Another Take: The children abandoned by South Korea’s adoption policy
The Take
Al Jazeera
4.7 • 748 Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Every Saturday, we revisit a story from the archives. This originally aired on September 25, 2024. None of the dates, titles, or other references from that time have been changed.
The world's largest diaspora of international adoptees comes from South Korea. Among them are mixed-race children who were forcibly sent for adoption due to the country's racist laws. One Black adoptee's search for a home reflects hard truths about the past of hundreds of thousands of international adoptees.
In this episode:
- Anna Kook (@annakook), AJ+ Reporter
Episode credits:
This episode was updated by Sarí el-Khalili. The original production team was Amy Walters, Sarí el-Khalili, Khaled Soltan, Chloe K. Li, Duha Mosaad, Sonia Bhagat, and our host, Malika Bilal.
Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our engagement producers are Adam Abou-Gad and Vienna Maglio. Aya Elmileik is lead of audience engagement. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer, and Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio.
Connect with us:
@AJEPodcasts on Instagram, X, Facebook, Threads and YouTube
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Al Jazeera Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hi, it's Saril Khalili, a senior producer with the take, back with another take, where we bring you episodes from the past. |
| 0:19.0 | Today, a missing child case from 1975 in Seoul unfolds a much larger |
| 0:25.5 | story about South Korea's international adoption system. Han Teysoon's four-year-old daughter vanished |
| 0:33.4 | nearly 50 years ago. For decades, she had no answers, until a DNA match revealed what happened. |
| 0:42.2 | Her daughter had been kidnapped, falsely listed as an orphan, and adopted to the U.S. under |
| 0:47.9 | the name Laurie Bender. The two recently reunited in California. |
| 1:00.5 | Han is now suing the South Korean government, saying they failed her and so many others. |
| 1:09.9 | During the 70s and 80s, thousands of South Korean children were adopted abroad, many taken without consent. |
| 1:11.3 | Last year, we spoke with AJ Plus reporter Anna Cook about her documentary investigating this very issue. |
| 1:19.3 | She traveled to South Korea with a Dutch adoptee searching for his birth mother, one of thousands |
| 1:25.9 | of cases still hunted by missing records and unanswered |
| 1:30.3 | questions. Here's that episode now, but remember, none of the dates or other references |
| 1:36.9 | have changed from September 25, 2024, when it originally aired. |
| 2:00.7 | Today, falsified adoption records and a hidden legacy of war in South Korea. |
| 2:09.0 | It's the sickest thing that you can do to a person, of course, taking away his family, |
| 2:11.3 | his relatives, his roots. |
| 2:17.4 | What one black adoptee hopes to find, and what that means for hundreds of thousands of other Korean |
| 2:18.3 | adoptees. |
| 2:21.0 | I'm Malika Bilal and this is The Take. |
| 2:28.4 | My name is Anna Cook. I am a field producer with AJ Plus Reports, and I am based in New York |
| 2:38.1 | City, but I was in Korea last year to film two special stories in South Korea. Anna, it's |
... |
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