1 The Korean War and Its Global Legacy: From Battlefields to Adoption Airlifts
2. Adoptions after the Korean War
3. Explaining the South Korean Economic Miracle
4. Medical Innovations During the Korean War
5. New Archives Analysis on the Origins of the Korean War
6. The Korean War Transformed the Cold War?
7. Religion After the Korean War on the Peninsula
8. American Intervention in Korea
9. A Focus on Some Veterans in South Korea and France
10. Anti-Americanism in South Korean Society
By Riyad Moosoody
How did South Korea become the most significant exporter of babies after the Korean War? In 1957, the first chartered plane took off for the United States carrying orphans from the Korean War, paving the way for the massive export of babies. When the war ended in 1953, the orphans had to fight for survival. A Christian American couple, Harry and Bertha Holt, played a key role in organizing the adoption of babies by foreign parents. The Holts themselves adopted eight Korean war orphans in 1955 and, to help others, created Holt International Children's Services. The launch of this United States-based humanitarian agency quickly led to the mass adoption of Korean war orphans—particularly mixed-race children considered pariahs in Korea—by American parents.
The Korea Herald, then called The Korean Republic, in its October 31, 1957 edition explained that the Holts had taken in over 400 Korean children in October 1957. The orphans were "mostly born to United Nations soldiers stationed in Korea." Over the years, the Holts' initiative became a veritable tidal wave of Korean infants and children flown to foreign countries, with the participation of several other organizations as mediators. The number of Koreans adopted in the United States between 1955 and 1966 was 6,293, according to the book Culture, Ethnicity & Mental Illness written by Albert C. Gaw, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. According to him, of these, 46% were half Korean and half white, 41% were Korean and the rest were African-American and Black Korean (Kim 2009, p. 2).
Adoption as a weapon in an ideological battle
From the American point of view, these "GI babies" or "UN babies" represented a potential weapon that North Korea could seize upon in the ideological battle to discredit the United States. Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision International, an evangelical Christian aid organization that began its humanitarian projects in Korea, used the adoption of mixed-race Korean children as part of an anti-Communist Christian propaganda program (Kim 2009, p. 6). Ironically, it was the foreign adoption "solution" that eventually led North Korea to scathingly criticize South Korean "traitors" for selling children to "American slave traders" (Washington Post 1959).
Children left homeless or orphaned during the war were portrayed in the American media as objects of humanitarian concern. Moreover, their welfare was a key element in the post-war American policy of containing communism, which sought to use humanitarian aid as a means of strengthening the "goodwill" of the Korean people. The thousands of mixed-race children born to Korean women and fathered by members of the armed forces soon became a welfare issue, both for the new South Korean government under President Syngman Rhee and for the United States, anxious to maintain its reputation as the embodiment of democratic ideals in the "free world" (New York Times 2023, 2).
For American couples who had no children of their own, or who wished to have more but were too old, or who lacked the stability, money, status, lifestyle or education that social workers seemed to demand of prospective adoptive parents, images of destitute orphans on the other side of the world appeared like a gift from heaven. The letters received by the Consul General in late 1953 from Connecticut, Iowa, California, Michigan and Texas expressed diverse motivations and requests in terms of gender and age (New York Times 2023, 2). One woman wrote: "My husband and I would love to place a Korean War orphan in our family and, in so doing, eliminate a small part of the world's suffering." Many of these families had "natural" children, and couples were looking to add children of a certain age to "complete" their family or give "playmates" to their children. Typical requests were: "We want a girl about 6 or 7 years old. Can you help us find her?" or "My little girls have always wanted a little brother, so I'd prefer a little boy, but either would be fine" (Kim 2009, p. 12).
Massive baby exports
Why did the South Korean government encourage the export of babies after the war? After the war, few Koreans saw any problem in sending babies "so they could have a chance of finding a new family." After all, domestic adoptions were rare and made no money for the agencies.
Adoption in South Korea was largely influenced by two factors: the rationalization of adoption policies and practices in the United States around the ideal of the nuclear family, and the South Korean government's desire to "solve" its "welfare problems" through intercountry adoption (Kim 2009, p. 8).
Eleana Kim emphasizes the commercial aspect of the adoption culture, explaining that sending children abroad "spared the Korean government the expense of caring for them." According to her, the Korean government at the time authorized four adoption agencies to handle all the procedures. Adoptive parents had to pay some $4,000 for "transportation costs, medical expenses, payments to Korean foster parents and adoption agency processing fees" (Kim 2009, p. 9). The Progressive, an American magazine, claimed in an article that the South Korean government earned between $15 and $20 million a year from this "peculiar business" (Kim 2009, p. 9).
In a correspondence dated 1953, President Rhee wrote, "We are very anxious to send as many of our orphans as possible to the United States. In particular, we wish to adopt the children of Western fathers and Korean mothers who can never hope to find a place for themselves in Korean society. These children should interest Americans even more than Koreans." The President therefore had a vested interest in promoting Korean adoption abroad, and his office put considerable effort into locating the specific children requested by American couples. According to the successor organization to CPS (Child Placement Services), the Social Welfare Society, President Rhee's "one nation, one race" (ilguk, ilminju) ideology transformed the situation of mixed-race children into an urgent concern for the government (Social Welfare Society 2004, p. 39).
