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A mother holds her pregnant belly, overlayed with the map of Korea. (Credit: Lissa Deonarain)
In this week’s episode, we take a look at how over six decades after the Korean War, South Korea processed the most international adoptions in history and how the demand for a “domestic supply of (adoptable) infants” may be playing a role in increasing threats to autonomy over pregnancy in the US.
Featuring: Music: Music was changed only in length and volume levels and can be found here: http://www.freemusicarchive.org/
Credits Making Contact Team: Guest Producers:
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TRANSCRIPT
Show Button: Making , Making, Making contact, Making contact.
Amy Gastelum: I’m Amy Gastelum, this week on Making Contact we’re closing out national adoption month by handing the mic to Korean American adoptees. Our millennial guests talk about how they grapple with identity being part of the largest ever international exodus of adopted children.
Schuyler Swenson: There’s a lot kind of like loaded in that assumption of like a better life in America.
Amy Gastelum: And we’ll hear from a group of Korean single moms in Queens, New York, who are bucking the stigma of being unwed mothers.
Sheena: In Korean culture, if someone has the baby without husband, they assume her life is already ruined or, you know, embarrassing, but I don’t care. Yeah.
Amy Gastelum: Stay with us.
Lydia Doublestein: So, I just got called by the midwife at the Brooklyn Birthing Center, and there is a mom in labor coming in, so right now, I am packing my bag, my birth bag, to take down with me to work. Okay. And I put a stethoscope in there of my own. I also have a lapel watch that I pin into my shirt, so I don’t have to look at a watch, my work clothes, just a pair of scrub pants and a t shirt. And I always make sure I take some good snacks with me, cause you never know when’s the next time you’re gonna eat once you get pulled into a birth. And I think we’re all set. I’m ready to go. So I’m headed out the door.
Lydia Doublestein: I am Lydia Doublestein, and I currently work as a birth assistant and a doula while I am studying to be a midwife. When I’m in the room, I’m helping to facilitate this bonding, I’m helping to facilitate this breastfeeding, this aspect of my life that I have no context with beyond just my, my learning experience and training. The relationship that I’m fostering during this immediate postpartum time, is something I never had with my adoptive mom. It’s something I never had with my birth mom. It’s almost like, who am I to even be in this context? Because I have no context to bring with me. It’s nothing is here. Why me? And I think all adoptees have that loss of context.
Lydia Doublestein: All right, I’m here. I’ll just call.
Lydia Doublestein: So my Korean name is Park Hee Eun. As far as I know, it was just kind of an arbitrary name given by the social worker. But two years ago, two and a half years ago, when I initiated a search for my birth mom, the only thing that they could verify to me is to let me know that her last name was Park as well, so that we did share the same surname.
Lydia Doublestein: Can I listen to the baby’s heartbeat?
Lydia Doublestein: I first thought about midwifery seriously as a future career the summer before my senior year of high school. I was super interested in international work, so as I looked at more international sites that were doing midwifery and training midwives in other countries around the world, they all talked about maternal mortality. And midwives are a key to addressing maternal and infant mortality because no woman ought to die alone. In childbirth especially. No woman should die alone giving life. And, within my adoption papers, the tiny paragraph that I have about my birth mother, it says she gave birth alone. And that always stood out to me.
Lydia Doublestein: You doing good? You doing good?
Birthing Mother: Ah, ah, oh my God.
Lydia Doublestein: You are so strong.
Birthing Mother: Oh man.
Lydia Doublestein: I know that someday I would like to have my own children. And I also think that it will be a very overwhelming and, um, very different experience. And I think, will I be able to relate to my mom.
Birthing Mother: Come on baby girl, drop.
Lydia Doublestein: Definitely she’ll be so great for, um, just like, advice and mom, mothering advice, but what about, you know, all the pregnancy advice that you get from your mom or the story that she tells you about your birth and how that may or may not be similar to your own and that will be absent. And for her, it’s something she never had. So is this a tender subject? Is this a awkward subject? Or is it something that we can just kind of embrace full force and just say, we have no idea what this is all about, but this is a new element to our relationship. Let’s see what happens.
Lydia Doublestein: You have so much power.
Lydia Doublestein: Hello there. Hi. Little one baby. Hi baby girl. Hi. So close. Come, mama. You got it?
Birth Father: Yes, she’s coming. She’s coming. Push.
Lydia Doublestein: I initiated a search and the woman that they contacted, she said, no, I never gave a child for adoption. Um, don’t ever call back again. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.
Lydia Doublestein: Hi! Welcome to the world baby girl!
And there was no even positive confirmation that that was her. It was just kind of this dead-end lead. As the part of the search, I did write a letter as well. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to say. In the end, I just wrote something pretty short. I told her. Why I wanted to be a midwife was related to her story.
