Stop intercountry adoption – Hankyoreh editorial

 

The fourth meeting of the International Korean Adoptee Associations (IKAA) is being held until Saturday in Seoul. Approximately 650 adoptees who have been separated from their birth parents are said to be in attendance. These adoptees were once neglected in the country of their birth, so it is sorrowful to have them come to Korea again out of a sense of longing. Repeating the talk about how we are “the same minjok” (people) or “of the same pitjul” (bloodline) only sounds like lip service in the face of their irreplaceable loss, since today as well, a few more newborn babies will board planes on their way to adoptive parents.

These individuals who have returned, though they have grown up so well, are like a thorn piercing Korea’s conscience. This thorn serves as a reminder of the fact that Korea, the “country that exports babies,” still sends some 2,000 children intercountry every year. And yet it is only at times like these that we allow ourselves to be reminded. We go about life forgetting – until they return again, when we say “we’re sorry” and “thank you” and then go back to the usual. This is a process that has continued for decades.

This time around, however, some of the people who want to see it stop are taking a stand. Adoptees and mothers who have sent children intercountry have begun collecting one million signatures calling for an end to intercountry adoption. It is an appeal calling for an end to the repetition of their experiences. This time, surely, they must not be neglected. Instead of statements about how Korea is going to promote domestic adoption or work to improve how society sees adoption, there needs to be an immediate and specific way to end intercountry adoption.

Some might question whether things can be changed overnight, but in fact the situation is different. Of the 1,899 children sent intercountry for adoption last year, 1,890 were the children of single mothers. If we make conditions such that single mothers can raise their children on their own, or raise them with help from their immediate communities, fewer of these women would send their newborn babies to strange foreign lands because they feared being ostracized in Korean society. A decent program for single mothers would contribute to a significant reduction in the number of children sent for intercountry adoption.

Discussions about increasing domestic adoption or changing how society improves adoption can come later. The only thing that discussing a long-term response, while neglecting the work that would have an immediate effect, does is make people doubt your sincerity.

Stopping intercountry adoption is more about very basic human rights for children than it is about any grand slogans about how “we should bear responsibility for our own minjok.” Article 9 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child declares that “a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will.” There is no justification for one of the world’s top ten powerhouses to ignore so basic a human right.

 

 

 

가슴 아픈 해외입양 ‘다신 없기를’

입양 어머니 모임 ‘민들레’ 해외입양 금지 운동

“해외로 입양된 아이들이 얼마나 어렵게 살고 있는지 그 아픔은 아무도 모릅니다. 우리같은 아픔이 다시는 없기를 바랍니다”

자녀를 해외로 입양보내고 뒤늦은 후회에 시달리던 어머니들이 이 같은 비극이 더 이상 반복되지 않기를 바라는 마음을 한데 모아 해외입양 반대 운동에 나섰다.

입양 어머니 모임인 ‘민들레’는 4일 오후 서울 장충동 지하철 3호선 동대입구역에서 ‘해외입양 반대’, ‘나의 아기 나의 손으로’라는 내용이 적힌 팻말을 들고 나와 해외입양 금지를 촉구하는 서명운동을 전개했다.

이날 캠페인에는 민들레 소속 어머니 10여명과 2007 세계한인입양인대회에 참석하기 위해 방한한 한국계 입양인 30여명 등이 참가해 시민들의 관심을 호소했다.

민들레 관계자는 “예전에는 힘든 사연이 있어 아이들을 외국으로 보내는 경우가 많았지만 이제는 어려운 처지의 엄마가 직접 아이를 키울 수 있는 사회적 시스템이 만들어져 고아 수출국의 불명예를 씻어야 한다”고 말했다.

노 명자(49.여) 민들레 사무총장은 “입양아들에게 엄마들이 노력한다는 모습을 보여주고 한국에 올 때 편안함을 느낄 수 있도록 서명 운동에 나섰다”며 “지금도 입양이 계속되고 있지만 우리와 같은 아픔이 또 있어서는 안 된다”고 강조했다.

