As international, transracial adoptees in their 30s in the US, Jacquelyn Wells and Lauren White-Gydas have things in common.

They were both born in South Korea to unwed mothers in the 1980s. Both were shipped to the US as newborns to join white families who eagerly welcomed adorable, new daughters. And neither knew many other Asians in the towns where they grew up – Wells in Westford, Massachusetts, and White-Gydas in Salem, Oregon.

But from there, their paths in the US split in dramatic, unpredictable ways.

On a sunny spring day last year, Wells, 39, sat in her cozy home in southern Maine, her babbling, infant son nestled in her lap and wedding photos of her recent marriage to her first-generation Asian American spouse lining the walls. In one, Wells poses in her white gown alongside her beloved adoptive mom, who wears a gold dress, and her Korean birth mother, in a flowing hanbok. They beam, smiles emblematic of more than just the happy occasion.

Wells was reunited with her biological parents, now married, and two full blood brothers during a trip to Seoul in 2018, when she was 31. She met her birth mother first, after reaching out through her adoption agency. “I was so afraid you were going to be so angry with me,” said her birth mother, who voluntarily relinquished Wells during a temporary breakup with Wells’s birth father.

Wells, a singer-songwriter, had a concert booked in the city the next day. Right before she went on stage she got a text: “I’m your brother. I’m on the high speed train, we are coming to your show.” From the stage she saw all four walk in, dressed in black, just like her. She later collaborated on a track with one of her brothers, singing in English as he rapped in Korean. “We became best friends,” she said.

Wells’ experience appears to be the epitome of “reunion porn”: feelgood stories of adoptees meeting birth families, which often go viral when shared online but ignore the complex nature of international, transracial adoption. It is for that reason that Wells, who is co-president of Boston Korean Adoptees, is reluctant to share hers.

“I feel guilty that I won the adoption Lotto,” she said, “because I learned the stories of hundreds of fellow adoptees where the outcomes were nothing of the sort.”

Adoptees like White-Gydas.

White-Gydas also has a photo with adoptive parents on her wedding day, but to her it amounts to sugary frosting, hiding rot. There’s no longed-for baby in White-Gydas’s arms, because in 1999, when she was 10, her American adopters left her in a children’s home for failed adoptions. White-Gydas alleges the home’s director put pressure on her to have a surgery that cut out her womb and ovaries when she was 18, sterilising her.

After decades on separate paths, White-Gydas and Wells’ stories have converged again. In March of 2025, South Korea admitted government responsibility for enabling private adoption agencies to “mass export” Korean children for sale abroad, sometimes without the consent of birth families, since the 1950s. Now, more than 100,000 Korean-born adoptees in the US are asking themselves questions like: “Who am I, really? And how did I get here?”

An international reckoning

The story told in the US of international adoption is often presented as a holy trinity: a woman struggling in a poor country, a newborn in need of a better life, and a western couple with love and resources in abundance. It is familiar to anyone who watched celebrities such as Mia Farrow and Angelina Jolie popularise foreign adoptions. Katherine Heigl, whose older sister was adopted from South Korea, in turn adopted her daughter Naleigh from the same country in 2009. “It is this gorgeous girl … born of a young woman who could not raise her but could give her the gift of life … that made me a mother,” Heigl posted on Naleigh’s 11th birthday.

Last March, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) convened by the South Korean government acknowledged the underhanded role South Korea played in delivering newborns to western couples’ doors.

It began in 1955, when evangelical Oregon couple Bertha and Harry Holt were “led by God” to “save” thousands of mixed-race babies fathered by GIs during the Korean war and left on the streets in economically devastated, conservative South Korea. They adopted eight themselves and set up an adoption agency, Holt Children’s Services, to help other Americans do the same. Arissa Oh, a historian of Asian American immigration at Boston College, said a combination of Red Scare-era thinking, an inclination for white saviourism, and promotion by churches drove customers to the agency’s services. “People who had little interest in adopting brown babies in America went abroad to ‘rescue orphans’ from communism,” Oh said.

