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South Korea’s dark past as West’s ‘baby farm’ laid bare by adopted ‘children for sale’ who grew up far from home
More than 170,000 South Korean children were adopted by Western families in the turbulent post-war period – nearly 9,000 a year at times in the 1980s. Many were labelled orphans, despite their birth parents still being alive, and say their documents were falsified, making them question their identity | It was late spring and Uma Feed had just dropped her son off at a kindergarten in Oslo when her phone rang unexpectedly, bringing news she’d been searching for her whole life: the true identities of her birth parents. ● Adopted as a baby from South Korea in 1983, Feed grew up in Norway being told she’d been abandoned – a story she refused to believe but could only disprove in May this year, when at age 40 she was finally reconnected with her biological mother thanks to DNA testing. ● A long letter and video message followed, revealing that Um Sul-yung – the name given on Feed’s adoption documents – was actually given up for adoption by her grandparents without the consent of her mother, who was hospitalised with tuberculosis at the time. “Every evening, my mum and my older brother had gone out to look for me. They were just wandering the streets,” she said. As it turned out, nearly all the information she’d received from the Norwegian adoption organisation was inaccurate, Feed told This Week in Asia. In response to queries, the organisation said it couldn’t comment on her case, citing privacy laws. Feed, who legally changed her first name to Uma in her twenties after rejecting the Norwegian one her adoptive parents had given her, is just one of the more than 170,000 South Koreans who were taken in as children by Western families in the decades following the Korean war. [Paywall]
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