Korea's Struggle with Single Motherhood and Government Policy on Adoption
[Voice] How should Korea address single parenthood?
As stigma remains ...
In a country that emphasizes strongly conservative sexual mores, births outside of marriage are both frowned upon and rare. Such is the mix of social conditions, culture and taboo that the nation has the lowest proportion of out-of-wedlock births in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, at just over 2 percent. The average among the club of rich nations, in contrast, exceeds that figure more than 15-fold.
These births, in fact, represent only a tiny fraction of the number of unwed women who become pregnant, as more than 90 percent of whom have chosen abortion over giving birth in recent years, according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Most of those who do carry their pregnancy to full term ultimately give their baby up for adoption, according to data from the National Assembly Research Service.
Common or not, out-of-wedlock birth and single parenthood remain a reality for society and policymakers to grapple with. Currently, the government provides about 70,000 won ($64) to unwed mothers each month, financial support that dries up if the recipient starts earning about 1.2 million won a month, according to Choi Hyong-sook, an unwed mother and secretary-general of Dandelions, a group for Korea adoptees’ families of origin.
“The government’s financial support is too low and, even though it has many policies for unwed mothers, every policy has many difficult requirements for support,” the mother of a 9-year-old boy told The Korea Herald.
Choi said that it was easier for her to earn money and manage with an older child, but that mothers with infants should be able to rely on support regardless of their income.
“Up until 24 months of age, the government should provide support without consideration of income,” she said. “(Seeing) families who adopt receive 150,000 won without regard to their income, so many unwed mothers think adoption is better than raising your child.”
Adoption
The official approach toward adoption goes to the heart of many activists’ criticisms of the government response to the issue. They argue that the government’s incentivizing of adoption has made it harder for unwed mothers already facing societal disapproval to raise their own children.
“How much of a problem is it? You can think of it like this: Unwed mothers are so discriminated against that the Korean government has allowed and is allowing their children to be systematically stripped of their Korean citizenship and sent en masse to foreign countries,” said Jane Jeong Trenka, the president of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea, by email. “We call it ‘adoption,’ but it is really a form of social cleansing, packaged in a way that Westerners can feel good about.”
Trenka said it was imperative that the government provide greater financial support to unwed mothers, prevent adoption agencies from providing the first counseling, and establish Single Mothers’ Day as a national holiday, among other measures.
“There is a feedback loop: When governments recognize and reward a population (such as retirees with Social Security), the population becomes politically active and their social construction (image) continues to improve as good and deserving,” she said. “When the image of a population is bad, the government can provide aid to that population, which would help to change that image, or it can reinforce the bad image to the public by continuing to punish or ignore that population, as we see with unwed mothers and birth parents.”
Lee Mi-hwa, project PR chief manager for the Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network, said that unwed mothers would have viable options besides adoption only with increased government support.
“So (that) unwed mothers don’t choose adoption and can choose to parent themselves, we need to make efforts to provide more specific support and change societal perceptions,” said Lee. “I think that in the future, policy for supporting unwed mothers should be devised with self-reliance in mind, and financial support, parenting support, expansion of housing and public rental facilities, easing rental requirements, and the establishment of a government department to efficiently enforce fathers’ parental responsibilities etc. should all be made in an integrated way.”
With existing and proposed supports ranging from housing to enforcement of child support, some policy researchers have emphasized the need for a more centralized approach to the issue. Kang Ji-won, a researcher at Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs who has researched policy on the issue, said there was a need for greater integration between different government bodies.
“Since support policies for single-parent families are currently being offered by individual departments, there is a need to establish a control tower capable of effectively managing the financial expenditures of the government,” said Kang.
“Due to the limit on integrated benefits imposed in the case of the Basic Livelihood Security System, the content of support differs between designated recipients and non-recipients. The Single-Parent Family Support, which is designed to supplement the previous system by supporting those in the second-lowest income bracket, has significant discrepancies in content compared to the benefits of the Basic Livelihood Security System.”
Traditional values
The Ministry of Family and Gender Equality was contacted for comment on government policy for single parents but did not respond by press time.