1977년 피치 못할 사정으로 아들을 떠나보낸 노씨는 “당시에는 아들이 설마 해외로 나갔으리라고는 생각하지 못했다. 2004년 미국에서 아들이 날 찾는다는 연락을 받고 기절할 뻔했다. 찾은 것은 기뻤지만 언어, 음식, 문화가 완전히 다른 아들을 접하니 너무 가슴이 아팠다”고 과거를 회상했다.

노씨는 “아들을 처음 만나 인사동에서 함께 쇼핑을 했는데 아들이 ‘난생 처음으로 백인들을 의식하지 않고 편하게 쇼핑해봤다’고 해 가슴이 찢어지는 것 같았다. 입양아들이 외국에서 얼마나 인종차별을 받았을까…”라며 안타까워했다.

이 날 캠페인에 참석한 입양인 김재란(36.여)씨는 “엄마들이 적극적으로 나서 이런 모임을 만들어 너무 기쁘다”며 “개인적으로 별 나쁜 경험은 없었지만 해외 입양의 폐해는 내 개인의 문제가 아니라 제도적 문제이기 때문에 여기에 동참했다”고 말했다.

김씨는 “아이 양육은 친부모나 친척, 아니면 그 사회 내에서 해결해야 한다. 국제 입양은 가장 마지막에 고려해야 할 일”이라며 “한국은 아직도 인구 대비 해외입양 비율이 가장 높은 나라”라고 꼬집었다.

민들레는 최근 청주에서 550여명의 서명을 받은 데 이어 전국 각지로 캠페인을 확대, 해외입양에 반대하는 100만명 서명을 받아 국회에 제출할 계획이다.

Interview with Eleana Kim

(Yonhap Interview) Korean adoptees seek identity through community

By Kim Young-gyo
SEOUL, Aug. 5 (Yonhap) — After many years of soul searching, an increasing number of Korean adoptees abroad are taking a curious look at their newfound position as a “transnational” bridge between their birth and adoptive countries, a U.S. scholar said this week.

The transnational movement taking place among Korean adoptees abroad is helping answer complex questions they have from being displaced from Korean family and nation, said Eleana Kim, a professor of anthropology at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York.

“I think this movement is a free circulation of information and travel. And this is what really defines a lot of adoptees’ communities now,” Kim said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency, stressing that adoption is “transnational” rather than international or inter-country.
“Rather than thinking of adoption as from the birth country to the adoptive country, which is a one-way trip, adoption now really is becoming much more transnational, where you have a constant flow of people, information and things moving back and forth.” she said.
Kim was in Seoul this week to appear at an international symposium on Koreans adopted abroad, part of a six-day meeting of about 650 Korean adoptees that ended on Saturday. The Seoul meeting was the fourth of its kind since the first one in Washington in 1999.
The bonds built through the “communities” for adoptees, Kim said, has helped them meet their needs, which they could not satisfy otherwise.

“For instance, the gatherings here brought hundreds of adoptees to South Korea. They travel back and forth many times and maintain connections with each other through the Internet,” she said.

As South Korea is becoming increasingly globalized and multicultural, she said, a variety of people live together in the country with different cultural backgrounds and tradition, including adult adoptees who often visit their birth country.
Kim praised the South Korean government for trying to give a helping hand to the adoptees.

“I think the government has made a lot of important gestures to adult adoptees. The government realizes it has to respond to the main population of the Korean adoptees,” Kim said.
The scholar said, however, that there still remains one key question that should be addressed by the Korean government: whether South Korean society should treat the adoptees, who do not have any connection to the society legally or socially, as a special category.

“From the government’s perspective, are adoptees Korean, or are they foreigners? Are they adults or children? How much will they give back to Korea and how much do they deserve to take? I think it’s still being worked out,” she said.

South Korea, the world’s 11th-largest economy, has been criticized both at home and abroad for its low rate of domestic adoption. Government figures show that there have been about 87,500 domestic adoptions versus 158,000 international adoptions since the Korean War ended in 1953.

Even though the government is now promoting domestic adoption, Confucianism, which stresses patriarchal bloodlines, and social stigma against unmarried and single mothers and their children are commonly cited as the reasons for the low domestic adoption rate.

