Here’s a story from the New York Times about Korean adoptees returning to Korea and advocating for stricter measures to reduce the number of adoptions, and, specificially, adoptions out of the country.
Over the past six decades, at least 200,000 Korean children — roughly the population of Des Moines — have been adopted into families in more than 15 countries, with a vast majority living in the United States.
Now, some 300 – 500 have returned to South Korea, which makes the headline, “Why a Generation of Adoptees Is Returning to South Korea” more than a bit misleading as only a very small fraction have done so, and it is being represented as if they all have.
There was a book I read a while back on the topic of adoption, “The Child Catchers,” which, as you can tell from the title, is very “anti” and doesn’t seem to be able to balance the number of children who experience unhappiness relative to those who don’t, and want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
But this is a bit odder still, because the complaints of the individuals profiled here — about discrimination, and lack of belonging when you’re part of a minority uprooted from a home country where you would have been in the majority — seem to hold true just as much for immigration as international adoption.
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