Korea to Haiti: Lessons in Overseas Adoption Corruption

Arrested by Haitian authorities for trying to cross illegally into the Dominican Republic with 33 so-called orphaned children, whose parents were later found to be alive, U.S. citizens and Idaho Baptist missionaries Laura Silsby and Charisa Coulter remain imprisoned in Port-au-Prince pending investigation of alleged child trafficking. Seeking to save the children in the wake of Haiti’s earthquake, Silsby and Coulter intended to place the children for adoption in the United States with Christian families despite Haitian law, which requires all adoptions to be finalized in the country. Dr. Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, a Korean adoptee and staff member of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK), presents how adoption from Korea can offer a perspective about this scandal.

By Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

APRIL/MAY 2010 CONDUCIVE

Laura Silsby and Charisa Coulter’s well-intended yet illegal actions remind human rights activists of other missionaries who, decades ago in Korea, portrayed overseas adoption as an education opportunity to poor and vulnerable parents seeking the best for their children. However, lessons from Korea – the world’s biggest, oldest, and longest-running overseas adoption program – remain largely unknown and unlearned.

This is like a reprisal of 1950s’ post-war Korea, where Western missionaries and relief workers in Korea drove around in the ruins of Seoul and other big cities and collected “adoptable” children, promising the parents education in the West. Such misrepresentations of overseas adoption as an education opportunity continue to discourage unwed mothers, “who currently provide 89 percent of Korea’s children sent abroad each year,” from choosing to rear their own children.

Silsby and Coulter’s other tactics of recruiting Haitian children from impoverished families and falsifying the children’s identities as orphans, through irregular or missing paperwork, read like pages out of Korea’s adoption history, which the Korean government has yet to acknowledge, reconcile, or include in history books.

“Not only do these children have families back home, but their parents incorrectly assume that the children remain theirs.”

Since 1953, Korea’s overseas adoption program, which established overseas adoption and served as a model for sending nations such as Haiti, has sent approximately 200,000 documented and undocumented children overseas to more than 15 receiving countries, many of which no longer have adoption programs of their own due to welfare systems that support single mother households. A G-20 and OECD nation with a GNP ranked eleventh in the world, Korea persists in sending 1200-1400 children per year and, until the earthquake, eclipsed Haiti in the number of children annually sent to the United States.

Such figures, however, can change during an emergency event. Researcher Dana Sachs observes how “the Haitian children’s airlift follows a pattern we’ve seen before during times of international crisis. Disaster strikes. The media broadcasts photographs of suffering children. Responding to a concerned public, political leaders bypass accepted protocols by speeding the process of adoption. And then we find out that a significant number of those children might actually have family back home”.

Not only do these children have families back home, but their parents incorrectly assume that the children remain theirs. Viewing overseas adoption as study abroad or access to healthcare and resources, Haitian parents willingly relinquished their children to Silsby. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, 36-year old Jean Anchello Cantave gave his 5-year-old son Ancito to the Americans because “the chance to educate a child is a chance for an entire family to prosper.” Mr. Cantave’s views are widely held by other Haitian families who relinquished their children by simply putting their children on Silsby’s bus.

What does full disclosure and sufficient counseling entail for parents who consider surrendering their children? As Sachs observes, overseas adoption follows on the heels of crisis. A family’s loss is another family’s gain. Decisions made under duress and with scant information do not protect a child from trafficking, unlawful adoption, or good yet misguided intentions.

As in Mr. Cantave’s case and in others like him, who are the vast majority, parents do not understand that overseas adoption forever severs their kinship and places their children in families located abroad. Not only is Mr. Cantave’s child more than likely not returning to him as an adult, but his child, assimilated into his adoptive family’s culture, may not even view Mr. Cantave as family. If his child seeks to reunite, more than likely his child will be culturally estranged from him and will require a third party to facilitate cross-cultural communication.

Did Silsby and Coulter explain these realities to Mr. Cantave and to the Haitian families who quickly entrusted their children to the missionaries’ care for better lives overseas?

While overseas adoption has usually meant placement in affluent families that can afford $25,000-30,000 in adoption fees – money that could easily keep a Haitian family intact – it shouldn’t be viewed as a chance at a better life. Overseas adoption erases identities and forever estranges families for generations. In Korea, which has sent three generations abroad, even the children of adoptees have begun to undertake family searches for their grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Their searches suggest that the loss of family due to overseas adoption persists beyond the adoptee.

Despite televised images of famous adoptees such as Toby Dawson embracing his Korean father, reunions between adoptees and their Korean families remain exceptionally rare. Third-wave Korean adoptees born after 1980 tend to experience the most success at 20-40%, according to Global Overseas Adoptee Link (GOA’L), due to hospital records identifying their mothers’ names.

“Both Korea and Haiti use orphanages as short-term housing while families recover from crises, but this practice does not translate into the western context where orphanages provide long-term solutions for children whose parents are dead.”

However, while consulting with Korea Unwed Mothers and Families Association, I learned that adoption agencies such as Holt International regularly counsel unwed moms against registering their children after giving birth. This practice fast tracks children into the adoption pipeline and prevents unwed mothers from changing their minds should they decide after leaving the hospital to reclaim their children to whom on paper they have no legal relationship. This lack of documentation also decreases the likelihood of adoptee family reunions. As in Haiti, Korean children are at risk of lacking documentation that identifies whether they are real orphans. Adoptive parents, trusting the system, believe that the children are truly orphaned, when they might simply be missing or undocumented.

Both Korea and Haiti use orphanages as short-term housing while families recover from crises, but this practice does not translate into the western context where orphanages provide long-term solutions for children whose parents are dead. Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community (TRACK) has uncovered instances where Korean parents returned to orphanages to claim their children only to find that their children had been sent overseas for adoption.

Lessons from Korea further suggest that the best interests of the child need slower and thorough consideration rather than giving into the religious zeal of missionaries whose real purpose “is religious conversion. Some families have taken four or five children. Certainly, the literature of His House, a large Christian orphanage in Miami which is coordinating adoptions, says it aims to turn children into ‘Christ-like beings’ ”.