FORGED ADOPTIONS 5: To mark the 35th anniversary of the newspaper’s founding, the Hankyoreh is featuring the stories of 20 transnational Korean adoptees in several installments.
Peter Moller, 48, who was adopted to Denmark from South Korea in 1974, reached out to Korean adoption agency Holt International for the first time in 2011 to search for his roots. Holt initially told the Danish adoptee that he was born in Seoul. But in subsequent letters, the adoption agency said he was actually born in Daejeon. Moller was then told that his biological mother gave birth to him in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province on March 16, 1974, which happened to be the same day she brought him to the adoption agency in Seoul.
A Denmark-based group has called on President Yoon Suk-yeol to prevent agencies from destroying records related to foreign adoptions, alleging falsified records.
Nearly 300 South Koreans who were adopted to European and American parents as children are demanding South Korea investigate their adoptions, which they suspect were based on falsified documents that laundered their real status or identities as agencies raced to export children
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) For 40 years, Louise Kwang thought she was an orphan baby found on the streets of the South Korean port city of Busan before her adoption to Danish parents in 1976.