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Growing up, my D had a friend who was a Korean adoptee adopted by an American couple. Living in New York, her parents decided she should know her heritage and enrolled in a Korean weekend school. The other kids ignored her, refusing to have anything to do with her.
Her parents talked to the director about this, as the little girl was upset by being ignored. They thought it was because they were white. The director told them it was because the other parents assumed their D was illegitimate and this is a major stigma in Korea. Reality was that her bio parents were married. So while in theory the parents were stunned that people would treat a child like this because she was illegitimate, their D should not suffer from a misconception. The director asked if they could prove that her parents had been married. So the next weekend they brought in their wedding cert and the child’s birth record. The director asked if she could share copies with the other parents. They agreed to this. The following weekend, the other kids were willing to talk to and play with their D. She never had a problem after that.
Being illegitimate was a HUGE deal in Korea. Of course it was wrong to misrepresent children whose mothers were living as orphans. I am not disputing that. However, illegitimate kids had dim prospects in Korea. As the article points out, domestic adoption was almost non-existent. Conditions in orphanages were bleak. Your marriage prospects were bleak. (Genealogy plays an important role in Korean marriage and an unknown father is not a small barrier to marriage. You can, of course, marry another illegitimate child, but your offspring will also have a problem.)
So, while I am not condoning what the agencies did, I think most of the kids did live better lives elsewhere than they would have in Korea. That is not true for the small percentage who had married parents who lost their children through subterfuge. But a lot of the unwed mothers who gave up their children did it to give them a better life and it many cases that’s what happened.
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