The Hard Truth About The Current State Of Birth Family Search.

Posted to Paperslip on November 11th, 2025.

No One Wants To Talk To Adoptees About The Hard Truths About The Current State Of Birth Family Search. But We Will.

Let’s face it — birth family search has never been easy for Korean Adoptees. However, in light of recent events, the birth family search process of your average Adoptee without known birth parent information in the documents already in their possession has gotten significantly harder, since ALL former Korean Adoption Agency files moved to the Korean Public Institution NCRC (National Center for the Rights of the Child), starting on July 19th, 2025.

And let’s state the hardest truth of all right from the beginning: with NCRC having taken over the former Korean Adoption Agency files, the Korean Government has effectively won the birth family search war against Adoptees. For those Adoptees whose searches depend on the adoption paperwork which NCRC now controls, whatever fight that Adoptees put up from this point forward is not about winning the battle of obtaining critical information about our pasts — it’s frankly just about triage. The war was frankly lost as soon as it was determined that the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (alternately called the Hague Intercountry Adoption Convention or the Hague Adoption Convention) would be ratified on June 17th, 2025. While the vast majority of Adoptees had no idea that S. Korea’s long delayed ratification of the Hague Adoption Convention would stipulate the centralization of all adoption files under one government body (in S. Korea’s case: NCRC), the S. Korean Government sure did. While we can’t prove that S. Korea finally decided to ratify the Hague Convention in order to trigger the movement of all Korean Adoption Agency files to NCRC, thus bringing them under the control of the Korean Government, we can only marvel at the fortuitious timing of this occurrence in the midst of S. Korea’s historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigation into Overseas Adoption. How convenient — for the Korean Government, but definitely not for Adoptees.

Chief amongst NCRC’s many problems is that NCRC has so few birth family search workers to handle the requests of ALL Korean Adoptees around the world. NCRC delegated just a handful of workers to handle the massive transfer of around 250,000 paper files from the Korean Adoption Agencies, and NCRC has been riddled with file management issues for the duration of its existence. NCRC’s perennial excuse for having so few workers is “budget” — namely the lack of budget provided by the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW). “Lack of budget” has been the excuse NCRC has used to justify its failure to build a permanent storage facility for the thousands of adoption files it took over. Another major issue with NCRC is that it requires Adoptees to submit their birth family search requests through the KAS (Korea Adoption Services) website, which is built on a long outdated 2012 or 2016 platform. While NCRC has said that it will be overhauling the KAS website in early 2026, we will believe it when we see it. In the meantime, the requests submitted by Adoptees through the KAS website often fail.

The moment that we first learned back in January 2024 of the coming file transfer of all Korean Adoption Agency files to NCRC, we knew that the future of birth family search would boil down to DNA testing by Adoptees. This is because our prior experience with NCRC had shown us how incompetent and resistant to change NCRC was and is. It is for this reason that we spent 15 months warning KSS and all Korean Adoptees about the coming file transfer. Now that the files have all been transferred to NCRC, there is an enormous and ever growing backlog of birth family search requests by Adoptees from around the world, which we don’t see as having any hope of all being handled by NCRC.

Activists have now pushed the Korean Government to forming an MOU with the National Archives for a possible SECOND transfer of these adoption files. The uncertainty of this agreement leaves the future of our adoption files in limbo. And it is unclear if Adoptees will even be able to directly access their files if they are moved to the National Archives.

The bottom line for most Adoptees is that if they have any interest in finding any blood relatives, the main option they have is to take ALL possible DNA tests. Adoptees often discount any DNA matches that are further distant than 2nd cousin, but the stark reality for those Adoptees who do not have birth parent information in their possession, is that DNA matches with even distant cousins may be as close as they come to finding birth family. We have always encouraged Adoptees to embrace the possibility of connecting with DNA matches beyond the 2nd cousin range (such as 3rd and 4th cousins). We know that Adoptees can have great experiences connecting with even distant cousins, so long as they remain open minded. While some Adoptees get lucky and find closer relatives, for the vast majority of Adoptees, DNA testing is a long game that requires a lot of patience.

Those Adoptees who have birth parent information in their possession should try to work with GOAL in Korea and apply for Adoptee homeland tours (preferably NOT the ones sponsored by the former Korean Adoption Agencies) as some of these homeland tours provide birth family search assistance. Adoptees can also attempt their own gumshoe investigation based on any information available to them in the paperwork in their possession. This process requires financial, temporal, and emotional resources. But it is a process which thousands of Adoptees have embarked upon over the decades.