Lies, Love & Deception

Inside the cutthroat world of international adoption, over six decades, a million “orphans” were shipped to the West from around the world. Now many are finding their past was a fabrication

Anja PedersenScholl, 47, has always known she was adopted. Her East Asian heritage stood out in Copenhagen, where she arrived as a baby. What she didn’t know is that she was smuggled out of South Korea on a dead child’s papers shortly after her birth. Her natural father would spend much of the rest of his life uncertain of her fate.

“While we were looking into your file, we learnt that your adoption paper was written quite differently from the true story,” admitted the Korea Social Service (KSS) in a letter sent to Pedersen-Scholl in 2009. “We understand you’d be very confused with this different information and feel sorry about that.”

Confused indeed. Pedersen-Scholl’s birth name was not Lee Eun Kyung, as she had always been told, and nor was she an orphan when adopted. Her given name at birth was Son Eun Joo but her parents were poor and unmarried, and an uncle took her to the KSS for adoption without her father’s knowledge.

“[My father] didn’t know where I was,” she says. “So every time he approached one of these adoption agencies nobody knew who I was because I was under the assumed identity of the dead girl.”

The orphanage and the false papers were, as she puts it, just a “cover story” to enable the KSS to put her up for adoption internationally.

Pedersen-Scholl’s case is not an isolated one. Some 200,000 South Korean babies were adopted by families in the United States and Europe from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, and about 3500 went to Australia. Many suspect they were put up for adoption under false pretences and there is now a concerted campaign in South Korea for all records from the period to be formally made available and released.