Even as activists and policymakers look toward greater support and understanding for unwed mothers, however, parallel debate about inadvertently incentivizing single parenthood has raged in Western countries with much more generous welfare policies and higher rates of out-of-wedlock births. Conservatives and religious leaders in countries such as the U.S. and the U.K. have often raised concerns about the risk of undermining the nuclear family by encouraging other family forms.
Kang, however, dismissed the suggestion that the rise in single-parent families in Korea in recent years could be attributed to welfare policy.
“To be sure, there is a link between the recent surge in single-parent families and increases in government support for them. But this is not a causal link,” said Kang. “I wouldn’t say either of these is responsible for the creation of the creation of the other.
“It’s rather that single-parent families had been left outside the reach of policy attention; now they are rightly in the policy realm. Also, while single mothers in the past often sent their newborns overseas for adoption. Now, more single mothers choose to raise their children on their own.”
Whether or not the risk of incentivizing single parenthood is real, the question of whether it should even be a cause of concern is in itself a sensitive issue, with commentators in various countries arguing over the merits or otherwise of the “traditional family.”
Lee said that while Korea had traditionally seen single parenthood as problematic and unwed mothers as immoral, most single-parent families were in fact completely normal.
“You do not see many children of unwed mothers with problematic behavior, and the truth is even among (two-parent)nuclear families you see children with troublesome behavior arise.”
By John Power (john.power@heraldcorp.com)
You can read some opinions at the source.
Source
Raised in America, activists lead fight to end S. Korean adoptions
By Wilfred Chan, for CNN
September 17, 2013 -- Updated 0021 GMT (0821 HKT)
(CNN) -- Jane Jeong Trenka, adopted from Korea at the age of six months in 1972, never felt she belonged growing up in a rural Minnesota town. But decades later the 40-year-old discovered her adoption began with a lie.
While trying to apply for a visa in 2006, Trenka was told her legal birthday didn't match birth papers supplied by her orphanage. After an investigation, Trenka unraveled the mystery: an adoption agency in Korea had given her a fake identity to make her more attractive for adoption, she said.
"I could see where they lied to get me adopted," said Trenka. Her family history and physical description was rewritten to hide the fact that she was in poor health, having been abused by her father. And the agency had lied to Trenka's Korean mother, saying she would be sent to a pair of wealthy Dutch lawyers.
South Korea was a pioneer on international adoptions. In the aftermath of World War II and Korean War, more than 200,000 children were sent to live with families abroad, according to the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare. As recently as 2005, South Korea was the fourth largest provider of children to U.S. families, sending more than 1,600 orphans that year, according to the U.S. State Department.
But Trenka, who repatriated to South Korea in 2008, is part of a vanguard of American adoptees who have led the fight to stop overseas adoptions from Korea and change the cultural stigma tied to unwed mothers. "The best option is always for a child to be parented by his or her birth parent," she said. "Then domestic adoption, and only then intercountry adoption."
"If you take a look at what's going on in (Korean) adoption reform, all of it is led by adoptees," said Kevin Haebeom Vollmers, a 36-year old Korean adoptee in Minnesota and publisher of Gazillion Voices, an online magazine on adoption issues. "We've been disenfranchised for so long, and we're finally writing our own history, for the first time, on our own terms."
In 2012, the Korean National Assembly implemented the Special Adoption Law, crafted by Trenka with a coalition of adoptee activists and allies. The law explicitly discourages sending children abroad.
Under the law, birth mothers must nurse babies for seven days before the child can be considered for adoption. If a mother chooses adoption, her consent must be verified and her child's birth registered. Finally, a mother may choose to revoke the adoption up to six months after her application.
"It's a paradigm shift," Trenka said. "We're checking to make sure things are done ethically and properly. In my generation, people did things with blindly, deadly, and unethical speed."
Even before the new law took effect, the number of children being adopted abroad from South Korea has been in decline. Only 621 South Korean children were adopted by U.S. families in 2012, compared to nearly 1,800 in 2002, according to the U.S. State Department.
'Ungrateful'
Not all adoptees are cheering the reform.
Steve Choi Morrison, 57, is a defender of intercountry adoption and the founder of the Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea (MPAK). "God came down to adopt human beings as his own children, even when we did not deserve it," he said. "I believe it is our human duty, that if we have more than people from other nations -- then we should share."
