A South Korean mother sues the government and an agency over the adoption of her missing son
World
Choi’s lawsuit follows a similar case filed in October by another woman in her 70s
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A 72-year-old mother has filed a lawsuit against South Korea’s government and its largest adoption agency, alleging systematic failures in her forced separation from her toddler son who was sent to Norway without her consent.
Choi Young-ja searched desperately for her son for nearly five decades before their emotional reunion in 2023.
The damage claim by Choi, whose story was part of an Associated Press investigation also documented by Frontline (PBS), comes as South Korea faces growing pressure to address the extensive fraud and abuse that tainted what’s seen as history’s largest foreign adoption program.
In a landmark report in March, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the government bears responsibility for facilitating an aggressive and loosely regulated foreign adoption program that carelessly or unnecessarily separated thousands of children from their families for multiple generations.
It found that the country’s past military governments were driven by efforts to reduce welfare costs and empowered private agencies to speed up adoptions, while turning a blind eye to widespread practices that often manipulated children’s backgrounds and origins, leading to an explosion in adoptions that peaked in the 1970s and 1980s.
Children who had living parents, including those who were simply missing or kidnapped, were often falsely documented as abandoned orphans to increase their chances of being adopted in Western countries, which have taken in around 200,000 Korean children over the past seven decades.
Choi’s lawsuit follows a similar case filed in October by another woman in her 70s, Han Tae-soon, who also sued the government and Holt Children’s Services over the adoption of her daughter who was sent to the United States in 1976, months after she was kidnapped at age 4.
