Erin Huppert, who was adopted from South Korea as an infant, wasn’t much interested in learning more about her pre-adoption history. But the St. Paul resident is reconsidering that now.
“I have never had any interest in finding anything out about my biological family or trying to contact them in any way,” Huppert said. “I had always held the opinion that they made the decisions they needed to make at the time, and that my family was my American adopted family. And it really only has been in light of the stories over the last couple of months that I’m now reevaluating everything.”
Those stories are from an Associated Press investigation released last year looking into fraudulent adoption practices that facilitated the adoption of thousands of Korean children into families around the world in the years following the Korean War.
After a nearly three-year investigation, a South Korean commission in late March found that the government bears responsibility for facilitating a program with widespread fraud and abuse — enabled by private agencies — that violated children’s human rights.
It’s a landmark acknowledgment of something long suspected among Korean adoptees, experts say.
Prior to the commission sharing its findings, Huppert said that while she has at times wondered if what she’s known about her background prior to her adoption is true or to what degree, her confidence in that information has substantially dropped.
“And both I and my adoptive parents have all agreed that I should probably reevaluate and reconsider my interest in reaching out, if for no other reason than the idea that there are two people over in South Korea who maybe have been looking for their child this entire time. It’s absolutely heart-wrenching,” Huppert said.
Erin Huppert, who was adopted from South Korea in the early 1980s, looks through her adoption paperwork at her St. Paul home on Friday, March 14, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
200,000 adoptees
Since the 1950s, an estimated 13,000 to 15,000 children have been adopted from South Korea by American parents in Minnesota, according to MNopedia, a website run by the Minnesota Historical Society.
It’s just a fraction of the more than 200,000 Korean adoptees around the world — mostly adopted in the 1970s and ‘80s. But it makes Minnesota the state with the highest concentration of Korean adoptees in the U.S.
Several organizations have facilitated those adoptions in the state, including St. Paul-based Children’s Home Society – which began adoptions from South Korea in the late 1960s – and Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota.
The two organizations formed a partnership and combined adoption services in 2012 and announced earlier this month that they will merge.
On Thursday, they released a statement on the commission’s findings and shared resources available to adoptees both with and outside of CHS/LSS.
“Here at Children’s Home and LSS, we understand the history, complexity and emotions associated with this report by the South Korean government and want to acknowledge the weight and impact of these findings on adoptees, birth families, adoptive families, and their loved ones,” the statement said.
It added: “The best interest of each child is at the center of our work. We want adoptees and families to know that we are here for them and want to be a place of support, resources, and consultation.”
In July, the Korean government is expected to begin overseeing adoption and post-adoption services directly, previously a responsibility of Korean agencies, according to CHS/LSS.
“The oversight of South Korean adoption records is moving from the Korean adoption agencies to the National Center for the Rights of the Child (NCRC). To conduct a search that includes your South Korean adoption record, you will need to petition the NCRC for these services directly. At this time, we do not know how long it will take to access South Korean search services,” CHS/LSS stated Thursday.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission Chairperson Park Sun Young, right, comforts adoptee Yooree Kim during a press conference in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, March 26, 2025. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
The investigation
The adoption industry grew out of the aftermath of the Korean War in the 1950s, when Americans adopted biracial children born to Korean women and Western soldiers. As the country made its way out of poverty, South Korea continued to rely on private adoption agencies to bring millions of dollars into the country, and saved even more by not developing its own child welfare program.
South Korea’s then-military governments saw several benefits to international adoption, allowing the country to reduce the number of children to care for, erase the “social problem” of unwed mothers and strengthen its relationships with Western countries.
Agencies registered most adoptees as abandoned orphans found in the streets, making their origins difficult or impossible to track down when many actually had identifiable relatives.
In dozens of the cases examined by the AP, which worked with PBS’s “Frontline” to produce a documentary on the findings, children were kidnapped off the streets and sent abroad and many parents claimed they were told their newborns were dead or too sick to survive.
Minnesota history
Children’s Home Society began doing adoptions with South Korea in the late 1960s, according to Kristina Berg, CHS senior director of adoption and foster care services, and adoption programs with South Korea formally began in 1967 for CHS and in 1969 for Lutheran Social Service.
Since 1970, there have been 8,282 adoptions from South Korea through Children’s Home, according to Berg. Of those adoptions, 4,137 occurred between 1970 and 1988.
“I think it’s a difficult piece because a lot of us here currently were not practicing at the time, but we are doing an internal audit of our records and our practice at the time,” Berg said in an interview with the Pioneer Press in late January.
“We’ve certainly seen an increase in requests for post-adoption service support, and have had conversations with adoptees and adoptive parents, both, discussing the AP and the investigation and additional articles, discussing their individual circumstances, providing both agency and non-agency resources,” Berg said.
As an adoption service provider, Children’s Home trusts the governing authorities of each country to ensure guidelines are met and makes efforts to partner with ethical organizations and countries, Berg said in a later email. The organization also makes sure to follow up when concerns are heard and to adjust practices or close programs when needed, she added.
The agency began to offer post-adoption services with South Korea in the 1970s, according to Berg.
