In July 1975, Choi Young-Ja's three-year-old son went out on the street outside the family's home in Seoul – and never came home again.
For almost five decades, the mother desperately searched for her son. It wasn't until 2023, due to a DNA test, that Choi discovered the boy had been adopted by a family in December 1975, five months after he went missing.
Now, Choi Young-Ja has sued the South Korean government, an orphanage, and the adoption agency Holt, which according to her son's documents, carried out the adoption. During her long search, the mother went to the agency multiple times to display pictures and ask questions about her son – but was met with a cold shoulder time and time again.
Said to be Orphaned
Choi Young-Ja's case is one of many. In October, another South Korean, Han Tae-Soon, also sued the government and the adoption agency Holt. Her daughter was abducted at the age of four and sent to an adoptive family in the USA, something the family didn't find out until much later.
In a groundbreaking report in March, an independent commission concluded that South Korea's military regimes had enabled an aggressive and loosely regulated adoption system that ruthlessly separated thousands of children from their families.
In order to reduce the state's social welfare expenses, private brokers were urged to accelerate adoption processes – while the regime turned a blind eye to the transgressions. Under the state-controlled program, children with living parents were incorrectly documented as abandoned or orphaned, which was thought to increase their chances of being adopted to Western countries. In reality, several of the children had been kidnapped.
Emotional Reunion
Over the past seven decades, around 200,000 South Korean children have been adopted to countries mainly in North America and Europe.
Choi Young-Ja and Han Tae-Soon are the first known parents to sue the state over the illegal adoptions. Previously, adopted children have sued the government and the accused adoption agency.
Today, Choi's son is 52 years old. In 2023, he traveled to South Korea for an emotional reunion with his biological mother.
Before the meeting, Choi had carefully rehearsed what she would say, practiced and practiced a specific phrase in English: "I'm sorry".
