A Personal Reflection On The (Supposedly) Coming End of S. Korea’s Overseas Adoption Program In 2029.

Posted to Paperslip on January 3rd, 2026.
S. Korea decided to announce the (future) end to S. Korean Adoption while I was on a holiday social media break. Thanks, S. Korea.

Mine Is Just One Opinion Amongst Many.

If you haven’t had a chance to process the news of S. Korea’s recent announcement that its overseas adoption program will be ending in 2029, my hope is that this Editorial can give you a jumping off point for your own thoughts. My thoughts are purely my own and I fully respect that others may have widely differing views.

*TRIGGER WARNING FOR SENSITIVE CONTENT REGARDING CHILD DEATHS.

Recently it was announced that S. Korea would be ending its overseas adoption program by 2029. The numbers of Adoptees from S. Korea have been very low for many years – nothing like the thousands of Adoptees sent abroad per year during the S. Korean Adoption heyday of the 1970s and 1980s. However, S. Korea now says that it plans to completely phase out overseas adoption by 2029.

Maybe some might wonder, as the co-founder of Paperslip — a site which is openly critical of adoption — does the fact that overseas adoption is ending from S. Korea make me “happy”? For me, this is a more complicated question than some might think. First, in thinking about the adoption system overall, nothing about the way in which the adoption process works or continues to work produces in me a particularly “happy” feeling. As regards my personal story, this is not to say that I don’t love my adoptive family or appreciate the life that I was given. But since late 2017, when I first “came out of the fog”, I have steadily come to learn more and more about the global system which evolved from a humanitarian post war effort in the 1950s to a ruthless business in the 1970s and 1980s which shamelessly procured children for Western families, no matter what the cost to the original Korean “birth” families, or to the “orphan” children themselves as regards their original identities. My goal at Paperslip has never explicity been to push for the end of adoption. My goal since the beginning, rooted as Paperslip is in my personal case, has always been to examine and excavate the past, so that I could understand what happened to me – and to the twin sister that I did not know that I had until 2020 when I was in my mid-forties, and accidentally discovered her file at my Korean Adoption Agency, KSS. The fact that she likely died at KSS, and that her death was hidden and never meant to be discovered, opened up a massive need in me to figure out what the hell had happened – not only in terms of the particulars of my and my twin’s cases, but in terms of the entire system that made us into orphans available for sale for the Western adoption market. And while I still don’t know all of the answers, all of my digging has made me realize that my twin sister was not the only child who died in the system whose names, family histories, and total numbers will never be publicly disclosed by the S. Korean Adoption Agencies and by the S. Korean Government. I also know that the Western Agencies were very much aware of these child deaths within the system, and I believe that they are just as complicit in covering up these now permanently “missing” children, which few have missed – because few knew they existed in the first place.

I often think about how those of us who were adopted out of the system are just the tip of an enormous iceberg. We survived to (in some cases) complain bitterly about our adoptions. Yet underneath this iceberg tip of surviving Adoptees, and beneath the surface of the water is the enormous base of the iceberg, made up of likely thousands of hidden child deaths, and the lives of children who were swept up into the system, but who never made it out. To illustrate this point, I often quip that I love to critique international adoption from my MacBook Pro. In other words, I am very much aware of my privilege as a Korean American Adoptee who grew up with her material needs met and surrounded by a loving family. Yet I came to discover in my 40s that adoption for me was actually the ultimate yin-yang event – I lost (without consciously knowing) my Korean twin sister, and in exchange gained a white American family who has no biological relationship to me.

I was filmed in 2022 for a documentary in which I said on camera that had I been old enough to have made the choice, I would not have traded my twin for a trip to Disneyland – America. Unfortunately, having been adopted as a baby, that choice was not up to me. My declaration, however, did not make the final cut of the documentary. It was too dark a statement for a (wonderfully made and greatly appreciated) documentary that itself Disney-fied the dark events of my story, to make it more palatable for the Korean audience for whom it was intended. But I still feel that, given the choice, I never would have made the Faustian bargain of trading my dead twin sister for the “good” life that I have lived in America. What is the definition of “good luck” when such a choice was made on my behalf by those who controlled the strings of the baby trade?

Fortunately, I was not amongst the many Adoptees who endured heinous abuses at the hands of my adopters, and I was “lucky” to grow up with the adoptive family that I did – though I see luck now as a lenticular image, whose definition changes, depending on which way you hold it up to the light. But the adoption system definitely abused me and my twin, and it continues to abuse me by erasing and hiding our pasts.

The recent announcement by the S. Korean Government about overseas adoption ending certainly emotionally impacts Adoptees around the world in enormously different ways. Whether or not overseas adoption should end has been one of the most hotly debated and divisive topics amongst Korean Adoptees for years. It’s obviously not for me to say what is right or wrong, and for me personally, my interest is more in figuring out the past practice and history of Korean Adoption – specifically through KSS – than it has been about influencing current adoption policy. However, of course they are directly intertwined, and given the recent media frenzy surrounding Korean Adoption, of which I played a significant part, there is no escaping the fact that criticism may play a role in future policy making over which I have no control.

