South Korea admits its crime to 'mass exporting' children for adoption

A scathing new report tore apart South Korea’s agonizing past, uncovering how successive generations of children were used as commodities in a vast, unmonitored adoption system. The report, published Wednesday by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, lays bare a network of deceit, coercion, and institutional abandonment that let private agencies “export” more than 170,000 children abroad—many under false pretences.

“They wiped us out,” says Inger-Tone Ueland Shin, 60, a victim who gave testimony. Adopted illicitly by a Norwegian couple when she was 13, she suffered abuse, neglect, and decades of displacement. “I wasn’t a child to them—I was just another transaction.”

South Korea’s Dark Past

The statistics are staggering: documents forged, identities fabricated, and birth mothers coerced into giving up their children. Agencies, desperate for profit, responded to foreign demand by sending children overseas with minimal regulation. Some adoptees did not learn until decades later that their entire lives were a fabrication.

A System Built on Exploitation

Post-war South Korea, which was desperate and poor, made adoption a business. Private organizations had almost complete autonomy, charging inflated fees and disregarding protective laws. The children were stamped “abandoned” to expedite the process, cutting them off from their culture.

“This wasn’t charity—it was trafficking,” says Park Sun-young, the commission’s chair. “The government sanctioned it, and now we have to face the truth.”

Though reforms have since been implemented, the wounds still linger. Adoptees wrestle with broken identities, and countless birth families were never provided a say. The commission calls for a formal apology and compensation—but for victims such as Inger-Tone, justice remains an afterthought.

“They destroyed my life,” she says. “No apology can restore what was taken.”