Adoption was a way for the state to regulate its mixed-race population and simultaneously maintain a good relationship with the United States. The Korean government undertook research to locate and assess the actual number of mixed-race children, as well as women living with or having relationships with UN or American soldiers. Adoption became a means of "purifying" the population, through the regulation of mixed-race children and the illicit sexuality of their Korean mothers, and social workers were the main actors in the execution of this family planning and population control project (Kim 2009, p. 9). Oak Soon Hong and other young social workers went into the DMZ to locate the children and convince the mothers that it was better for everyone if they sent the children to be adopted by Americans who wanted them (Kim 2009, p. 10). The mixed-race adoptees of the war generation with whom I spoke still remember meetings between Korean social workers and their Korean mothers, who were convinced to send their children up for adoption (Han 2004, p. 20).
Lisa Malki argues that children function as a "tranquilizing convention" in the international community, serving to depoliticize highly political contexts (Bornstein 2001, 53). In the case of humanitarian interventions in particular, children are, she writes elsewhere, "sentimentally valued as human beings," and thus transcend "national identities and differences" (Zelizer 1994, 54).
American soldiers overcame racism and cultural "skepticism" by focusing on humanitarian efforts on behalf of children. The "children of war" were often portrayed as "orphans", and Korean parents were rarely, if ever, mentioned in these press accounts (New York Times 2023, p. 2). Instead, the benevolent American soldier played the role of parental figure crossing racial divides by assuming a paternal role to provide for the needy Third World child. Eleana Kim explains how the humanity of children enabled American soldiers to redeem their own humanity in the context of a dehumanizing war, as "Americans" whose acts of charity restored their personal and national moral exceptionalism (Kim 2009, p. 12).
Thus, an ambivalent image developed around the role of the American military in the history of international adoption in South Korea. On the one hand, they played a paternalistic role as the main supporters of the orphanages and as intermediaries for the Americans. On the other hand, many of them renounced their real paternal responsibilities as fathers of children who were subsequently abandoned because of the double stigma of illegitimacy and mixed race. The stigma attached to these children justified the first wave of international adoptions from South Korea. As Abelmann and Lie (1995) write, describing the role of the United States in South Korea: "Through military and civilian contacts, the United States became both an object of material desire and materialistic contempt, a heroic savior and a reactionary intruder" (Kim 2009, p. 15).
Koreans' collective indifference to babies sent abroad took another turn in the 1980s, when the international media brought to light the "international adoption business," in which the country was a major player. "This flow of children abroad began when South Korea was a poor nation, whose cities and families had been devastated by the Korean War. The fact that it continues, when South Korea boasts giant factories and the 1988 Olympics, raises questions," read a 1988 New York Times article entitled "Babies for Export."
Adoptees demand answers
There's no denying that Harry Holt was instrumental in the rise of international adoption, and for many in South Korea, the Holt name is virtually synonymous with overseas adoption and child protection. Yet, seventy years on, Holt's mythical stature, as portrayed in Bertha's books and by Holt International Children's Services (the agency created by Harry Holt), is being challenged by many who criticize the way in which international adoption had become a "quick fix" to child welfare problems in the South.
Today, some adult Korean adoptees are demanding explanations. They claim that their adoption process, managed by Holt International and other adoption agencies, was riddled with errors, misinformation and fabrications. They asked the government to investigate. In 2021, a group of Korean adoptees officially asked the Seoul Reconciliation Group to examine past adoption cases, which they claimed were essentially human rights violations. They accused Holt of falsifying documents such as biological origins, birth names and parents to facilitate the adoption process, in the document filed with Seoul's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
"We realize that the adoption agencies, Holt and Korea Social Service, systematically falsified documents that made adoptees look like orphans on paper, even though their parents were alive at the time," reads the document in Korean. "Although the adoption agencies were officially non-profit, we realize that they accepted millions of dollars in donations. We ask the Commission to investigate the use of this money."
Jin Meyerson, an adopted Korean turned artist, asserted that South Korea is generally obsessed with righting historical wrongs, such as Japan's apology for the sexual enslavement of Korean women during the colonial period. However, when it comes to coming to terms with its painful adoption past, the country has failed, he declared. "As a country, as a culture, as a community, what right do we have to demand an apology from Japan when we can't even deal with this situation in our own home, with our own children? It's unimaginable."
About the Author
Riyad Moosoody is a researcher in Global Security at the Asia Institute. His work focuses on the role of the United States on the Korean Peninsula, the historiography of the Korean War, and the continuing geopolitical impact of the conflict. Born in Mauritius, he studied Law at the University of Strasbourg and U.S. History at the University of Bordeaux and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has received fellowships from the American Institute and the French Ministry of Defence for his PhD research and is fluent in English and French.
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