The daughter of a first-generation immigrant couple who moved to North America from South Korea in the 1960s, Kim began researching the issue of Korean adoption in 1999 and published articles in periodicals such as Anthropological Quarterly, as well as in a number of edited volumes, including Cultures of Transnational Adoption.

She said the Internet has helped Korean adoptees stay closer together.

“I think the Internet was really an important way, technology, for them to connect to each other,” Kim said. “Often they would say they thought they were the only ones, and suddenly they realize there are thousands of others that were also adopted like they were.”
The Internet also provided the adoptees with a way to participate in the adoptee community in a comfortable and safer way, even being able to open up to those who might have felt uncomfortable about talking face-to-face about the issue, she said.

Adoptees who used to feel they belonged neither to the birth country nor to the adoptive country have now started to accept the fact that “where they are is where they belong.”
“Adoptees often feel likely to choose between one and the other — Korean and American, Korean and French, or Korean and Swedish. Through the community, however, a lot of them were able to say with confidence, ‘I’m a Korean adoptee.’”
ygkim@yna.co.kr

Korean adoptees from abroad and birth mothers protest overseas adoption

SEOUL, Aug. 5 (Yonhap) – Roh Myung-ja has gotten together with her son every year since 2004, when she was reunited with him after giving him up for adoption about 30 years ago. She is one of thousands of Korean women whose children were adopted overseas.

The 49-year-old Roh believes what she has experienced in the years before her son returned to her should not happen to anyone. Now, she works as a staff member of Mindeulae, (Dandelions), a civic group of South Korean parents whose children were adopted overseas and who oppose the nation’s adoption system, which sends thousands of orphaned and abandoned children abroad.

“We hope that no other mothers have to go through the pain and suffering that we went through. Overseas adoption leaves deep-rooted scars both on the birth mothers and the children,” Roh said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency on Saturday.

About 30 Korean adoptees from abroad and 10 birth mothers, including Roh, came together Saturday for a rally in downtown Seoul calling for the government to abolish international adoption from South Korea. The mothers and adoptees were not all related to each other.

They held up picket signs that read, “Real Choices for Korean Women and Children,”"Korean Babies Not for Export” and “End Overseas Adoption.”

A signature-gathering drive also began to express opposition to overseas adoption. The civic group plans to collect one million signatures nationwide.

Government figures show that there have been about 87,500 domestic adoptions, versus 158,000 international adoptions, since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

In 1977, Roh had to give up her 11-month old child, and had no idea that her son had gone to the United States. “I was literally shocked when I got a phone call in 2004 saying that my son is coming from the U.S. to look for me,” Roh said.

Roh said that no one asks or is responsible for what happens to the children after they were adopted overseas.

“My son luckily turned out fine. But who knows what other kids undergo?” she said. “The day when I took my son shopping for the first time, he said to me, ‘This is my first time in my life that I went shopping without caring that I am not white,’”

Roh’s son, who was not able to make a trip this week to Seoul from South Dakota, wholeheartedly supports her actions, she said.

Jaeran Kim was one of the adoptees from overseas who joined in Saturday’s protest. A social worker focusing on domestic adoption in the U.S., Kim was adopted from South Korea by a U.S. family in 1971.

“When people talk about the adoption, they don’t care about how the child grows up or how it affects the birth mothers,” she said. “The adoption system is too much dominated by the adoptive families and the adoptive agencies.”

Kim stressed that she did not have negative experience as a Korean adoptee in the U.S. and is in a good relationship with her adoptive parents.

“It is not a matter of whether you had a good experience or bad experience as an adoptee. The adoption system goes way beyond that. It works within a political, institutional structure of society,” she said.

Kim, who was on her third visit to South Korea, has not been able to find her birth parents yet, but plans to live in South Korea with her husband and children for a while in the future.

“Adoption does not only affect me as an adoptee, but it also affects my family — my husband and children. My children do not have their grandparents in South Korea, and they lost their part of the Korea culture, too,” she said.

She argued that a child should be adopted by the extended family or extended community at least, and that international adoption should be the last option.

South Korea, the world’s 11th-largest economy, was the fourth country in 2004 following China, Russia and Guatemala to send the most children to the U.S. for adoption, according to a research paper by Peter Selman, a British scholar.

 ygkim@yna.co.kr