallow, whole, the sentimental advertising of adoption agencies.

Writes Ms. Choi, the unwed mother:

Adoption agencies often say that adoption is “giving birth to an abandoned child through one’s heart.”

What kind of mother in earth can send her child easily? Our hearts are broken when we hear that.

Lest anyone think that the South Korean government’s current emphasis on polishing its overseas image is new for the G-20, or that reports on the link between money and adoption is new, I’d like to share this editorial from a time when South Korea was sending troops not to Afghanistan, but Vietnam. In a Korea Herald article from 1968, Yo-in Song, a professor at Dongguk University, wrote an editorial called “Mendicant Mentality,” which detailed the police investigation of a local representative of a U.S. adoption agency, who escaped the country after being charged with embezzlement:

But there are some agencies, particularly those involved in aiding orphans, whose reputation has been less than favorable. Some have been known to exist here for the sake of their own existence.

It is usually one of these agencies that runs advertisements in U.S. magazine[s] soliciting donations to help alleviate the misery of orphans …Such advertisements add a jarring note to the favorable image now being created of this country in the United States, what with her economic development and dispatch of troops to Vietnam.

It is about time this nation shake off its mendicant mentality. The government should take some action to put an end to this type of panhandling. Preferably, those agencies in Korea with orphans should be phased out at the request of the government…Korea is coming of age. She should learn to do without the services of foreign charity agencies in caring for her orphans.

Proponents of international adoption say that international adoption must be kept open for the benefit of mixed race and disabled children. However, the Ministry of Health and Welfare recorded that only 3.49% of children sent for adoption were mixed race from 1953-2005. This seems accurate. On the other hand, the ministry recorded that 23.45% the children sent during that time period were handicapped.

But to an overseas adoptee who has met with adoptees in the U.S., Europe, and South Korea, this statistic is unbelievable. Koreans can see for themselves in the first week of August this year, when the adoptees come to Seoul by the hundreds for the “Gathering,” that 1 in 4 adoptees are not visibly handicapped. As the ministry itself pointed out in the 2008 audit, sufficient information is not being kept on handicap. According to ministry statistics, the number of “handicapped” children sent overseas for adoption dropped suddenly from 500 in 2007 to 124 in 2008. How is that possible?

This is possible because the number of “premature” (미숙아/조숙아) children dropped from 222 in 2007 to only 48 in 2008. A drop such as this can only mean a change in definition, not actual state. It would be interesting to know how the definition changed from 2007 to 2008. At any rate, it seems to indicate that many of these “handicapped” children sent from Korea were neither severely handicapped nor in a life-or-death situation. It seems they may have simply been small. And because the definition of premature has likely changed, it seems that even those small children were not so small that their health was endangered. Many children sent as “handicapped,” therefore, may have been miscategorized according to today’s standards.

In addition, those who have visited the severely handicapped in Korean institutions – children who cannot eat, sit or walk by themselves — know that there is a difference between their heartbreaking situation and the lighter handicaps seen in overseas adoptees. The children with the poorest health actually stay in Korea. Meanwhile, Korea continues to send children away for being born with harelips. But why do we need to send children overseas for plastic surgery when Apkujeong, the plastic surgery and medical tourism neighborhood of Seoul,  is so close?

I’d like to end on a personal note. Many adoptees, including myself, who have been critical of the adoption industry and who have demanded real justice for our Korean families have faced years of backlash in the form of hate mail sent over the internet and physically to our homes, infantilizing comments on blogs, gate-keeping behavior in the publishing world and academia, and threats of physical violence and even death. I believe that the goal of these actions – even on the petty level of name-calling that evokes the stereotype of the “bitter,” “ungrateful,” and “angry adoptee” – is to discredit, dismiss, and intimidate us because we are a threat to an unjust social order.

The topic of backlash is a fascinating one that deserves to be methodically unpacked in a separate paper for the benefit of the younger generation of activists. For now, though, I just want to quickly quote a popular American bumper sticker. It says, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.” Compared to even a year ago, it seems that many more adoptees are now paying attention. We should be not angry, but righteously outraged, that we have been deceived and lulled by false advertising for so, so long. We must wake up not 40 years from now, but right now, because the exchange of babies for money and silently consenting to the exploitation of vulnerable mothers – treating them as nothing more than hens laying eggs in a factory farm – steadily erodes the humanity of all of us.

Note:

The English-language excerpt of Choi Hyung-sook’s essay is translated from a paper titled “Counselling Services of Adoption Agencies Experienced by Unwed Mothers” presented Feb. 24, 2010 at the 60th Women’s Policy Forum hosted by the Korean Women’s Development Institute (KWDI) and sponsored by the Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network (KUMSN), both located in Seoul. The paper describes the experiences of five unwed mothers who participate in Korea Unwed Mothers & Families Association, formerly known as “Miss Mamma Mia.” Their organization, launched officially in June 2009, now claims over 250 unwed mothers as members nationwide, while the most active members of the group are a handful of mothers raising their children in Seoul. Click here to read more of Ms. Choi’s article.

Jane Jeong Trenka was born in the U.S. military district of Yongsan-gu in Seoul, South Korea, and was sent to the U.S. for adoption in 1972. With Julia Chinyere Oparah and Sun Yung Shin, Trenka is co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing and Transracial Adoption and the author of two memoirs: The Language of Blood and Fugitive Visions. She makes her living by correcting English grammar at night, and volunteers by day for the Seoul-based organization TRACK (Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea), which advocates for a full understanding of the practice of adoption, both past and present, to improve the human rights of children and families affected by adoption.

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Other Articles in this Series:

Structural Violence, Social Death, and International Adoption: Part 1 of 4

Structural Violence, Social Death, and International Adoption: Part 2 of 4

Structural Violence, Social Death, and International Adoption: Part 3 of 4

Related Article

Counseling Services of Adoption Agencies Experienced by Unwed Mothers

Other Articles by Jane:

Nothing About Us Without Us

What Does “Gotcha” Mean?

Abuses in Adoption from S. Korea

Transnational Adoption and the “Financialization of Everything”