You gonna give us a cry? Can you get mad a bit? Rub her back a little bit. Give her a stimulator. There we go.
And then I just concluded with, Please know you’ll be warmly welcomed at any time.
Lydia Doublestein: Ah, that’s…it, that’s the way. You got a little mad. Being born this hard. There we go. Yes, you’re so happy.
Schuyler Swenson: A lot of adoptees I know have done search and have been given false information or have been told that there isn’t any documentation of biological family or after searching, um, it’s discovered that their biological family doesn’t wish to meet, reunite with them. Um, and my story is, um, very different.
Amy Gastelum: So this is Schuyler Swenson. She produced the piece about the birth assistant. And like Lydia, Schuyler was adopted from Korea by an American family. Our friend, producer Anne Noyes Saini, sat down with Schuyler for this interview.
Schuyler Swenson: When I was, um, about 24, I bought a one-way ticket from New York City to Seoul and figured I’d try to live there and just learn more about my relationship with the country and learn more about where I came from.
Amy Gastelum: Schuyler stayed in Seoul for a year and a half, and she was working and making friends and just learning about the place where she was born, but she struggled to fit in.
Schuyler Swenson: The thing that really was a dead giveaway of me not being from Korea while I was over there was just my sense of fashion and, um, you know, eating ability and like, um, in general, just kind of like being independent. I think like mainstream Korean culture by the time you’re like in your mid-twenties expects that you’re like with a husband, gonna have kids. You know the housewife narrative of like the 1950s in America is very much alive in like Korean culture. I just felt like I always had to be in heels and a dress, which is like not who I am. But like it was, I kind of gave into it a little bit as like more from like a curiosity of like how I would be empowered as a woman, um, in Korea was like through adhering to like some of these standards.
Amy Gastelum: Meeting her birth parents was part of Schuyler’s search for herself when she was in Korea. And finding them was actually the easy part because her adoption agency kept better records than Lydia’s. But what came next was harder for Schuyler.
Schuyler Swenson: I had the most butterflies about just seeing people that looked like me. Um, and then when they walked in the door, it wasn’t like, oh my God, there’s me. It wasn’t, I guess I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but there wasn’t like such a striking resemblance that it was like, oh, these are clearly my parents.
Anne Noyes Saini: Was it ever like awkward in any way sort of being…
Schuyler Swenson: Yeah. Um, lots of silence, as you can imagine, the language barrier and just the emotional intensity of it all often left us, you know, without words, but, um, I tried to be comfortable and like sit in that silence and I hope that they were too. I mean, there wasn’t much of an alternative, but, um, you know, we tried to kind of pantomime and like write things and, um, yeah, just kind of physically be around one another.
Amy Gastelum: When she was growing up, Schuyler never really wondered why her parents placed her for adoption. She had been told that they couldn’t afford to care for her, and she accepted that.
Schuyler Swenson: Literally, the first thing that my father said to me was, uh, in Korean, I’m sure you’re wondering why we placed you for adoption. And it’s because when you were born, we couldn’t afford other children. And also, you were born female, not male. Yeah. Which was something I had not known. So, um, I’m still kind of like sitting with that additional information and not knowing yeah what, how to process that, or how I feel about it. But I also like, am who I am today because of everything that’s happened. So I, I don’t like, feel anger or resentment or shame in that decision that was made for me based on sex, I guess, at birth. I think I was more just like approaching this reunion with the hope that they would know that that decision was one that resulted in me being a healthy, like, adult who had like, the life that I would assume maybe they had wanted for me. I mean, who knows? There’s a lot kind of like loaded in that assumption of like a better life in America, which is, yeah, yeah, hard to, uh, hard to process now as an adult, as I’ve become more aware of like systems of like colonization and, um, you know, the loss of being raised in America with white parents of like, uh, a sense of self. And I think, yeah, going back to Korea was a big part of figuring that out.
Lucy Kang: I’m jumping in to remind you that you are listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and want more information, or if you’d like to leave us a comment, visit us at our new website FOCmedia.org. There you can access today’s show and all of our prior episodes. Okay, now back to the show.
Amy Gastelum: Welcome back to the show. I’m Amy Gastelum. This is Making Contact. Several years ago, I invited my friend Alex Lewis to come over for a visit. And when he walked into my apartment, he immediately wanted to hold my brand-new baby and he seemed so comfortable I could tell that he had had experience with newborns.And so we got to talking and it turns out his experience with infants starts with his own birth story. Like Schuyler and Lydia, Alex was adopted from Korea, and as an adult, he tried to learn about his birth mother, but his adoption agency didn’t have great records.
