South Korea Stole Babies and Sold Them Abroad: A Dark Past

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Back in the days and for decades, let’s be blunt about it: South Korea stole Korean babies and sold them overseas. There, it’s said. The “adoption miracle” was no miracle at all. It was a state-endorsed export program disguised as compassion, where poverty met bureaucracy and children became paperwork.

For years, the country sent its most vulnerable abroad under the comforting pretext of “better opportunities.” In reality, it was about convenience, money, and global image. Now, decades later, the façade has collapsed. After months of investigation, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded what many adoptees had long suspected: thousands of children were registered as orphans despite having living parents. Records were falsified. Identities were erased.

Babies were mislabeled and dispatched to the United States, Europe, and beyond. Between the 1950s and 1990s, over 200,000 children disappeared into foreign systems, their real names and origins stripped away. The state knew. Private agencies knew. Everyone looked the other way because adoption was profitable and politically convenient. It solved a “social problem” by exporting it.

The scandal is not an accident of history; it’s a policy choice that traded human lives for foreign approval. It took a 2025 government investigation and the unrelenting voices of adult adoptees to drag the truth into daylight.

President Lee Jae Myung ’s October 2025 apology, though historic, reads like an overdue confession. He admitted that the government “failed in its duty” to protect children’s rights and announced an immediate end to overseas adoptions as of October 17, 2025. It is the first time a Korean head of state publicly acknowledged systemic wrongdoing. But apology is not justice, and words do not restore an identity.

Legal consequences have begun catching up, though they remain largely domestic. South Korean courts faced multiple suits over adoption fraud. In 2019, Korean American adoptee Adam Crapser sued the government and Holt Children’s Services for falsified records and negligence, but the High Court cleared both in January 2025. Birth mothers have filed parallel suits against the state, orphanages, and agencies for wrongful adoptions of kidnapped children, many of which are still ongoing.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that mass adoptions under falsified identities violated both the Korean Constitution and international human-rights conventions. Yet it stopped short of criminal referrals, recommending compensation without lawsuits. So far, no penalties have been enforced.

In the eyes of international law, that silence is telling. Admission without accountability remains a contradiction, and for thousands of adoptees searching for their names, it is justice deferred.

The legal dimension is brutal. International law, particularly the Hague Adoption Convention, demands state oversight and child protection. Yet for decades, Korea outsourced its moral and legal obligations to private agencies operating in a gray zone between charity and commerce. Consent forms were fabricated, family searches ignored, and oversight mechanisms absent. The law existed only on paper. What happened instead fits closer to human trafficking than legitimate adoption.

Now, the government faces the impossible: repairing what cannot be undone. Tens of thousands of adoptees live abroad with no way to reclaim their names or citizenship. Many learned through DNA tests that their “adoptive past” was built on forged documents. Reparation, restitution, or even access to original files will demand not just political will, but legal infrastructure: registries, lawsuits, and international cooperation.

This scandal also forces accountability on the receiving countries. Western nations that accepted Korean adoptees benefited from a system they never questioned. Adoption filled demographic gaps, satisfied humanitarian optics, and let governments boast moral leadership while ignoring how those children arrived. The question now is whether they will share responsibility for remedy and truth.

Ending the overseas adoption system marks the end of an era, but not the end of a crime. South Korea must now write laws that prioritize transparency over export, welfare over bureaucracy, and human dignity over policy convenience. The law failed these children once. This time, it has to defend them.