Born in the aftermath of the Korean War and orphaned at age 5, Morrison spent his early childhood wandering streets and sleeping under bridges, he said. After moving to an orphanage, he was finally adopted at age 14 to a Christian family in Utah. "They didn't have to adopt me, but they did," he said. "I really, really love them for what they did."
He opposes the new Korean law's requirement for mothers to register their children's birth before adoption, arguing that it counters cultural norms. "In Korean culture, face-saving is very important," he said. "Mothers are afraid the birth record will later show up, and that husbands will not marry them later. If you force birth mothers to register for adoption, they're just going to abandon their children."
Korean adoption activist Kim Stoker, 40, disagrees. Morrison's criticism is based on "incorrect information," said Stoker, who was adopted as an infant in 1973 and returned to live permanently in South Korea in 1995. "After a child is placed in a family, that child will be removed from the birth mother's registry."
Stoker rejects the idea that the law is not suitable for Korean culture. "There's the idea that Korean culture, as large as it is, and as vast as it is, is somehow static. That is not true. I've lived in the country since 1995, and there's been tremendous cultural change."
Fight for single-mother rights
Korean returnee activists are now fighting to improve government support for single women who have children. "Mothers are mothers," she said. "If you give them a real chance, most will want to parent their children. Who is the parent should not be a contest of who has the most stuff."
Stoker believes South Korea's adoption reform movement will set an example for other countries. "We're the first generation of international adoptees that are telling our own stories," she said. "A lot of the adoptees leaving China, for example, are going to look at our model to see what's important."
But Jane Trenka said she's not ready to celebrate. Single mother welfare remains lacking and adoption agencies as well as groups like Steve Morrison's MPAK are fighting to overturn the Special Adoption Law.
"The Koreans have a saying, after a mountain, there's another mountain," she said with a sigh.
Source
I currently live in South Korea, and I ran into a couple of adoption-related articles that are tied together. I thought they were interesting as they discussed the big stigma attached to single motherhood in Korea, and the preference to "erase" the children born to unwed mothers.
As stigma remains ...
In a country that emphasizes strongly conservative sexual mores, births outside of marriage are both frowned upon and rare. Such is the mix of social conditions, culture and taboo that the nation has the lowest proportion of out-of-wedlock births in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, at just over 2 percent. The average among the club of rich nations, in contrast, exceeds that figure more than 15-fold.
These births, in fact, represent only a tiny fraction of the number of unwed women who become pregnant, as more than 90 percent of whom have chosen abortion over giving birth in recent years, according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Most of those who do carry their pregnancy to full term ultimately give their baby up for adoption, according to data from the National Assembly Research Service.
Common or not, out-of-wedlock birth and single parenthood remain a reality for society and policymakers to grapple with. Currently, the government provides about 70,000 won ($64) to unwed mothers each month, financial support that dries up if the recipient starts earning about 1.2 million won a month, according to Choi Hyong-sook, an unwed mother and secretary-general of Dandelions, a group for Korea adoptees’ families of origin.
“The government’s financial support is too low and, even though it has many policies for unwed mothers, every policy has many difficult requirements for support,” the mother of a 9-year-old boy told The Korea Herald.
Choi said that it was easier for her to earn money and manage with an older child, but that mothers with infants should be able to rely on support regardless of their income.
“Up until 24 months of age, the government should provide support without consideration of income,” she said. “(Seeing) families who adopt receive 150,000 won without regard to their income, so many unwed mothers think adoption is better than raising your child.”
Adoption
The official approach toward adoption goes to the heart of many activists’ criticisms of the government response to the issue. They argue that the government’s incentivizing of adoption has made it harder for unwed mothers already facing societal disapproval to raise their own children.
“How much of a problem is it? You can think of it like this: Unwed mothers are so discriminated against that the Korean government has allowed and is allowing their children to be systematically stripped of their Korean citizenship and sent en masse to foreign countries,” said Jane Jeong Trenka, the president of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea, by email. “We call it ‘adoption,’ but it is really a form of social cleansing, packaged in a way that Westerners can feel good about.”