Alex Lewis: There’s so little information about my birth mother. We know her first name, we know that she was, I believe she was 20 or 21 years old when I was born, and she was a university student. And the only hobby that’s listed in the file is bowling. Apparently she liked bowling. And the only two sentences besides that in the description are, “The mother met the father on the way home from work one day. She never knew his name.” And so that’s it. That’s that’s it.
Amy Gastelum: Alex hasn’t been able to find his birth mother yet, but he still visits Korea occasionally for similar reasons as Schuyler, right? He goes to learn about himself and the place that he was born and when he goes there, he visits an organization that houses young unmarried pregnant people and the babies that they place for adoption.
Alex Lewis: And this place is called Ewha, the Ewha Baby Center. Um, and another name for, the English name is like, Home for Young Moms. Because in Korea, um, single moms, or being like a single mom is like, the worst thing you could be and you’re shunned from society. That’s changing, but not that quickly.
Amy Gastelum: Stigma against single moms is part of the reason that over six decades, starting after the Korean war in the 1950s, at least 200,000 Korean children, were adopted outside of the country, and most of them ended up in the U.S. It was the largest adoption exodus from one country in the history of the world, and it wasn’t an accident. After the war, a special law created a legal framework for adoption, and agencies were set up to fast-track adoptions out of the country. These agencies actually made quite a bit of money on the adoptions. And now, decades later, there are reports of widespread adoption fraud. stemming from these agencies.
At the same time in the U. S., abortion was legal, birth control was more accessible than ever, and single women in the U. S. were keeping their children at greater rates than those in Korea. All of this led to a decrease in U. S. domestic-born infants available for adoption, something conservatives continue to point out as a problem here and a rationale for limiting abortion and birth control in the U.S.
In his opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito wrote a footnote referencing a CDC report about the high demand for adoptable infants in the U. S. juxtaposed with the virtually nonexistent, quote, “domestic supply of infants.”
Alex never found his birth mother, but he found the Ewha Baby Center, this place that houses pregnant people and babies. And to get back to the story, that’s where he learned to hold infants. That’s why he was so comfortable holding my baby.
Alex Lewis: They put me in the room with like the newest babies and just like sat me down on the ground, put like, um, a towel basically on me, like over my arm and handed me a baby and like a bottle and I kind of just sat there. This is a lot of what I did there was I’d sit there for hours and like change out babies who I was holding and feeding.
Amy Gastelum: In 2011, Korea passed the Special Adoption Act in the hopes that it would increase domestic adoptions and decrease international adoptions. It did that, but it also resulted in more abandoned children. Because the underlying problem of stigma had not been resolved. The law required unwed mothers to document the adoption. Some women didn’t want their adoptions formally documented by the government. And here in the U. S., the stigma against single moms persists among the Korean diaspora. Our friend Ann Noyes Saini produced this next story, which was recorded at a church.
Sheena: It’s not just like a bad thing happened. I became more independent and then I have some kind of sense of, uh, notion how to survive here. And I’m teaching my daughter, I mean, as a young girl, in big city, how she survive in here. So I think it’s like also good thing for my daughter and then to teach her like how to stand by herself and then be independent. Yeah, it’s good opportunity to teach her like that way.
Anne Noyes Saini: This is Sheena. She’s originally from Korea, but she lives in Queens now. And she’s raising her teenage daughter on her own. Sheena is actually part of this support group for single moms in New York. It’s called the Single Parent Alliance of Koreans. Um, and basically, it’s a group of single moms with their kids. They get together and they celebrate holidays together. Um, kind of, kind of like a big extended family. And basically, it’s just a place where the women can kind of lean on each other for support and advice and, uh, friendship.
Amy Gastelum: That sounds brilliant. That is absolutely brilliant. I, I get that like being in community with people who understand you and go through a struggle that’s like so similar to yours, that can be really important in somebody’s life. It can really like buoy you. Did Sheena and these moms talk about like their specific or unique challenges, especially as Korean single mothers?
Anne Noyes Saini: Yeah, totally. Because, I mean, keep in mind, uh, one, they are supporting their kids alone in New York which is just a really, really hard, expensive place to live, period. Um, and then, you know, they’re all immigrants um, and for most of them, there’s, you know, sort of an issue of learning English, um, getting kind of like professional qualifications that are sort of valid here, um, and then just being so, so far away from their family. Like, I think all of them still had most of their family in Korea. So I talked to another woman who is also in the group. Her name is, uh, Chung Sook. And she told me that it was so hard for her after her husband passed away, um, and when she was raising her son on her own, that she almost gave her son up for adoption.
Anne Noyes Saini: And when, when you were thinking about what that would mean for you to be a mom, doing, raising your son alone, like, what were your initial thoughts?