The original Korean war babies ran out by around the 1960s. But “orphan fever” had already spread across the US and Europe, where women’s increasing access to welfare, contraception and abortion would lead to shortages of infants to adopt domestically. “That’s when market mechanisms come in,” said Oh, who authored the book To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption. With the Korean government’s blessing, “competing agencies sprang up to keep the pipeline going”.

According to Oh, the surge in adoptions became a source of wealth, welfare savings and soft power for Korea, now the world’s 15th largest economy. Its blueprint was replicated by Russia, China, Guatemala and Ethiopia, among many, all claiming to struggle with rehoming children domestically due to poverty, medical needs or policies like China’s one-child rule. US politicians – including President Dwight Eisenhower, who the Holts lobbied in the 1950s; Senator John McCain, who adopted from a Bangladesh orphanage in 1993; and Hillary Clinton, who in 2012 called international adoption “an important matter of foreign policy” – have also championed the framework. International adoption to the US peaked in 2004, when 23,000 children landed on American soil. Adopters today pay an estimated $30,000 to $60,000 per foreign child.

Then in December, on the heels of the TRC, South Korea announced international adoption of its children will end by 2029. That means in three years’ time, many of the world’s most prolific “sending countries” will be closed for business: Romania, Guatemala, Nepal, Ethiopia and China have already banned or limited foreign adoptions amid accusations of trafficking children via international adoption.

Months before the announcement, Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, offered a “heartfelt apology” to adoptees and birth parents for the government’s complicity in allowing agencies to dismantle generations of Korean families so white people could make new ones in the west.

According to the TRC, which took three years to consider evidence from 367 adoptions to 11 countries between 1964 and 1999, young, mostly unmarried Korean mothers felt pressure to give up babies due to stigma and poverty. It confirmed fraudulent practices in 56 cases in which children were adopted without valid parental consent or with falsified records claiming they were orphans even if they had living relatives; the cases were handled by multiple adoption agencies, including the one set up by the Holts. Reporting in 2024 by AP/PBS Frontline went further, alleging children were kidnapped off the street and from hospitals to be adopted.

Susan Soonkeum Cox, vice-president of policy and external affairs at Holt International, which split from Holt Children’s Services (South Korea) in the 1970s, acknowledged that some children were improperly separated from their families by Holt and sent on fraudulent documents, but told the Guardian there was “not evil intent” and denied that children were “trafficked”.

She said: “Holt is very concerned about [the Guardian’s reporting] and takes it very seriously. Holt feels strongly that every adoptee has the right to their own story and experience and how they interpret it belongs to them. Anyone who has come forward with experiences that were negative we respect that and we frankly are deeply saddened by it.”

Cox, a Korean-born adoptee to the US in 1956, continued: “Holt has been very determined to provide ethical, professional services. Were mistakes made in the beginning? Of course they were, but we were a very strong proponent of The Hague Convention [on Intercountry Adoption, established in 1993] because there had to be global standards.” Holt Children’s Services (South Korea) did not respond to a request for comment.

The revelations caused a wave of mass awareness among Korean-born adoptees in the US.

Katie Bozek, 45, a Korean-born adoptee and couples therapist in Grand Rapids, Michigan, said “waking up” to the dark reality of Korea’s adoption industry felt like being deprogrammed, or entering a multiverse like in the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once and becoming aware of infinite parallel lives she might have led.

“Thousands of adoptees are popping their heads out of the water, seeing [allegations such as] ‘kidnapping’, ‘trafficked’, and going, ‘where am I?’” Bozek said. “I don’t know how to explain to people that phrases like ‘I just found out my friend was kidnapped,’ ‘I may have been stolen’ or ‘my file is a lie’ are not extreme hypotheticals.”

Bozek’s adoption file claimed she was found near a police station in Korea in 1981. In 1982, she was adopted by a white Michigan family whom she loved. But outside the home, she endured painful, racist bullying, and yearned to be blond.

International adoptees are frequently the only person of color in mostly white families. On the advice of agencies to “not see race”, some families were unprepared to help adopted children deal with intrusive questions like: “where did they get you?” or “why didn’t your real parents want you?” In decades past, white adopters were more likely to downplay racist comments or ignore adoptees’ racial or ethnic backgrounds, leading to incidental promotion of whiteness as “normal” or “better”. Some Asian adoptees reported feeling isolated among Asian people too, who can perceive them as “too white to be Asian and too Asian to be white” – a double rejection.