Trenka said it was imperative that the government provide greater financial support to unwed mothers, prevent adoption agencies from providing the first counseling, and establish Single Mothers’ Day as a national holiday, among other measures.
“There is a feedback loop: When governments recognize and reward a population (such as retirees with Social Security), the population becomes politically active and their social construction (image) continues to improve as good and deserving,” she said. “When the image of a population is bad, the government can provide aid to that population, which would help to change that image, or it can reinforce the bad image to the public by continuing to punish or ignore that population, as we see with unwed mothers and birth parents.”
Lee Mi-hwa, project PR chief manager for the Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network, said that unwed mothers would have viable options besides adoption only with increased government support.
“So (that) unwed mothers don’t choose adoption and can choose to parent themselves, we need to make efforts to provide more specific support and change societal perceptions,” said Lee. “I think that in the future, policy for supporting unwed mothers should be devised with self-reliance in mind, and financial support, parenting support, expansion of housing and public rental facilities, easing rental requirements, and the establishment of a government department to efficiently enforce fathers’ parental responsibilities etc. should all be made in an integrated way.”
With existing and proposed supports ranging from housing to enforcement of child support, some policy researchers have emphasized the need for a more centralized approach to the issue. Kang Ji-won, a researcher at Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs who has researched policy on the issue, said there was a need for greater integration between different government bodies.
“Since support policies for single-parent families are currently being offered by individual departments, there is a need to establish a control tower capable of effectively managing the financial expenditures of the government,” said Kang.
“Due to the limit on integrated benefits imposed in the case of the Basic Livelihood Security System, the content of support differs between designated recipients and non-recipients. The Single-Parent Family Support, which is designed to supplement the previous system by supporting those in the second-lowest income bracket, has significant discrepancies in content compared to the benefits of the Basic Livelihood Security System.”
Traditional values
The Ministry of Family and Gender Equality was contacted for comment on government policy for single parents but did not respond by press time.
Even as activists and policymakers look toward greater support and understanding for unwed mothers, however, parallel debate about inadvertently incentivizing single parenthood has raged in Western countries with much more generous welfare policies and higher rates of out-of-wedlock births. Conservatives and religious leaders in countries such as the U.S. and the U.K. have often raised concerns about the risk of undermining the nuclear family by encouraging other family forms.
Kang, however, dismissed the suggestion that the rise in single-parent families in Korea in recent years could be attributed to welfare policy.
“To be sure, there is a link between the recent surge in single-parent families and increases in government support for them. But this is not a causal link,” said Kang. “I wouldn’t say either of these is responsible for the creation of the creation of the other.
“It’s rather that single-parent families had been left outside the reach of policy attention; now they are rightly in the policy realm. Also, while single mothers in the past often sent their newborns overseas for adoption. Now, more single mothers choose to raise their children on their own.”
Whether or not the risk of incentivizing single parenthood is real, the question of whether it should even be a cause of concern is in itself a sensitive issue, with commentators in various countries arguing over the merits or otherwise of the “traditional family.”
Lee said that while Korea had traditionally seen single parenthood as problematic and unwed mothers as immoral, most single-parent families were in fact completely normal.
“You do not see many children of unwed mothers with problematic behavior, and the truth is even among (two-parent)nuclear families you see children with troublesome behavior arise.”
By John Power (john.power@heraldcorp.com)
You can read some opinions at the source.
Source
Raised in America, activists lead fight to end S. Korean adoptions
By Wilfred Chan, for CNN
September 17, 2013 -- Updated 0021 GMT (0821 HKT)
(CNN) -- Jane Jeong Trenka, adopted from Korea at the age of six months in 1972, never felt she belonged growing up in a rural Minnesota town. But decades later the 40-year-old discovered her adoption began with a lie.
While trying to apply for a visa in 2006, Trenka was told her legal birthday didn't match birth papers supplied by her orphanage. After an investigation, Trenka unraveled the mystery: an adoption agency in Korea had given her a fake identity to make her more attractive for adoption, she said.
"I could see where they lied to get me adopted," said Trenka. Her family history and physical description was rewritten to hide the fact that she was in poor health, having been abused by her father. And the agency had lied to Trenka's Korean mother, saying she would be sent to a pair of wealthy Dutch lawyers.
