FRONTLINE and The AP examine fraud and abuse allegations in South Korea’s historic foreign adoption boom.

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About 200,000 people around the world were adopted out of South Korea to Western countries over the course of the past seven decades in what is believed to be the largest population of adoptees out of any country. More than half of those adopted ended up in the United States.

But as the documentary, “South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning,” from FRONTLINE and The Associated Press explores, a growing number of adoptees have returned to South Korea as adults only to discover that what they’d been told about their origins was not true.

The film draws on years of reporting, thousands of pages of documents — some of which had never been made public before — and interviews with those who worked in adoption agencies, officials from South Korea and abroad, and more than 80 adoptees who gave powerful firsthand accounts.

“What do you do when you find out your origin story is marked with grievous injustice?” one adoptee asks in the film.

The reporters also spoke to officials from some of the adoption agencies, who have denied systemic wrongdoing. They interviewed a former senior official from an adoption agency who stressed that the overall goal was to find homes for children who would otherwise have grown up in orphanages.

“South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning” is a FRONTLINE production with Maxine Productions and Sony Pictures Television – Nonfiction (SPTNF) in association with The Associated Press. The writer, producer and director is Maxine Productions’ Lora Moftah. The reporters are Kim Tonghyung and Claire Galofaro. The senior producer is Nina Chaudry. The executive producer of Maxine Productions is Mary Robertson. The editorinchief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney AronsonRath.

Explore additional reporting on “South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning” on our website:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/do...

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FRONTLINE is produced at GBH in Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional support for FRONTLINE is provided by the Abrams Foundation, Park Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the HeisingSimons Foundation, and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund, with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen.

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Prologue
03:24 Adoptees from South Korea Search for Their Roots
10:26 The History of South Korea’s Foreign Adoption Policy
22:57 A Korean Adoptee Reveals the Hardships She Faced in Childhood
28:08 South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Discusses Investigation of Foreign Adoptions
31:03 Inside an Agency That Facilitated Adoptions of Children from South Korea
36:28 Former U.S. Ambassador Discusses How the U.S. Approached Adoptions from South Korea
42:43 Former South Korean Adoption Worker On Foreign Adoptions At One Agency
46:17 How Some Korean Adoptees’ Adoption Papers Distorted Their Origins
56:45 How South Korean Hospitals and Maternity Homes Became a Key Source of Children For Adoption
01:08:13 South Korea’s Late 1980s Audit Reveals Problems in the Country’s Adoption System
01:15:25 What Korean Adoptees Want: Answers & Accountability
01:22:19 Credits