Seoul

A commission set up by the South Korean government has revealed that thousands of mothers were forced to give up their children for adoption abroad. Around 200,000 children, conceived by poor parents, especially single mothers, in government-funded welfare centres were adopted in nations like Australia, Denmark and the United States since the 1950s.

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In most of the cases; hospitals, maternity wards and adoption agencies would unilaterally declare mothers ‘mentally ill’ or unfit to raise children.

A report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission revealed that parents would sometimes be misled about the foreign adoption system, forcing them into believing that their children would come back. The adoptees would be told that their lives would be much better in high-income Western nations and not in impoverished South Korea.

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The commission also urged the government to issue a formal apology to the victims and develop a framework to compensate them.

South Korea’s ‘social purification’ policy

The military dictatorship in South Korea during the 1970s and 1980s implemented a ‘social purification’ policy under which thousands of people were forcibly admitted into government-funded welfare centres.

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The commission also revealed in its report the miseries that would be inflicted upon poor inmates in these centres. Human rights abuses were rampant, with people being forced into unpaid labour on construction projects, forcibly transferred to other detention facilities, restrained and subjected to beatings and solitary confinement.

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Those who died would be buried in shallow graves, without attempting to identify their families and relatives. When women would give birth, their children would be taken away for the purposes of overseas adoption within a day.

“It only goes to show just how much [South Korea’s adoption system] was always about money, and how little it was about the children,” complained a 51-year-old Danish adoptee, as quoted by the Guardian.

(With inputs from agencies)