Associated Press / AP Articles Related To The FRONTLINE Documentary “South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning”.
We will post here a series of articles by Associated Press / AP which tie into the FRONTLINE documentary "South Korea's Adoption Reckoning" premiering September 20th, 2024.
Article 4:
Takeaways from AP’s story on the role of the West in widespread fraud with South Korean adoptions
Yooree Kim, right, who was 11 when she was adopted from South Korea to a couple in France, hugs her biological mother, who had come to visit her in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, May 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Yooree Kim sits for a portrait with a computer tablet displaying a picture of her taken before she was sent from South Korea to be adopted by a family in France when she was 11 years old, in her apartment in Seoul, South Korea, Sunday, May 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Above - Screenshot from FRONTLINE / AP Interactive Story. Photography -Victor Tadashi Suarez
Robert Calabretta holds his baby photo from before he was adopted out of South Korea to a family in the United States, Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024, at his apartment in New York. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
"Her story is not uncommon. When children processed for adoption died, became too sick to travel or were found by their biological families, agencies often replaced them with other children instead of redoing the process from scratch, according to former adoption workers. At a meeting with an adoptee in 2021 where AP was present, a longtime worker said Western partner agencies were willing to take “any child of the same sex and similar age, because it would take too much time to start over again.”
Paperslip Note - The adoptee meeting in 2021 mentioned in the quote from the AP article above is our meeting at KSS with our social worker, where she admitted that Switching was common.