SOUTH KOREA is often chided by adoptee lobby-groups and international observers for having renounced its orphaned and abandoned children for decades. After the Korean war (1950-53) South Korea witnessed perhaps the largest exodus of infants—around 200,000—from a single country into adoption in foreign homes. As recently as 2011 it was the sixth-biggest source of infants for adoption in the world (it dropped to 17th in 2013). Yet South Korea has in fact been caring for an overwhelming majority of its unwanted children—2m, or around 85% of the total—who have grown up in state-run orphanages in the past six decades. Part of the reason for that is that adoption in South Korea is so rare. Why?
South Koreans have taken in just 4% of their unwanted children since the 1950s. In 2013 they adopted fewer orphans domestically than Americans, Chinese, Germans, Russians and Swedes did (see chart). Neighbouring Japan, by contrast, has some of the highest rates of adoption in the world; but there, men in their 20s and 30s accounted for 98% of adoptions in 2008, taken in by sonless families to carry on their names and businesses. Japan’s sagging birth rates have limited the odds that a family has a natural male heir. South Korea’s households are having even fewer babies: under 1.3 per woman, among the lowest rates in the world. As families have fewer of their own, the prospect of raising another’s child is discounted—not least because it remains so taboo. The chairman of LG, a South Korean conglomerate, adopted when his only son died early (he also has two daughters); he took in his brother’s son, the better to keep the business in the family.
Traditional Confucian notions of the bloodline family still hold sway, as do aspects of primogeniture. Women who cannot bear children face strong social stigma, as do orphans and adoptees, whose chances of getting a job and marrying are limited. Many adoptions in South Korea are concealed from family and friends—and, in many cases, the adopted child. Parents ensure that the baby’s blood type matches their own; some mothers even fake pregnancy. All this sends the message that adoption is shameful, in turn discouraging more of it. The secrecy also explains why 95% of infants adopted within South Korea are less than one-month old: young enough to be passed off as biological children. A majority of adopted babies are girls so as to avoid difficulties over inheritance and at ancestral family rites, which are normally carried out by bloodline sons.
South Korea’s government has long wanted to boost domestic adoption rates. In 2013 it signed the Hague Adoption Convention, which says that children should preferably be adopted by families in their own country. Since 2007 unwanted children must stay in South Korea for five months, while agencies look for a local home, before they can be sent abroad. Overseas adoptions have since fallen while domestic ones encouragingly inched up. But since 2012 their number has dropped too. Some think a recent tightening of South Korea’s adoption law has slowed the adoption process. Courts, involved for the first time in adoption proceedings, now determine parent eligibility (with occasionally odd outcomes: a judge turned down the request of a hopeful couple because a prospective parent was vegetarian). The law’s revision may also have shrunk the pool of infants available for adoption: parents who would previously have given their babies up anonymously at adoption agencies must now register their births in family registers first (see article). Some are choosing to abandon them instead, at churches—and to South Korea’s orphanages.
