The recent announcement by the Communist Chinese government that it would cease all adoptions of Chinese children by foreign nationals (except for step-parent adoptions) has thrown a spotlight on the subject of international adoption. And while China was always a frequent and reliable “exporter” of adoptable (female) infants, thanks to its now-abandoned one-child policy (which they have magnanimously replaced with a “two-child” policy), no other country in the world has been the source of more foreign-born children adopted into Western nations than South Korea.

According to the recent Frontline documentary, South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning, “There are about 200,000 people around the world who were adopted out of South Korea ... [m]ore than half of [whom] ended up in the United States.” The documentary acknowledges the adoption of Korean children by couples/families in other countries (specifically France, Norway, and Sweden), but the adoptees whose stories are told in the greatest detail are all American.

After introducing us to Choi Young-ja, a Korean woman who has been looking for the son she lost 48 years earlier, the documentary begins in what seems like a predictable way, with the story of a woman who is encouraged by her adoptive mother to look for her Korean roots.

Alice Stevens had been adopted into an American family in Philadelphia, the youngest of her parents’ four children, and the only one who was adopted. Because she knew nothing about her Korean birth mother—she had only ever been told that she had been found abandoned as an infant—the idea of looking for anyone in Korea to whom she might be biologically related seemed an impossible task.

But Stevens was, in one way, fortunate, in that she was one of the thousands of mixed-race children who were fathered by American servicemen in the decades following the end of the Korean war, thus enabling her to identify a cousin of her American birth father through a commercially available DNA test. Unfortunately, however, her father had already passed away; but members of his surviving family were able to provide Stevens with the information necessary for her to begin looking for her birth mother in Korea, including, among other things, a photograph of her birth mother, dressed in a traditional Korean hanbok, standing next to her father, clad in his U.S. Army uniform.

According to Stevens, “It took me a long time to understand just what she did here in Korea, that she ... was a military prostitute. He kept her in a home that was quite near the base. They were in a common-law marriage. His family told me that he loved her. He left Korea when my mother was six months pregnant. So he knew that she was gonna have his baby. Since my father wasn’t Korean, I would not have been recognized by Korean society as a Korean. She knew that life here would not have been good for me, and so, she gave me up.” Sadly, like so many adoptees’ efforts to find their lost family, Stevens’ search came to a dead end.

The documentary then turns to its main thesis, i.e., the shady, immoral, and often illegal things the various players—adoption agencies and government officials especially—did in order to facilitate, and even intentionally expand, the international market for the adoption of Korean babies and children, including the falsification of records, and even the outright theft of children from their parents. For their part, Korean officials promoted foreign adoptions in order save money, as well as to maintain cultural purity, while the U.S., in 1961, expanded the definition of an orphan eligible for adoption by U.S. citizens to include children who had been “abandoned,” without providing a precise definition. This gave Korean officials an unconscionable amount of wiggle room when it came to labeling a child as “abandoned” in order to make it almost instantly available to be adopted.

The “reckoning” of the title takes the form of a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission [that] is now investigating hundreds of cases of possible human rights violations associated with past [Korean] governments’ handling of foreign adoptions.” Among the many irregularities revealed by the investigation were cases of children being adopted with documentation belonging to another child altogether, as well as the placement of “adoptable” children who were found through “a process that amounted to baby hunting”: “adoption workers [toured] poor neighborhoods looking for financially struggling parents who could be persuaded to give away their babies,” as well as in “hospitals and maternity homes and other birth venues.”

The documentary ends happily, where it began, with Choi Young-ja’s reunion with her long-lost son, whom she finally found via DNA testing following a cancer diagnosis.

Originally broadcast in late September, the documentary can be viewed on Frontline’s YouTube channel, or on the various PBS television station websites.