SEOUL, South Korea, May 27, (AP): A 72-year-old mother has filed a lawsuit against South Korea’s government and its largest adoption agency, alleging systematic failures in her forced separation from her toddler son who was sent to Norway without her consent. Choi Young-ja searched desperately for her son for nearly five decades before their emotional reunion in 2023.

The damage claim by Choi, whose story was part of an Associated Press investigation also documented by Frontline (PBS), comes as South Korea faces growing pressure to address the extensive fraud and abuse that tainted its historic foreign adoption program. In a landmark report in March, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the government bears responsibility for facilitating an aggressive and loosely regulated foreign adoption program that carelessly or unnecessarily separated thousands of children from their families for multiple generations.

It found that the country’s past military governments were driven by efforts to reduce welfare costs and empowered private agencies to speed up adoptions, while turning a blind eye to widespread practices that often manipulated children’s backgrounds and origins, leading to an explosion in adoptions that peaked in the 1970s and 1980s. Children who had living parents, including those who were simply missing or kidnapped, were often falsely documented as abandoned orphans to increase their chances of being adopted in Western countries, which have taken in around 200,000 Korean children over the past seven decades.

Choi’s lawsuit follows a similar case filed in October by another woman in her 70s, Han Tae-soon, who also sued the government and Holt Children’s Services over the adoption of her daughter who was sent to the United States in 1976, months after she was kidnapped at age 4. Choi says her son, who was 3 years old at the time, ran out of their home in Seoul in July 1975 to chase a cloud of insecticide sprayed by a fumigation truck while playing with friends - and never came back.

She and her late husband spent years searching for him, scouring police stations in and around Seoul, and regularly bringing posters with his name and photo to Holt, South Korea’s largest adoption agency. They were repeatedly told there was no information. After decades of searching in vain, Choi made a final effort by submitting her DNA to a police unit that helps reunite adoptees with birth families. In 2023, she discovered through 325Kamra, a volunteer group helping adoptees find birth families using DNA, that her son had been adopted to Norway in December 1975, only five months after he went missing. The adoption had been handled by Holt, the very agency she had visited countless times, under a different name and photograph.