Chung Sook: Once I thought about, you know, give up my son because yeah, at the time I really survived by myself. Yeah, and then emotionally, financially, I really I wanted to give up myself, so that’s why. Yeah. I don’t know how to say it. It’s really difficult.
Anne Noyes Saini: I’m sorry. I don’t mean to ask such a, um, hard question. I’m sorry.
Amy Gastelum: That’s just shameful. Like, in our community, that that’s even something she had to consider.
Anne Noyes Saini: Yeah. So there’s, there’s that aspect of it, which is literally like, making ends meet, um, but the women that I talked to in this group, they also said that it’s really hard for them because they feel kind of excluded by people in the Korean community here. Um, and then also their families back home in Korea aren’t all that supportive of their decision to raise their kids, um, alone. Um, so here’s, here’s the group’s founder. Her name is Mimi Huang.
Mimi Huang: Korea is a male-dominated society. You know, practically single moms are shunned from society and her own family. In terms of single mom conveys a negative connotation in Korea. They face to, you know, discrimination. And also kids is target as well, yeah. Because you know, they, uh, children’s of single moms, they’re easily tease by other kids.
Anne Noyes Saini: Is it the same here? Like if you, is it, is it different? Like if you are in the Korean community here in New York do people have the same kinds of attitudes?
Mimi Huang: There’s a little bit different, it’s not much different, you know.
Anne Noyes Saini: So people aren’t sympathetic to single moms, even, even here in New York.
Mimi Huang: Oh, but, uh, we don’t want to sympathetic. We need empathy, right? We are not pathetic, you know. Ha ha ha.
Amy Gastelum: So, when these moms immigrated from Korea, it sounds like the shunning kind of stayed with them here.
Anne Noyes Saini: Exactly. Exactly. Mimi actually said that she thinks, you know, even though there were certain things that were harder here, she thinks it’s maybe a little bit easier to be a single mom here in New York, um, than in Korea.
Amy Gastelum: Okay. Did the other women in the group weigh in on that? Like did they feel that way?
Anne Noyes Saini: Yeah, I was curious. I mean, that was, that was one of the main things I wanted to ask them. And it was a little tricky for them, because most of them hadn’t lived in Korea in a good decade or more. But I, but I asked them about that, and um, here’s what they said. First you’re going to hear Chung Sook, and then you’re going to hear Sheena, who’s the woman from the very beginning.
Chung Sook: In Korean culture, if a woman has the baby without husband, they assume her life is already ruined or, you know, embarrassing. In here, the Korean people, they really seem like in Korea, still. They still think the same, but I don’t care. Yeah, I don’t care whatever they say, whatever they think. Yeah.
Sheena: Now things change a little bit, but not very dramatically, I believe. It’s like, uh, it’s when I say, mention it to my parents, maybe I can just, I can be back with my daughter. They are really hesitating to answer, yes, you can be back with your daughter. No. Yeah, they are really, really hesitating.
Anne Noyes Saini: Like, like even for a visit?
Sheena: It’s, uh, my daughter looks a little bit different than like a regular Korean. It’s like, uh, she’s half Korean. So they don’t want to say, they don’t want to say other people how they look. Yeah, it’s, uh, they’re really aware what other people think. Yeah, so, I really think, yeah, it’s, uh, it’s sad, but I have to accept it.
Amy Gastelum: You know, I’m really impressed by the way these women, you know, kind of banded together and figured out what their needs were when almost everybody in their world is telling them that they’re doing it wrong.
Anne Noyes Saini: Yeah, I mean, their group is such a great model. Like, these women really get it. Like, you know you’re not alone. You’re not the only person dealing with this.
Gina: I mean, I meet other, like a single mom, and then from their story, I encourage them, okay, they survive. I have to do more. I have to push myself.
Chung Sook: This group is only group I know, this one group in here for Korean, single mother. There is no other group like us.
SongHaAnn: We all go together, cheering of each other and comfort each other, why? Because every day we’re living very difficult. That’s why we know everybody each other problem. So we’re getting together. We have created some new energy.
Amy Gastelum: I’m Amy Gastelum. Thanks for listening to Making Contact. As we were finishing up production on today’s episode, a feminist movement from South Korea began to gain traction here in the United States. It was a response to the presidential election. It’s called 4B. The B stands for the Korean word meaning not. Essentially, women are refusing to participate in four components of patriarchy, marriage, childbearing, dating, and sex with men. This is Korea’s latest export. Whatever it takes, y’all.
Amy Gastelum: A huge thank you today to producers Schuyler Swenson and Anne Noyes Saini. Go to our website focmedia.org for more information about today’s show. Until next week.
