The bone-deep longing to know who their parents were

A few days ago, I bought subway train tickets with my adopted youngest son, who’s 12 years old. After looking at them and fiddling with the change he murmured, “My birth mother may have touched these same coins.”

He’s been missing his birth mother, who bore him and brought him into the world, even though he has never met her. He was expressing a bone-deep longing, which would hurt my wife’s heart if she heard him express it.

Every person has a unique personality. Personality basically starts with defining who our parents are and where we come from. One’s identity never changes, from beginning to end, even after one grows up and one’s appearance changes.

According to the U.N. Convention of the Rights of the Child, Article 7, “The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and, as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.”

The immediate acknowledgement of its birth is the child’s right and the parents’ basic responsibility, and is regulated by the Act on the Registration, Etc. of Family Relationship.

Despite all this, my little boy has no information or records on his birth parents at all. So, there’s no way to find his birth parents for him. The 12-year-old boy keeps on saying, “I miss my mother,” “Where is my mother?,” “I wonder who she is.” Guided by instinct, he wants to look for his roots. My wife and I feel a deep sadness listening to his questions because we know that we will never be able to forget them and can’t do anything about his suffering.

I was in attendance when Chin Young, the former minister of health and welfare, signed The Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption in May of this year. We had a goodwill gathering with citizens of the Netherlands who had been adopted from South Korea when they were very young. As for the question of what the government or the Korea Adoption Services could do for them, the only thing they mentioned, over a two-hour period, was their longing to meet their birth mothers.

It is necessary to undertake the process of tracing the roots of adoptees strictly and fairly with the assistance of public organizations because finding their birth parents is a truly urgent issue. They insist that the government should get involved in the matter of intercountry adoption procedures and maintain information or records of the birth parents.

When intercountry adoptees visit their mother country, it is very hard to find their birth parents because the necessary information or records are maintained differently by various nongovernmental organizations.

Meanwhile, adoptees have rarely been successful in finding their birth parents. It would definitely be possible to locate their roots if only the details of their births were registered. People who insist that the Special Adoption Act needs to be revised assert that the adoption agencies should set up a family registration system without the birth mothers’ permission, even though mothers may be afraid that information about their children might remain on their official records. However, adoptees have encountered lots of problems with tracing their roots as a result of the current adoption system.

If a single mother fears the existence of official records of a child’s birth, it’s not a matter of following the Special Adoption Act without considering the child’s guarantee of rights and interests, but a matter of abiding by the Act on the Registration, Etc. of Family Relationship. Therefore, adoption procedures shouldn’t be considered from the adult’s perspective. Adoption should be viewed from the child’s perspective.

By Shin On-han

Shin On-han, doctor of public health, is president of the Korea Adoption Services. He has served as vice minister of health and welfare. -- Ed.