Growing up, Bozek had few Korean role models to teach her about her birth culture. “It was hard because the dominant adoption narrative says: ‘You went to the best country in the world! You should be grateful we saved you,’” she said. “But I [feel an] ambiguous loss of something … When I’m in Korea I can sense it, I can smell it, I can taste it.”

Bozek started searching for her biological parents aged just 13. While she hasn’t yet found them, in 2019 and 2021 she discovered two first cousins through 23andMe’s DNA testing. They are also US adoptees, and half siblings. It sparked more uncomfortable questions: were agencies plucking multiple children off the streets at the same time?

In 2018 Bozek became the executive director of Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network (KAAN) – the first leader who is an adoptee, not an adopter. Since the initial TRC bombshell, KAAN has welcomed new members seeking support as they process complex feelings of anger, guilt and loss.

Thousands of adoptees, some of whom are in their 60s and 70s, await their turn to be heard by the TRC. In the meantime, many are trying to track down adoption paperwork in Korea. Despite widespread fraud, these files still contain scraps of evidence, making them holy grails to adoptees hoping to piece together clues about their origins, reclaim lost identity, and find family.

US adoptee Oh Myo Kim, 46, a psychologist in Brookline, Massachusetts, who specializes in adoption, was in Seoul on a Fulbright scholarship when the TRC’s report was announced and felt its full force hit the adoptee community. “Just off the top of my head, I know four Korean adoptees who found out they were stolen,” she said.

The mother of two, adopted by a white family in New Jersey in 1981, became an accidental activist when she co-founded Emergency Action for Records Storage (EARS) with other adoptees, after plans were revealed for the Korean government to centralise adoptee files in inadequate storage, possibly delaying access for years and damaging or destroying fragile paperwork. In between school runs and work at Boston College, Kim uses vacation days to fly 7,000 miles to lobby a foreign government to better care for the documents – and identities – of thousands of strangers, in a language she still speaks “like a child”, she joked.

But adoptees are also searching for something files can’t always provide: a sense of belonging. “I feel like adoptees chase fiction. They chase ghosts,” Kim said. “On my paperwork it says my parents were married and gave me up as I was their fourth daughter, but there are no parental signatures. Do I have sisters?”

While the TRC surprised many adoptees, activists had sounded alarms since the 1970s, when the first adult adoptees from Korea found birth families and learned the truth of their adoptions. But the advent of commercial DNA genetic testing in the 2010s was the gamechanger, facilitating more reunions – as well as lawsuits against the Korean government from two birth mothers. One, Han Tae-soon, claimed her four-year-old daughter, Kyung-Ha, went missing while playing outside in 1975. Mother and daughter were reunited in 2019 after Tae-soon signed up to Korean DNA database 325Kamra and matched with Kyung-Ha, now Laurie Bender, a middle-aged nurse in California.

Bender only took the test because her US-born daughter was interested in their mysterious Korean roots. To her shock, Bender discovered Han had been walking the streets for 44 years, looking for her, until all 10 toenails fell off. “It’s like you’ve been living a fake life,” Bender told AP.

Han Tae-soon is suing the Korean government for $445,000, for failing to prevent Bender’s adoption through a children’s home that said she was an orphan despite a missing persons report filed with local police by her mother. A government spokesperson told the BBC in 2025 that it “deeply sympathises with the emotional pain of individuals and families who could not find each other for a long time” and would act based on the trial’s outcome.

The aftermath of adoption

While adoption agencies sold the dream of a better life, that wasn’t what awaited everyone.

Lauren White-Gydas, 37, was born in Korea in 1989 and at five months was adopted through Holt Korea by a white couple from Salem, Oregon. Problems started early. White-Gydas felt she wasn’t the “girly Asian” her adoptive mother desired. “I was a very explosive, angry child,” she said. Her therapist believes she was suffering from relinquishment trauma, a term increasingly used to describe anxiety, dysregulation, anger and depression experienced by many adoptees after separation from biological mothers.

