How Korea’s birth mothers are exposing the hidden cost of overseas adoption
Lee Aeri Rana holds a photo of her daughter during a press conference in Seoul, May 25. Courtesy of Ruth Hyunsook Chon
The silence prepared for her
Korea’s 3rd Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) crossed its 100-day milestone earlier this month, revealing that 437 new cases detailing human rights violations in overseas adoptions have been filed since Feb. 28. Tucked inside those numbers is a shift that demands our attention. For the first time, the voices demanding the truth do not belong solely to adult adoptees — they also belong to the Korean birth mothers left behind.
I recently stood with one of these mothers in Seoul and saw the other side of erasure. I watched what it costs to be told your child is gone, to mourn her as dead and to learn years later that she had lived.
In 1993, Lee Aeri Rana gave birth to a daughter in a hospital. She was told her baby was ill and needed to be transferred to a larger hospital. She was not allowed to see her. One week later, she was told the child had died. She believed this for years. When she finally tried to find where her daughter was buried, she discovered there was no grave.
Her daughter had not died at all. She had been sent — on falsified documents, without her consent — to a family in the United States. Her daughter’s name was Park Mi-ae. In 2023, after years of conflict with her adoptive parents, Park died by suicide, homeless and alone.
At the press conference, as Lee told her story, she wept. Not quietly. The kind of weeping that comes from deep and long-held pain. She asked why her child had been recorded as dead and why her daughter had been sent overseas without her consent. No one, she said, had ever given her answers. No one had allowed her to love her child.
I went to her and held her.
My Korean is limited; I am still learning how to bridge the distance between what I feel and what I can say. I wanted to tell her that I understood something about a loss that had never been fully acknowledged. That I am also a mother. That her daughter's life mattered, and that her death is a loss the world should be required to name.
I could not find those words in Korean. All I could say, again and again, was "I’m sorry" in Korean. It was the wrong phrase entirely, but she understood. Someone should be sorry.
Lee did not fail her daughter. Her daughter was taken from her.
I am a mother four times over. One of my children died at 16 weeks in utero in the U.S. There was no viable child, but I wanted to bury the fetus, to have a place, a marker, something to return to. That was not allowed. The hospital decided what would happen to the remains, and I was not part of that decision.
I did not understand then that the same institutional logic — the one that decides which deaths count, which remains matter, which mothers are owed an explanation — was operating here in Korea as well. Mothers were told what had happened and expected to recover and move on.
It was into this silence — this expectation that mothers would simply accept what they were told — that fraud was inserted. A mother was told that her full-term baby had died. She had no body to bury, no ritual to perform. The silence had already been prepared for her. And grief without ritual is grief without witness — private, unverifiable, impossible to insist upon. Decades later, mothers like Lee are still waiting for someone to acknowledge that what was taken from them was real and lasting.
Standing outside the TRC office in Seoul, several of them shared how fraud deprived them of their children and gave them a life of pain. These Korean birth mothers are bound together with overseas adoptees by the same falsified documents, the same machinery of separation. The mothers lost children — not to death, as many were told, but to an adoption system that took their babies and sent them abroad. That same system left many adoptees with incomplete records, missing histories and unanswered questions about their origins.
I am one of those adoptees. I am Kim Jung-mae. My own records contain anomalies that raise legal and ethical questions.
But this story belongs first to Lee and her daughter.
Park was born in 1993. She did not die at birth.
She deserved to know her mother and to grow up with the ordinary certainty that she belonged to someone.
The new petitions now being filed by Korean birth mothers are not only requests for investigation. They are declarations that these children existed, that these families existed and that their losses were real.
For years, Lee carried that truth alone.
I am saying their names because no one should be erased from their own story, and no one should die without being mourned.
Lee has not stopped knowing her daughter existed.
Now, Korea now has an opportunity to acknowledge what she has known all along.
Anne Mai Bertelsen is a former managing director at Accenture and board adviser currently based in Seoul.