South Korea was a pioneer on international adoptions. In the aftermath of World War II and Korean War, more than 200,000 children were sent to live with families abroad, according to the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare. As recently as 2005, South Korea was the fourth largest provider of children to U.S. families, sending more than 1,600 orphans that year, according to the U.S. State Department.
But Trenka, who repatriated to South Korea in 2008, is part of a vanguard of American adoptees who have led the fight to stop overseas adoptions from Korea and change the cultural stigma tied to unwed mothers. "The best option is always for a child to be parented by his or her birth parent," she said. "Then domestic adoption, and only then intercountry adoption."
"If you take a look at what's going on in (Korean) adoption reform, all of it is led by adoptees," said Kevin Haebeom Vollmers, a 36-year old Korean adoptee in Minnesota and publisher of Gazillion Voices, an online magazine on adoption issues. "We've been disenfranchised for so long, and we're finally writing our own history, for the first time, on our own terms."
In 2012, the Korean National Assembly implemented the Special Adoption Law, crafted by Trenka with a coalition of adoptee activists and allies. The law explicitly discourages sending children abroad.
Under the law, birth mothers must nurse babies for seven days before the child can be considered for adoption. If a mother chooses adoption, her consent must be verified and her child's birth registered. Finally, a mother may choose to revoke the adoption up to six months after her application.
"It's a paradigm shift," Trenka said. "We're checking to make sure things are done ethically and properly. In my generation, people did things with blindly, deadly, and unethical speed."
Even before the new law took effect, the number of children being adopted abroad from South Korea has been in decline. Only 621 South Korean children were adopted by U.S. families in 2012, compared to nearly 1,800 in 2002, according to the U.S. State Department.
'Ungrateful'
Not all adoptees are cheering the reform.
Steve Choi Morrison, 57, is a defender of intercountry adoption and the founder of the Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea (MPAK). "God came down to adopt human beings as his own children, even when we did not deserve it," he said. "I believe it is our human duty, that if we have more than people from other nations -- then we should share."
Born in the aftermath of the Korean War and orphaned at age 5, Morrison spent his early childhood wandering streets and sleeping under bridges, he said. After moving to an orphanage, he was finally adopted at age 14 to a Christian family in Utah. "They didn't have to adopt me, but they did," he said. "I really, really love them for what they did."
He opposes the new Korean law's requirement for mothers to register their children's birth before adoption, arguing that it counters cultural norms. "In Korean culture, face-saving is very important," he said. "Mothers are afraid the birth record will later show up, and that husbands will not marry them later. If you force birth mothers to register for adoption, they're just going to abandon their children."
Korean adoption activist Kim Stoker, 40, disagrees. Morrison's criticism is based on "incorrect information," said Stoker, who was adopted as an infant in 1973 and returned to live permanently in South Korea in 1995. "After a child is placed in a family, that child will be removed from the birth mother's registry."
Stoker rejects the idea that the law is not suitable for Korean culture. "There's the idea that Korean culture, as large as it is, and as vast as it is, is somehow static. That is not true. I've lived in the country since 1995, and there's been tremendous cultural change."
Fight for single-mother rights
Korean returnee activists are now fighting to improve government support for single women who have children. "Mothers are mothers," she said. "If you give them a real chance, most will want to parent their children. Who is the parent should not be a contest of who has the most stuff."
Stoker believes South Korea's adoption reform movement will set an example for other countries. "We're the first generation of international adoptees that are telling our own stories," she said. "A lot of the adoptees leaving China, for example, are going to look at our model to see what's important."
But Jane Trenka said she's not ready to celebrate. Single mother welfare remains lacking and adoption agencies as well as groups like Steve Morrison's MPAK are fighting to overturn the Special Adoption Law.
"The Koreans have a saying, after a mountain, there's another mountain," she said with a sigh.
Source
I currently live in South Korea, and I ran into a couple of adoption-related articles that are tied together. I thought they were interesting as they discussed the big stigma attached to single motherhood in Korea, and the preference to "erase" the children born to unwed mothers.