‘I believed I was an orphan’: Australians caught up in global adoption scandal

Chae Ryan doesn’t know which parts of his adoption story are real, and which are lies.

In 1991, at four months old, he was adopted from South Korea by a Queensland couple. For most of his life, he believed what was written on the birth certificate issued by a South Korean adoption agency. That there were “no records” for his birth parents.

That was false. It has also proven false for a growing community of Australians adopted from South Korea who have discovered they were issued similar birth documents, despite the agency also holding records for their birth parents.

For Chae Ryan, 33, the search for his Korean identity has been a harrowing journey. Credit: Peter Rae

That agency is now embroiled in a global scandal surrounding South Korea’s inter-country adoption program, which sent more than 140,000 babies to 15 countries, including Australia, in the decades after the end of the Korean War. Ryan was one of them.

A landmark South Korean inquiry last week found systemic fraud and malpractice in the program, including the falsification of adoption papers and “mass exportation of children to meet demand” with minimal procedural oversight.

“I had always believed that I was an orphan because the only piece of paper that I had was this birth certificate,” Ryan, 33, says.

Baby photos of Chae Ryan, including one of the few he has of himself before he was adopted from South Korea by a Queensland family. Credit: Peter Rae

Now he also has reason to doubt the accuracy of the birth parents’ records held by the adoption agency.

“You find out all this information [about the birth parents], and have belief and hope, and then you find out that it’s even more complicated to find them with all the falsifications.”

The agency that facilitated Ryan’s adoption was the Seoul-based Eastern Social Welfare Society (ESWS), which is Australia’s partner agency for South Korean adoptions. It has facilitated 3600 adoptions from South Korea since the late 1970s.

The South Korean investigation, which issued preliminary findings last week, has triggered a painful reckoning for some Australian Korean adoptees who are confronting new questions about their identities and embarking on searches for birth families, while also pushing for a federal parliamentary inquiry to determine the scale of the scandal in Australia.

When Ryan began a search for the roots of his identity in 2022, he discovered ESWS not only had the names and basic details of his birth parents, his file also contained two conflicting accounts of how he came to be surrendered for adoption.

One piece of ESWS documentation, called an “initial social history”, recorded that he was born to a single mother who had separated from his father before his birth. She had tried to raise the baby on her own but found it too hard in “needy circumstances”, the document stated. On another file note, Ryan was listed as the child of an affair that occurred while his parents were married to other people and had their own families. His mother’s husband “did not want to keep the baby” and so she put it up for adoption.

“I think the hard part in all of this is there’s the possibility that one of these versions is true, or neither of them are true, but they both can’t be true at the same time,” Ryan says.

His journey has been a harrowing one, made more traumatic by the fact that his childhood in his adoptive family home in Ipswich, in south-east Queensland, was abusive at the hands of his mother.

“At times, I am angry, but mostly I’m deeply depressed by it all, I feel let down, lied to and exploited by the systems and governments that promised to protect me,” he says.

ESWS is one of four adoption major agencies being investigated by the South Korean government-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In a set of preliminary findings last week, the commission confirmed human rights violations in 56 of the 367 complaints lodged by adoptees from 11 countries and recommended an official state apology be given.

The inquiry broadly found that children were falsely documented as orphans when they had known parents, while in other cases authorities failed to secure proper consent from biological parents for adoptions, or adequately screen adoptive parents.

Pippa McPherson, 38, pictured with her son Mackenna, 6, is part of a group of Australian-Korean adoptees pushing for a federal inquiry into the adoption of thousands of babies from South Korea.Credit: Joe Armao

The South Korean government also failed to regulate fees, enabling agencies to solicit additional “donations” from adoptive families that were used to secure more children, effectively transforming a welfare process into a profit-driven industry.

Ryan’s case is one of eight Australian cases still pending before the commission, and it is uncertain whether they will be finalised before the inquiry’s mandate expires in late May.

ESWS did not respond to a written request for comment about the commission’s findings and allegations of fraud and malpractice in its Australian adoption program.

However, the findings provide some validation of the malpractice Ryan and other adoptees have uncovered in their own cases. They also align with revelations of falsified documents by ESWS first exposed by ABC Background Briefing program in 2024. It aired allegations by a former ESWS social worker in the 1970s and 1980s that the agency paid bribes to hospital workers for babies.

Pippa McPherson, 38, who was adopted by a Melbourne family in 1986 and raised in a loving home, only began doubting her adoption story after reading news coverage of the commission’s investigation. The findings have forced her to question the $US200 ($318) donation – more than half the average monthly wage in South Korea at the time – that her parents were required to make to ESWS, on top of a $US1400 adoption fee, to secure her adoption.

“My parents were led to believe the donation would go to help kids in the orphanage. It’s been very hard to digest that this money may have been used to pay off doctors and other officials,” she says.

“There are three victims: the birth parents, the adoptees, and the adoptive parents.”

Victorian court documents show McPherson’s adoption was registered in the state with details of her birth parents listed as “unknown” despite Victorian authorities having records of her social history, provided by ESWS, detailing her birth parents’ biographical details.

Pippa McPherson as a child, with her adopted father. She grew up in a loving household in Melbourne.

The South Korean inquiry has kicked off an information exchange among the Australian adoptee community in online networks and WhatsApp groups. Many of them have discovered that their ESWS social history profiles – a one-page document that also records the reason for adoption – are strikingly similar. This masthead has seen six separate social histories that all paint a portrait of a single mother who discovered she was pregnant after separating from the father, often using near-identical phrasing or keywords.

“It’s just a template,” says McPherson. “And then you start to think: is that really me? Is that my story, or is it not?”

Samara Kim James, an Australian-Korean adoptee and academic who researches transnational adoption, says a federal inquiry is needed to investigate the extent of the issues in Australia’s broader inter-country adoption system.

“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s findings only scratch the surface of what has taken place here in Australia,” James says. “Right now, the burden is falling on adoptees to gather evidence, scrutinise policies, and piece together the truth – while also having to justify our basic human rights.”

The Australian Department of Social Services said it was waiting for the commission’s final report, which is due by May 26.

A DSS spokesperson said ESWS was expected to cease its adoption services by mid-2025, and no further inter-country adoptions would be facilitated between ESWS and Australia.

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