As the plane descended into Seoul, South Korea, Robert Calabretta swaddled himself in a blanket, his knees tucked into his chest like a baby in the womb. A single tear ran down his cheek.

The 34-year-old felt like a newborn — he was about to meet his parents for the first time since he was 3 days old.

Most of his life, he thought they’d abandoned him for adoption to the United States. When he finally found them, he learned the truth: The origin story on his adoption paperwork was a lie. Instead, he said, his parents were told in 1986 that their infant was very sick and they thought he had died.

Calabretta is among a growing and vocal community of victims of an adoption system they accuse of searching out children for would-be parents, rather than finding parents for vulnerable children — sometimes with devastating consequences only surfacing today.

South Korea’s government, Western countries and adoption agencies worked in tandem to supply some 200,000 Korean children to parents overseas, despite years of evidence they were being procured through questionable or downright unscrupulous means, an investigation led by The Associated Press found. Those children grew up and searched for their roots — and some realized they are not who they were told.

Their stories have sparked a reckoning that is rocking the international adoption industry, which was built in South Korea and spread around the world. European countries have launched investigations and halted international adoption. The South Korean government has accepted a fact-finding commission under pressure from adoptees, and hundreds have submitted their cases for review.

In dozens of cases the AP examined in collaboration with Frontline (PBS), it was discovered: Children were kidnapped off the streets and sent abroad. Parents claim they were told their newborns were dead or too sick to survive, only to have them shipped away.

The agencies and governments each played a part in keeping the baby pipeline pumping. Adoption agencies created a competitive market for children and paid hospitals to supply them, documents show. The South Korean government not only knew of fraudulent practices but designed laws to speed up the exportation of children it deemed undesirable. Western governments turned a blind eye, sometimes even pressuring South Korea for children, while promoting the narrative that they were saving orphans.

Advocates say the vast majority of adoptions are honest and end well. But it is impossible to know how many adoptions are fraudulent because unreliable documents prevent adoptees from finding their birth families and learning the truth. Government data obtained by the AP shows less than a fifth of 15,000 adoptees like Calabretta, who have asked South Korea for help with family searches since 2012, have managed to reunite with relatives.

In 2019, a Korean government agency told Calabretta they had found his father. He pictured himself as a rock on a beach, with two waves crashing over it. The first was joy — he had been loved. The other was fury that something profound had been taken from him.

“You’re constantly in flux between two worlds,” he said, “the one you could have and should have been in, and the one where you are.”

‘A baby factory’

Adoptions from South Korea peaked in the 1980s, fueled by the government, just as Calabretta’s parents arrived at the hospital with a blanket in which to carry their firstborn son home.

The adoption industry had grown out of the wreckage of the Korean War in the 1950s, when Americans took in the unwanted biracial children born of Korean women and Western soldiers. As it clawed its way out of post-war poverty, South Korea continued to rely on private adoption agencies as its social safety net, bringing millions of dollars into the economy and saving even more by never building its own child welfare program.

Meanwhile, in the West, the number of adoptable babies plummeted because of access to birth control and abortion. The desires of two cultures collided: couples in wealthy nations desperately wanted babies, and South Korea desperately wanted to rid itself of mouths to feed.

As the supply of biracial babies dwindled, South Korea turned to those it saw as unwelcome citizens: fully-Korean children of poor families and unwed mothers.

Korean officials fit their laws to match U.S. ones to make children adoptable for what some deride as “baby diplomacy” to satisfy Western demand. The government endorsed “proxy adoptions,” for families to adopt children quickly without ever visiting Korea, meeting them by the planeloads at American airports.

In an internal memo from 1966 obtained by the AP, International Social Service, a Geneva-based organization, wrote that it suspected the Korean government assessed agencies not by child welfare standards, but by the money they brought in.

“There is quite a bit of rivalry and competition among the different agencies, and it is not beyond agencies to bribe or pressure mothers for the release of these children, and not beyond agencies to try to compete with each other for the same child,” officials noted in the document, now at the agency’s archives at the University of Minnesota Libraries.

In December 1976, the government facilitated a new law that widened the legal definition of adoptable children, removed judicial oversight and granted vast powers to the heads of private agencies.

The government empowered four agencies to handle most adoptions: Holt Children’s Services, which had pioneered sending Korean children to the U.S.; Eastern Social Welfare Society; Korea Welfare Services; and Korea Social Service. A 1983 Health Ministry audit cited all four agencies and accused Holt of providing larger-than-allowed payments to impoverished birth mothers. The ministry’s response was to issue a warning.

