To Save the Children of Korea is the first book about the origins and
history of international adoption. Although it has become a commonplace
practice in the United States, we know very little about how or why it
began, or how or why it developed into the practice that we see today.
Arissa Oh argues that international adoption began in the aftermath of
the Korean War. First established as an emergency measure through which
to evacuate mixed-race "GI babies," it became a mechanism through which
the Korean government exported its unwanted children: the poor, the
disabled, or those lacking Korean fathers. Focusing on the legal,
social, and political systems at work, this book shows how the growth of
Korean adoption from the 1950s to the 1980s occurred within the context
of the neocolonial U.S.-Korea relationship, and was facilitated by
crucial congruencies in American and Korean racial thought, government
policies, and nationalisms. It also argues that the international
adoption industry played an important but unappreciated part in the
so-called Korean "economic miracle."
Korean adoption served as a kind of template as international adoption
began, in the late 1960s, to expand to new sending and receiving
countries. Ultimately, Oh demonstrates that although Korea was not the
first place that Americans adopted from internationally, it was the
place where organized, systematic international adoption was born.
