Han Tae-soon's last memory of her six-year-old daughter is from a warm spring day in May 1975. "I was going to the market and asked Kyung-ha, 'Aren't you coming?' But she said, 'No, I'm going to play with my friends'," Ms Han recalled. When she returned home, her daughter was gone.
For more than 40 years, Ms Han searched relentlessly - visiting orphanages, putting up posters, and appearing on television shows. The trauma left her physically and mentally scarred. "I spent 44 years ruining my body and mind looking for her. Has anyone apologised to me? Not once," the 71-year-old told the BBC.
In 2019, a DNA match through a volunteer organisation finally led to a long-awaited reunion. Her daughter, now a nurse in California named Laurie Bender, had been kidnapped as a child, declared an orphan, and illegally adopted abroad, according to allegations in a lawsuit filed by Ms Han against the South Korean government.
Ms Han's case is part of a growing wave of damning revelations about South Korea's decades-long overseas adoption programme - once the world's largest. Since the 1950s, an estimated 170,000 to 200,000 South Korean children were adopted abroad, mostly to Western countries.
A recent government-backed inquiry found that successive administrations committed human rights violations by failing to regulate private adoption agencies, which allegedly falsified documents and trafficked children for profit. One case cited in the 2024 report from South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission described children being flown abroad "like cargo", strapped into airplane seats by the dozen.
Now, Ms Han is the first known biological parent to sue the South Korean government over an overseas adoption. Her case is scheduled to go to court next month. A government spokesperson told the BBC it "deeply sympathises with the emotional pain of families who could not reunite for decades" and expressed "deep regret" over her case, adding that it would take "necessary actions" depending on the trial's outcome.
According to the inquiry, agencies often fabricated adoption records, wrongly declaring children as abandoned, or swapping identities if an adoptee died or was reclaimed by their birth parents - practices aimed at avoiding refunding fees or delaying placements. Some children were allegedly taken without consent; others, like Kyung-ha, were kidnapped.
Kyung-ha was reportedly lured away from her home by a woman who told her that her mother "didn't need her anymore". She was then abandoned at a train station, picked up by police, and placed in an orphanage before being adopted in the US under the name Laurie Bender.
When mother and daughter finally reunited, Ms Han knew instantly. "I've been a hairdresser for 30 years. I touched her hair and I knew."
"I felt guilty," Ms Han said. "She must have searched so much for her mother, and I wasn't there."
While Laurie Bender declined to speak to the BBC, she told the Associated Press earlier that the reunion "healed a hole in her heart."
Experts believe the inquiry's findings could open the door to more legal challenges from adoptees and biological families. Many adoptees, now adults, are demanding access to accurate records and accountability for the abuses they say were inflicted upon them.
"This is a human rights issue," said Han Boon-young, co-founder of an adoptee rights group. "There were kidnappings and falsified documents - these were state-sponsored violations."
One key figure in the scandal, Bu Chung-ha, who chaired South Korea's largest adoption agency Holt International in the 1970s, denied any wrongdoing. He told the BBC that children were not kidnapped, but "abandoned".
Overseas adoptions from South Korea have plummeted in recent years, with only 79 children sent abroad in 2023, according to official figures. But for families like Ms Han's, the scars remain.
"It's like we were erased," she said. "Now I just want the truth - and an apology."
