Update from Spence Chapin

Here is a letter sent to us via email from our agency.

August 23, 2006

Dear Korea families:

Last Wednesday night, we had a telephone conversation with Mr. Lee, Seung-Hwan, president of SWS. We were able to get a much better understanding of the current situation of adoptions from Korea. Overall, the conversation was quite positive.

Mr. Lee continues to work with the government around the policy changes, and he continues to advocate for international adoption for children who are unlikely to be adopted domestically. Given this continued work with the government it is hard to predict how things will unfold. Despite the inability to give definitive answers at this time, we are cautiously hopeful that the situation will improve to some extent.

At this time, we encourage families to continue moving ahead. We will be sending Home Study packets to Korea as they are received and they will be in line at SWS for child referrals. We are optimistic that in 2006 families will be receiving referrals of children who are 2-3 months of age. It is still unclear whether the children will be older at travel if travel approval isn’t received until 2007. It remains possible that child referrals received in 2007 may be for children 5 months of age and that age at travel may be 10-12 months. We hope to have more clarification on this within the next few months.

We ask that you consider traveling as it is in the best interest of your child, but it will not expedite cases.

There has been some movement in the program this month; we have received three sets of legal papers and three escort notices but no child referrals.

Updates will be sent to all of you via email. Your social worker will be cc-ed on all correspondence. A lot of the unknowns over the past couple of days have been frustrating for us all. There remain many unanswered questions but as the situation evolves we hope to have more answers.

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Here is an op-ed piece from the Korea Herald.

Susan Soon-keum Cox

I am responding to an article in The Korea Herald this spring regarding lawmaker Ko Kyung-hwa's proposed ban on overseas adoption from Korea. I am an adult adoptee and would like to show my perspective and hope to provide another view of these complex issues.

I was born in Korea as the war was coming to an end. My Korean mother named me Soon-keum which means "pure gold." Because of circumstances in the world at that time she made the courageous and selfless choice to let me go. I was almost 5 years old.

I was adopted by a family in Oregon whom I love and cherish. Although we do not share biology, they are my family. But it does not take away the reality that I will forever be connected to my birth mother and my beginnings in Korea.

I was 26 years old when I returned to visit Korea for the first time. It was a powerful experience that touched emotions deep inside me that I did not know were there. I wondered if I were in places I had been as a little girl; if I had touched this piece of earth before or seen what was now new and unfamiliar. Was it possible that I walked past my birth mother just a whisper away but unknown by either of us.

It was also the first time I was in an orphanage since I left my own more than 20 years before. It is impossible to prepare yourself for such an experience. I could not stop the tears as little children ran to me to be held and cuddled. I was a young mother and I thought of my own precious son and could not imagine what it must be like to give birth to a child you would not hold close to you and love daily. I also thought back to my own days in an orphanage and what it was like to be alone and scared.

As difficult as it was to see the little ones, I was devastated to meet the young men and women my age, who had stayed behind and not been adopted. As I compared my life with theirs I considered what chance of fate had made our lives so different. It was not that I had gone to the United States - it was that I had gone to a family. Whatever I had given up by leaving Korea, was nothing compared to what is given up when you do not have a family to love and care for you.

I have returned to Korea many times in the past 30 years. Whenever possible I go back to visit those men and women, never adopted, now in their 40s and 50s. They are still there - still orphans - some of them are turning gray. They are orphans with gray hair.

For several decades there have been efforts to reduce and eliminate international adoption of Korean children. It is understandable. A country as progressive and modern as Korea does not want to be considered a nation that does not take care of its children. Now there is the juxtaposition of overseas adoption with Korea experiencing the lowest birth rate in world.

I agree that as a public official you must look at both of these critical societal issues. However, one is not the antidote for the other. Financial and policy incentives to promote domestic adoption are good public policy and I enthusiastically concur with your efforts. But an immediate ban on international adoption of Korean children will not bring the "fundamental change" that you seek. It is true that such a ban as you propose will keep the children in Korea. But it will not give those children families - it will promote children living in institutions and denied the fundamental right of a family.

If it were a perfect world, every child would grow up loved and cared for by the parents they are born to. In that world I would have stayed in Korea. Several years ago I found my birth mother and learned the story of my early life in Korea. Sadly, it is not a perfect world for children, and as painful as the sacrifice for both my birth mother and the small child I was at the time, it was the right choice for both of us.

I pray for the time when every child born in Korea has a family either by birth or adoption - in Korea. But that time is not now. In spite of how modern and progressive Korean society, the truth is that the stigma of adoption is still powerful. It will change - it is changing. But it has not yet changed to meet the reality of the all children in Korea today.

Like me, there are thousands of adult Korean adoptees whose lives would have been far different if they had not been adopted by a family in another country. We are a testament to the resilience of children and the capacity of a family's love to transcend issues of race, nationality, and culture.

I will not pretend that every Korean adoptee feels positive about adoption, or that every adoption was as it should have been. But you cannot ignore the fact that having been adopted has provided adoptees with the means to question and speak honestly, and sometimes negatively, about their adoption experience. A child growing up in an orphanage does not have the benefit of that entitlement. This also should not minimize or discount that there are three generations of Korean adoptees who feel passionately about the blessing of adoption in their lives.

As Koreans "struggle to counter a dropping birthrate and aging population" I urge you not to place the burden of responsibility on orphaned children. Those children will grow up, and if they are denied the opportunity of a family, they will become the next generation of orphans with gray hair.

Susan Soon-keum Cox is vice president of public policy & external affairs at Holt International Children's Services. - Ed.