“There was a lot of physical and emotional abuse, constantly screaming at me. I screamed back. They were not prepared for how much trauma I had,” White-Gydas said. “By the time I was seven I was completely stripped of everything. I was not allowed to have friends or go out or leave my room apart from school.” She has some happy memories of playing with her adoptive father but felt she had to earn her adoptive mother’s love.

In 1999, just after her 10th birthday, the couple put White-Gydas on a plane to Hope House in Nampa, Idaho, eventually terminating parental rights. “Being possibly abandoned by my biological parents and then abandoned by my adoptive parents pretty much told me … there’s something wrong with me,” White-Gydas said.

Hope House was opened in 1976 by Donna Velvick-Lowry, now in her 80s, as a Christian home and school for children from disrupted US and international adoptions, many of whom had severe mental health issues and were labeled as “incorrigible”. At Hope House, White-Gydas joined abandoned adoptees from Russia, Romania, Ukraine, Haiti, Mongolia, Brazil and China. She claims that during her time there, some staff were physically abusive, “slamming” children to the ground, locking them in solitary, and keeping them “doped up” by a visiting psychiatrist. By age 12, White-Gydas claims she was prescribed, among many medications, birth control to suppress her cycles. Her weight ballooned to 200lbs (90kg), medical records showed, and she developed type 2 diabetes.

White-Gydas said Velvick-Lowry wanted her to stay at Hope House beyond the age of 18 as her adopted daughter, and she felt like Velvick-Lowry belittled her to make her feel like an eternal child.

White-Gydas experienced painful periods and intense mood swings, and from age 12 claims that Velvick-Lowry started to “pressure” her into a hysterectomy, taking her to doctors by age 16: “She said if I didn’t, my hormones would make it so I ended up in jail.” After White-Gydas turned 18, in 2008, she alleges that Velvick-Lowry and the visiting psychiatrist put pressure on her to sign paperwork consenting to the procedure.

The OBGYN who performed the surgery noted on her intake paperwork that the psychiatrist, whose name appears on the surgery referral, diagnosed White-Gydas with “severe premenstrual disorder with anger and violent behavior”. The paperwork says White-Gydas was “absolutely certain that she does not desire any children”. White-Gydas was on Seroquel, the paperwork also notes, an antipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia that sedates patients and causes drowsiness.

Medical notes confirm White-Gydas underwent a total hysterectomy in February 2008, with bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (removal of fallopian tubes and ovaries), plunging her into menopause at 18 years and five months. “As they wheeled me in, it was the only time Donna wasn’t there,” White-Gydas said. “I told the nurse: ‘I don’t want to do this.’ She looked sad and said: ‘Sorry.’”

White-Gydas added: “Donna knew the one thing I wanted was a family who loved me, and she took that from me.”

Five adults who lived at Hope House as children in the 1990s and 2000s alongside White-Gydas told the Guardian allegations of physical and emotional abuse by Velvick-Lowry and other ex-staff, as well as being given medication that made them feel like “zombies”. Two former Hope House staff, who began working there after White-Gydas’s operation, stated that knowledge of her hysterectomy was “widespread” among staff and students but did not have personal knowledge as to whether she was pressured to have the procedure. The former Hope House residents and staff requested anonymity to protect their privacy.

Cleve Cushing, chair of Hope House’s board of directors, said in a written statement to the Guardian that for 50 years the organization had provided a home for children in need and given them “love and care, a quality education, and a real opportunity to succeed”.

He said: “Hope House takes any concern about the welfare of a child extremely seriously. We are, however, bound by state and federal confidentiality obligations and by our duty to protect the privacy of the children and families we have served. For that reason, we do not discuss any current or former resident or the details of their care. Anyone with a concern about the care of a child at Hope House, past or present, is encouraged to contact the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare or law enforcement.”

Cushing added the nonprofit is subject to Idaho’s licensing standards and oversight and would cooperate with any official review.