“And we have a lot of, now, adoptees and those with lived experience on our team,” Berg said. “I believe about 75% of our team has a close personal connection to adoption, and that’s including our staff, leadership, board members. It includes Korean and other domestic and international adoptees.”
The AP and “Frontline” investigation underscores the importance of the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children, which the United States implemented in 2008 and South Korea is set to do in 2025, according to Berg. The Hague Adoption Convention is an international treaty meant to safeguard children and families in intercountry adoptions.
Doubt, questions
According to Huppert’s adoption records, her biological parents were young and unmarried with families who did not support their relationship when she was put up for adoption.
“I think, in light of the reporting from the Associated Press and the subsequent reports, it’s pretty, well, it is clear to me that I should question how true some of those details are, because it looks very similar to the same narratives that have been produced at a very high volume from those agencies,” Huppert said.
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The findings have made adoptee Anna Lund, who grew up in Minneapolis, question parts of her background as well. As a teenager, Lund visited South Korea with her mother and sister and met the woman who fostered her before her adoption.
“I mean, after that reporting came out, I even started to question, like, ‘Was that really my foster mother? Or was this just some lady that they brought in?’” Lund said.
Concerns of fraud are not new. But perceptions of how adoptees should feel about their adoption can be a barrier to those concerns, said Kim Park Nelson, an associate professor of ethnic studies at Winona State University whose research specializes in transnational adult adoptees in the United States.
Because many people see adoption as an overall good, with a focus on a birth mother giving her baby a better life and adoptive parents doing something selfless, the adopted child is kind of forgotten, Lund said.
“And they’re almost seen as like a blank slate, and now they can go and they can live with this family and everything’s great for them. And I think that what they’ve lost is not really considered as much,” Lund said.
Adoption inherently involves loss, something that adoptees and their families need to navigate, said Richard Lee, a University of Minnesota psychology professor who studies international adoption.
In the last several decades, many adoptees have developed adoptee-focused organizations that can also help other adoptees process their response to the findings, Lee said.
“And they’ve been pushing hard on these issues. So for them, this investigation is something that they’ve been asking for for decades, and it’s a validation of their efforts that they’ve put in, in the face of so much opposition from adoption agencies, governments and many adoptive families,” Lee said.
Emotional touchstones
Adoptees can go through a mix of emotions upon finding out the information they’ve been told about their background may be false, experts say.
Researcher JaeRan Kim is working on an adoptee consciousness model that looks at the different “touchstones” adoptees might experience in adulthood related to their adoption. Kim is a faculty member at the University of Washington Tacoma and researcher who focuses on post-adoption well-being, particularly among adult adoptees, and grew up in Minnesota.
One touchstone is called rupture, which can include when an adoptee finds out something isn’t the way they thought it was, Kim said.
Adoptees also can experience dissonance, Kim said.
“And dissonance is that real internal struggle: What am I supposed to believe now? Who can I trust? How do I manage all these different feelings that I have? And for some adoptees, they shut down, and it’s too overwhelming and too much, and so then they just want to be like, ‘I don’t want to think about it anymore, I’m just going to pretend I don’t know,’” Kim said.
Other adoptees might decide to look more into their background and its context. Some go into activism or research. Others become opposed to adoption and become adoption abolitionists, Kim said.
Because the narrative around adoption is often that it was in the best interest of the child, some adoptees may find it hard to find the right support for themselves or to know that their feelings around their adoption are valid, especially when reconciling what was supposed to be a good thing for them with serious ethical issues, Kim said.
Even formal mental health support can be inadequate if the provider is not equipped to properly work with adoptees, Kim said. Resources developed by other adoptees, such as support groups or mutual aid, can be a good way for adoptees to find some support, Kim said.
“And I think that there’s been a lot of talk around adoption-competent mental health, and I think we’re still trying to figure out what that is, because so much of that has been focused on helping adoptive families with younger children who might be struggling, but there hasn’t been as much focus on their therapists and mental health clinicians really being able to address adult adoptees who are finding out these issues around their own adoption,” Kim said.
Next steps
South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in late March recommended that the government issue an official apology over the identified problems and address grievances, as well as investigate citizenship gaps among adoptees sent to the United States and work to assist those without citizenship, who may number in the thousands, the Associated Press reported.
When it comes to what Huppert would like to hear from agencies like Children’s Home Society, it would be an apology and accountability.
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“I know that there are at least some instances where they genuinely did not know that this was happening, that they were acting in good faith,” Huppert said. “But I do have to wonder at what point, if ever, they thought about the volume of children coming through this process over the course of 15 years, and didn’t once wonder whether there was anything nefarious going on.”
Reforms in South Korea, such as a 2011 law requiring foreign adoptions to go through family courts, have led to significant declines in the country’s intercountry adoptions. Only 79 South Korean children were adopted abroad in 2023, the AP reported.
Adoption is more complex than it has often historically been portrayed, making its impacts complex as well. It’s life experience, so it’s complicated, Park Nelson said.
“And I think that the stories that have come out and the research that’s just come out about those experiences really provide some solid evidence for people to understand the adoption process differently and to understand it not just as this wonderful way that people without children can have children and do this, like, basically charity work to save children who are in bad situations, but that we’re real people, and we have real lives,” Park Nelson said.
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