Records show that officials were aware of a laundry list of dubious practices in the industry: Lost children were documented as abandoned; the origins of alleged orphans weren’t verified; some were “disguised” by agencies as being born from unwed mothers to make them adoptable, according to Health Ministry records seen by the AP.

In the early 1980s, the government itself likened the agencies’ child-hunting practices to “trafficking.” At a meeting in 1982, documents show, the ministry admitted to child “intake” problems and cautioned agencies to improve their practices to avoid the appearance of “trafficking, profiteering.” Yet the government still called for “as many adoptions as possible.”

Calabretta was taken from the Red Cross Hospital in Daegu in 1986. His father, Lee Sung-soo, said an administrator told him his son had lung and heart problems. The family didn’t have a lot of money. The only option, the administrator said, was a high-risk and expensive surgery that could leave the baby dead or severely disabled.

She advised Lee to relinquish his son to Holt, which would pay for the surgery and find a home for a disabled child if he survived.

Lee said he signed the paper, believing it was the only way to save his son, and wept. The AP could not verify Lee’s account — the hospital closed and its records were destroyed. Information obtained through a records request show that 470 children born in that hospital were adopted during the 1980s and 1990s.

By then, agencies were procuring most of their children from hospitals and maternity homes, which often received illegal payments for babies, records show. Though the stated intention of adoption was to spare children from orphanages, they gathered more than 4,600 from hospitals in 1988, 60% of their supply.

A government audit the following year shows that Holt made nearly 100 illegal payments to hospitals during six months in 1988, worth about $16,000 now. Eastern Social Welfare Society gave even more, now worth about $64,000, to hospitals over that period.

Search for children

With the government on their side, agencies raced against time for children. Employees were told to process them as quickly as they could, said two former adoption workers who spoke anonymously because Korean law forbids them from publicizing confidential information.

“All I heard was work faster, faster,” said one, employed at an agency from 1979 to 1984.

Agencies had intake workers scour every region of the country for children, she said. They invested “zero effort” in confirming a child was truly orphaned.

The U.S. took in the highest number of orphans by far, and to be eligible for a visa, they had to have lost one or both parents to death, disappearance or abandonment. The agencies seized on the word abandonment, applying it to most of the children they acquired.

Records from 1980 to 1987 show that more than 90% of the Korean children sent to the West almost certainly had known relatives, said Philsik Shin, a scholar at Korea’s Anyang University. The number of children sent for adoption was often more than 10 times higher than the police count for abandoned children, he found — close to 9,000 in 1985.

Listing children as abandoned made adoptions easier because agencies didn’t have to verify child origins or obtain parental relinquishment. It was “almost customary” to document children as abandoned, said Helen Noh, who matched hundreds of children with U.S. parents at Holt Children’s Services from 1981 to 1982.

Now a scholar at Seoul’s Soongsil University, Noh said Holt workers understood the agency was charging adopters about $3,000 per child.

Documents obtained by the AP show that agencies were likely charging even more, around $4,000 to $6,000. But they pocketed some of that money through improper means, such as charging for travel expenses for adoption workers but arranging for commercial passengers to carry babies instead.

National shame

The Korean government cracked down on the adoption industry when the 1988 Olympics brought attention to the baby trade as a national shame.

The Health Ministry instructed agencies to “improve” their practices and stop “touring” hospitals and orphanages to gather children, according to a document obtained by the AP. They were told they could be punished if they continued to “competitively engage in unlawful practices.”

Adoptions plummeted, from around 8,000 a year in the mid-1980s to around 2,000 a year in the 1990s. But tens of thousands of children were already overseas, including Calabretta.

Calabretta returned to South Korea in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. His father, Lee Sung-soo, could not wait out the two-week quarantine and showed up outside the apartment the next day.

Calabretta threw open the window. “Dad!” he shouted.

“My son!” Lee shouted back.

“We were supposed to be a happy family, not separated. He was my precious firstborn son,” Lee said. “For over 30 years, he lived in a foreign land against his will. That makes my heart break.”

Calabretta visits South Korea often, and they talk on the phone every few days. He has the same odd divot in his ear as his mother, the same laugh as his father, the same taste in shoes and jackets and music, the same allergies.

He asked his mother to rename him, to reclaim him, as her son and a son of Korea.

In Korea, there is a sentiment that something isn’t truly yours until you name it, and once you do, you must take care of it.

So he prefers his new name now: Hanil Lee.