Velvick-Lowry no longer operates Hope House, now located in Marsing, but is understood to be living on the property, according to former staffers and students. She confirmed to the Guardian that she had been Gydas-White’s legal guardian, but declined to answer questions about alleged abuse or sterilisation. She said she was consulting a lawyer but did not provide their contact information.

She told the Guardian: “I remember loving [Gydas-White] very much and offering her a full time position after she left.”

White-Gydas left Hope House at age 22, moved to Montana, and started trauma therapy after being diagnosed with complex PTSD. She invited her former adopters to her 2014 wedding, hoping to salvage the only parental relationship she remembered, but it broke down again over their refusal to accept how damaged she was by their actions. She now works with disabled adults and co-owns an animal rescue, but still struggles with her infertility.

“We’re supposed to be grateful we got this ‘better life’ in America,” White-Gydas said. “A lot of us didn’t have a better life.”

Transracial, international adoption in the US is rife with issues that, until the last decade, were underdiscussed and underreported. Generations of children were funnelled for profit into largely white families ill-equipped to support minority kids, oftentimes in monoracial, segregated or racist communities. Even in loving placements, many adoptees had increased likelihood of attachment issues, depression and rage. Some were overmedicated, abused, or illegally “rehomed”.

A recent AP investigation found that, due in part to overdiagnosis of a rare condition called reactive attachment disorder (RAD), adoptees of all backgrounds account for an estimated 25-40% of institutionalised US children even though they are a tiny minority of total children (just 2%). A 2026 report by Winston-Salem State University found that adoptees were 35 times more likely than non-adoptees to attempt suicide.

Issues sometimes follow them into adulthood – and new ones arise. An estimated 35,000 US adoptees lack citizenship, more than half of them Korean-born. Minnesota lawyer and founder of the pro-bono group Adoptee Rights Law Center Gregory Luce says a vast majority of Korean adoptees arrived on visas requiring US adopters to apply for citizenship on their behalf. Some didn’t, which adoptees do not realise until applying for passports or college, or even until retirement. “Some [Korean] adoptees were essentially smuggled into the country,” said Luce, who is a domestic adoptee.

In 2016, US adoptee Adam Crapser was deported to South Korea after a green-card application uncovered old criminal charges, separating him from his children. He became the first Korean adoptee to sue the Korean government and Holt International for not telling his adopters to apply for his citizenship. Crapser won $68,600 in damages in 2023 when the Seoul high court dismissed accusations against the government yet found Holt responsible, but the result was thrown out on appeal. Holt and the government successfully cited a 1976 law that sped up foreign adoptions in part by absolving agencies of responsibilities such as ensuring citizenship for adoptees abroad. Crapser now lives in Mexico.

In September 2025, the Protect Adoptees and American Families Act (PAAF), intended to close citizenship gaps through which adoptees fall, reached US House committee stage; it is at least the sixth attempt since 2015. In light of surging immigration arrests at US airports, international adoptees and groups including Luce’s are urging each other not to fly, even domestically, without a US passport.

Some “receiving countries” are reexamining international adoption. Denmark and the Netherlands – facing scandals over fraudulent adoption paperwork and government complicity in trafficking adoptees – have made moves to end participation in the industry. The UK keeps an updated list of adoption restrictions on sending countries facing allegations of trafficking and fraud.

There have been no such developments in the US, where the likelihood of a ban remains low, Luce said. Despite international adoption to the US plummeting 94% since 2004 and some adopters publicly expressing regret for the role they played in funding its continuation, it is simply too popular.

US families get a $17,000 federal tax break per international or domestic adoptee, and positive international adoption stories permeate social media (as with “reunion porn”) and pop culture (Grey’s Anatomy, Modern Family, Sex and the City and Sesame Street have featured transracial, international adoption). Kim, of EARS, remembers people in the 80s telling her white adoptive mother, “God bless you,” as if she were a saint for adopting Kim. “Adoption as this force for good is very strong in American culture,” she said.

Even politicians who support PAAF, like senator Amy Klobuchar and representative Adam Smith, are “super pro-adoption”, Luce said. “If you criticize adoption as a politician, you’re seen as way outside the norm.”