I don’t consider any individual’s opinion or feelings any more or less valid than anyone else’s about this topic. “Adoption” – however you personally define it – means very different things to very different people. It’s not for me or for anyone else to tell someone if they are “right” or “wrong”. Adoption is a sprawling, complex topic, and I think it is natural for peoples’ opinions and feelings to change about it over the course of their lifetimes. I know this has been the case for me personally. It has taken me an inordinately long time to unpack the layered history of adoption and along with that, the layered emotions I felt / feel as I learned / learn more and more about the dark side of what I once considered to be a very “Disney” topic. Sometimes I miss the version of me that did not know anything about the dark history of adoption – but if I am honest, I also feel sorry for that version of myself. I would not now prefer to be ignorant about the shady practices that infused the system that sent so many of us abroad over decades. It has taken me years to understand that just because an Adoptee has a “good” life and a good family, does not mean that the system that enabled her adoption was not corrupt. I have articulated this concept both to myself and to my adoptive parents many times, as though to try convince all of us. None of us see these conditions as mutually exclusive now – I can both critique the system of Korean Adoption, yet still love my adoptive family and acknowledge their love for me. And to my adoptive parents’ great credit, they can now also see the system for its past and current issues, and how I continue to critique it, yet still embrace me as their daughter – as they always have.

The Broadly and Colloquially Used Terms of “Adoption” and “Adopted”.

The terms “adoption” and “adopted” have different meanings in different contexts, and people often use these terms broadly to describe what are actually different aspects of the process, or they use the terms loosely without understanding their different possible meanings.

People often use the words “adoption” and “adopted” and think that they are talking about the same thing. I believe that such is often not the case. This is very true amongst Adoptees, who often discuss “adoption” as though they are describing the exact same thing. But I think it’s important to parse out the various possible meanings of these terms. Below are meanings I can think of off of the top of my head – there may be more.  

Before discussing what “adoption” means to me on an emotional level, I think it’s important to define the ways in which many people – especially Adoptees – use the terms “adoption” and “adopted”. I think that the terms “adoption” and “adopted” literally mean different things to different people, depending on the context in which people use these terms (in a loose and colloquial sense).

By contrast to the term “adoption”, the term “adoptee” is pretty unambiguous – you are either are an adoptee, or you are not one.

Common colloquial ways in which people use the terms adoption / adopted:

Adoption: The process of adoption (noun) – for example: “We went through the adoption process to adopt our daughter / son from S. Korea.”

Adoption: The entire system (noun) – for example: “The topic of this article is Korean Adoption”.

Adoption: The formal legal process that concludes what is often a multi-year process of a prospective adoptive parent selecting / approving a foreign child for adoption, obtaining a visa for the child, transporting the child, and picking up the child from the airport or adoption agency (noun). Many Adoptees do not realize that in the US and Europe, adoptions were often not legally finalized until 1-3 years after the child entered the country of adoption. So, when an Adoptee says, “I was adopted at 3 months old”, she or he often means that she or he arrived to their Western country of adoption at 3 months old. However, they are likely unaware that the formal adoption process was not finalized for between 1-3 years after they arrived. It would be more accurate for an Adoptee to say that she or he arrived at 3 months old – not that they were adopted at 3 months old. Yet most Adoptees tend to refer to the moment that they arrived at the airport in their Western country of adoption as the moment when they were “adopted”.

Adopted: Some Adoptees who were directly picked up from an orphanage or adoption agency in Korea say that this is when they were “adopted” (verb). However, as explained above, the legal adoption process was often not finalized until well after a child was physically picked up directly by adoptive parents, or more commonly delivered by plane to adoptive parents in the West. Adoptees from earlier generations were more likely to be adopted via proxy (meaning adoptive parents did not have to physically travel to Korea to select / pick up a child) – though there were many exceptions, especially for those who were adopted by US military personnel living in S. Korea or Japan, or other places near S. Korea.

Adopted: The act of being adopted or the end result of going through an adoption process (verb) – for example: “I was adopted from S. Korea.”

Adopted: The process from an adoptive parent’s perspective (verb) – for example: “We adopted our daughter / son from S. Korea.”

Why Precise Terms Matter.

The reason why I think it is important to distinguish some of the various possible meanings of the terms “adoption” and “adopted” is because I think that people often conflate a critique of “adoption” with a critique of the entire system, and of all Western adoptive parents. For me at least, such is not the case. This is because I distinguish the process of acquiring S. Korean children for adoption from the process of moving children across international borders by the various players involved in that process (Korean Adoption Agencies and the Korean Government, Western Adoption Agencies and Western Governments, and Western adoptive parents). To put this succinctly, something I have often said is: “Once I was in an orphanage, I sure would want to get the hell out of there (in other words, *be adopted) – but how the hell did I get there in the first place?”

In other words, my critique is about why and how so many children ended up at orphanages and adoption agencies, when so many of us had living family members. I personally believe that it’s best for a child to get OUT of an orphanage or adoption agency once they are there (*in other words, be adopted) – but the problem is that so many children were outright acquired for the process once a profit driven business became emergent.

*Ideally, those Korean birth parents who returned to orphanages or adoption agencies to pick up their children would be granted such permission by those in charge of these facilities. But such birth parents were often lied to by these organizations and denied the possibility of getting their children back. The orphanages and agencies most often made sure that the only way out of these places for children was through adoption, aging out, or death.

I’ll conclude this editorial by saying that I extend my respect to all Korean Adoptees around the world – we have all lost and gained things in our lives in immeasurable ways, and I am constantly struck by how resilient we have all had to be in the face of the brutal “imperfect storm” over the past few years. The TRC 2 (The Second Truth and Reconcilation) investigation into overseas adoption, the FRONTLINE documentary, and the movement of all Korean Adoption Agency files to NCRC (National Center for the Rights of the Child) in 2025 (and perhaps to the Seongam Branch of the National Archives in 2026) are events which have battered our community like no other time in history. I particularly extend my respect to all Korean Adoptees who have had the bravery to undertake a birth family search. We have had to endure so much in the face of a system which continues to ignore our needs for the truth about our pasts. I can only say that our struggle, which both unites and divides us, will never end. Whether we all get along or not, we will only ever have each other to understand all that we have gone through. I hope that we will all find our paths inward, towards ourselves and towards Korea.