Manufactured Orphans
The documentary Manufactured Orphans will air on Jan. 31 at 8pm Singapore time. “Nearly 90% of the estimated 143 million children in orphanages worldwide are not orphans at all. They are systematically bought, coerced, and stolen away from their birth families. The adoption industry is a huge market driven by money where orphans are ‘manufactured’. With the help of human …
Being called ‘anti-adoption’?
Back home, I started to question the way babies were obtained for adoption. During the process of researching and writing, I tried to remain as neutral as possible and gave the facilitators the benefit of the doubt (even giving them my trust) over the course of full decade of reflection and study. I truly believed that they were saints and …
Baby Trafficking
When my sister and I were sent to the United States from South Korea in 1972, the pioneering adoption agency gave our adoptive parents a document called “Certificate of Orphanhood”. This piece of paper gave the impression that we were orphans. Because this document implied that we had no Korean family, we wore whole new identities without question and never …
Saving the World’s “Orphans”
In the years leading up to its accession to the EU, Romania was forced to reform its child rights policy. It was one of the many conditions for its future EU membership. From 1999 to 2006, a brave woman called Roelie Post, a public servant at the European Commission, worked tirelessly on the Romanian case files. As her understanding and …