But two recent legal cases have signalled to adoptees an increasing awareness in the US of the dark side of a system that promised them more.

In one, a Chinese-born adoptee was awarded $30m in damages by a New Hampshire judge in 2024, after her adopted parents pleaded guilty to criminal charges for keeping her tied up in their basement until she escaped in 2018, at age 15.

And just this summer, ex-Kentucky governor Matt Bevin and his ex-wife, Glenna Bevin, were accused of abuse and neglect by their Ethiopian-born adopted son Jonah Bevin, who described being used as a “political puppet” for campaigns and claimed he was sent away to abusive facilities in the US and Jamaica. Matt described Jonah’s claims as “false”, and Glenna testified that Jonah was “aggressive” toward his siblings as a teen. The case is playing out in state family court, with Jonah seeking retroactive child support payments.

A living grief

South Korea’s TRC relaunched in February, inheriting 2,100 unresolved complaints from the last commission while accepting hundreds of new submissions from adoptees, and, for the first time, birth parents. They include Lee Aeri Rana, whose daughter, Park Mi-ae, was stolen at birth from a hospital in 1993 and sent on allegedly fraudulent documents to the US. Homeless and estranged from her adoptive family, Park died by suicide in 2023 at age 30, the day after legally restoring her Korean surname. “This is a death produced by illegal adoption,” said her grieving mother, who had been told her daughter died as a newborn.

Some activists have called for reparations from the Korean government including restored citizenship, and compensation for travel to South Korea and family searches. But as many adoptees will tell you, you cannot relive a life you lost.

“It’s very draining, the feeling that I don’t know who I am,” White-Gydas said about trying to digest the TRC’s initial findings. “Growing up whenever I saw another Asian person I wanted to ask them where they were from, because I knew so little. I wouldn’t even consider myself Korean.” The one sliver she has held on to is the name in her file: Jung Hee June.

So many questions remain unanswered: “I have done DNA tests and found nothing. I don’t know whether I truly was given up or I was stolen. Do I have a mom in Korea who loved me? How did I get here?”

Wells didn’t escape unscathed either. For years she suffered crushing depression misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder when she was 13, leading to unnecessary medication that caused suicidal thoughts. She met her Korean family, but only after 10 years of her birth mother declining to meet or tell her birth father and brothers about her.

Wells, now pregnant with her second child, was not a stolen baby. It does not lessen how adoption affected her, her birth family and her children, another generation removed from Korea. “I feel truly lucky because of the rare hand I was dealt, but I had to fight like hell for my life,” she said.

Some adoptees are reframing the US’s endorsement of international adoption as part of its long legacy of forced family separation.

“Adoption is an amazing analytic … to look at settler colonialism, white supremacy [and] anti-Black violence,” said Dr Kimberly McKee, a Korean adoptee and critical adoption scholar at Grand Valley State University, Michigan. Her Instagram handle is proudly “@adopteekilljoy”.

Academics like McKee argue that the international slave trade, which split up African families for sale to white people, laid the framework for state-sanctioned separation that disproportionately affects Black and brown US families today. In the 19th and into the 20th century, thousands of Native American children were sent to Indian boarding schools, sterilised, or forcibly adopted by white families. Likewise, McKee says international adoption is “a violent institution” that continues this pattern.

McKee married another Korean adoptee, reunited with her birth family in 2013 and has taken her son to celebrate Chuseok, a major Korean holiday, with them. She told the adoptee activist Haley Radke on the Adoptees On podcast that eating with her appa, or father, felt like a “glimmer” of the life she might have led. But being unable to communicate with this genetic stranger left her feeling a “living grief” – or han, a Korean word for sorrow and rage, resulting from injustice.

“I can order food … get directions … [but] I can’t have that sustained deep conversation,” McKee said. “Even though I am in reunion … there is a grief there and it’s palpable.”

The historian Oh saw a type of han walk into her classrooms at Boston College, as adoptee descendants took her course on adoption, looking for their own answers about why their line was cut, and who wielded the knife. She wonders if one day people will talk about international adoption the way they talk about slavery: “a historical phenomena, with a beginning and an end, thought to be firmly in the past”.