Adoption Under One Roof

Today's guest blogger is AdoptedEunmi, a twenty-one-year-old Korean adoptee from Minneapolis. She comes to Adoption Under One Roof as the voice of a young adoptee just trying to find her way. She grew up in the so-called Korean adoptee capital of the world and has been an active member of its large adopted family community for most of her life. In 2005 and 2007, she spent time with her birth family in Korea, for two and eight weeks respectively. She speaks minimal amounts of Korean, and struggles to keep up with correspondence to her family. AdoptedEunmi has kept a personal blog, which you can read here.

While all of my friends scrambled through final exams and papers,

This morning, the Korean news agency Yonhap posted an interview that contains some of the most candid comments about international adoption that I have ever seen from an agency official.

The speaker is a daughter of Harry and Bertha Holt, the American couple who opened Korea to international adoption more than 50 years ago, and created the modern model for inter-country adoptions by Americans. Molly Holt began helping her parents with adoptions in 1956, when she was 19, and now lives near Seoul at a home that Holt runs for 250 homeless disabled people.

The backdrop for this interview is the fact that, in March, Iowan Steven Sueppel murdered his wife and the four Korean children they had adopted through Holt International Adoption Agency. Sueppel, who later committed suicide, had been charged with embezzling more than $500,000 from his former employer . In the interview, Holt asserts that finding a family is still best for an orphan, but concedes that not all adoptions work out as planned.

When Vietnam retaliated last week against a scathing report about its adoption processes by closing to American families, the news was all over the blogosphere in a nanosecond. But something happened yesterday in the Asian adoption world of far greater importance, and it hardly got a blink: A report that Korean domestic adoptions last year exceeded inter-country adoptions for the first time ever.

According to a story in The Korea Times, 1,388 orphans the Republic of Korea--what we colloquially call South Korea--were adopted by Korean families in 2007. Just 1,264 others were adopted by foreign families. If you prefer things in percentages, it was 52.3% domestic and 47.7% inter-country. It is a stunning change in the nation that has set the tone for international adoptions for more than half a century.

Fifty-two years ago, an American couple began a revolution in adoption by bringing home eight children from a country that had been ripped apart--literally--by war. Harry and Bertha Holt were their names, which live on in the agency they founded, Holt International. To make their adoptions happen, the Holts had to get the U.S. Congress to pass a special law permitting international adoptions--and they did it. But when it passed, Korean war orphans, and children shunned by their society because they were born to Korean mothers and foreign soldier fathers, could start new lives in other corners of the world.