Abstract
This article examines several key aspects of maternity homes for ‘unwed mothers’ in order to understand the overwhelming phenomenon of single mothers giving up their babies for adoption in South Korea and its naturalization as a common practice. Drawing upon Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, this article recasts maternity homes as an institution of biopolitical welfare and highlights two features of social governance that the maternity home extends over the population of single mothers and their children. First, I argue that this unique, non-governmental social service agency functions as a hub of biopolitical technologies, where multiple social, legal, economic, and political forces work in concert to curb single motherhood through the promotion of adoption via (1) containment, (2) classification, and (3) circulation. Second, attending to the intricate dynamics of maternity home practices, this article observes the ways in which a single mother relinquishes her motherhood via adoption and, in so doing, becomes a birthmother, a self-regulating and self-governable subject.
Since the mid 1950s, transnational adoption from South Korea has sent more than 180,000 children overseas to homes in North America and Europe. More than 120,000 of these children were children of single mothers. Single mothers are referred to as mihonmo, 1 which literally means ‘not-yet-married mothers’. Due to the high rate at which children of mihonmo are sent away for adoption in South Korea, the term has become synonymous with birthmother (a mother who has given up her child). The conflation of these two categories in common parlance, however, misrepresents the population of South Korean birthmothers as being comprised entirely of single mothers. 2 Even more importantly, this conflation introduces the expectation that a single mother should relinquish her baby for adoption.
To examine this phenomenon that has naturalized the transformation of single mothers into birthmothers, I analyze a critical historical period in which children of single mothers increasingly accounted for those sent abroad in transnational adoption. This period is the years between the 1980s and the mid 2000s, 3 during which single mothers became the most common origin of children sent abroad, increasing from 36.5 percent in the 1970s to 92 percent in 2005 (Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs, 2009). Children of single mothers now make up the vast majority of all transnationally adopted South Korean children. This rising trend persisted until 2007, when a series of significant changes – an increase in domestic adoption and a parallel decline in transnational adoption, the abolition of a patriarchal family law (hojuje), a shift in government policy from population control to pronatalism, and a revision of adoption legislation – took place. A critical examination of this historical period can shed light on how social governance has used adoption to regulate single mothers in South Korea over time.
Recent adoption scholarship has examined how South Korea’s practice of transnational adoption has long functioned as biopolitical technology, which is a technology of regulating and managing various perceived population crises (Cherot, 2008; Hubinette, 2005; E. Kim, 2010; J. Kim, 2009; Pate, 2010; Kim and Cho, 2012; Yngvesson, 2010). Drawing upon Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, Tobias Hubinette (2005) and Eleana Kim (2010) identify state racism as an organizing principle of this practice: transnational adoption is intended to drive out ‘impure’ and ‘disposable’ children (e.g. mixed race, disabled, or illegitimate children) from South Korea. The removal of those children via adoption has a collateral effect of regulating working-class, single mothers’ reproduction. Barbara Yngvesson puts it thus: ‘Transnational adoption is likewise a dimension of biopolitics, in which … certain adults are entitled to become parents and raise children while others are discouraged or prohibited from doing so’ (2010: 196, italics added). Yngvesson’s keen insight into the inequality that underlies transnational adoption sets the stage for a critical inquiry into the unwed mother’s ‘choice’ to relinquish her baby for adoption.
Among the various institutions that facilitate single mothers’ adoption choices, I privilege maternity homes 4 as a principal site of population management. Since the 1980s, the maternity home has developed into a key social welfare institution for single mothers. During the 1980s and up to the mid 2000s, the number of maternity homes grew from 3 to 18 facilities. Alongside this growth, the number of residents served rose from several hundred to more than 2500 annually. This increased number of residents constitutes 31 to 43 percent of all births outside marriage in South Korea (Lee, 2010). Despite the various kinds of practical and emotional support and services that maternity homes provide for single mothers, a great majority of maternity home residents, as many as 70–95 percent, choose to give their newborns for adoption 5 (Huh, 1993; Lee, 2010). A crude estimate of the proportion of children relinquished at and transferred from maternity homes to adoption placement indicates that such children constituted up to 40 percent of all adopted children in 2005. This high relinquishment rate demands a critical analysis of the regulatory functions that maternity homes have undertaken over the past 30 years.
In this light, this article, as part of my larger project on Korean birthmothers in transnational adoption, examines the maternity home as a hub where various techniques of social governance have merged to curb single motherhood and therefore regulate the population of single mothers and their babies via transnational adoption. In order to tease out maternity homes’ administrative and discursive technologies that initiate, mediate, and secure the unwed mother’s decision to select adoption for her baby, I employ multiple modalities of exploration. I primarily draw upon in-depth interviews that I conducted in 2011 with birthmothers and a single mother (whose names have been altered here to preserve anonymity), as well as interviews with two counselors and three maternity home directors that were conducted during three site visits that took place over 10 years. In addition, I engage in archival research; secondary analysis of existing Korean literature, including government reports on birthmothers, content analysis of maternity homes’ websites, as well as discourse analysis of collections of letters written by birthmothers.
This article explores the ways in which maternity homes function as conduits for and corollaries of systematic regulation of the population by asking the following two questions: (1) In what ways has the maternity home operated in tandem with various social institutions thus constituting a biopolitical apparatus of security over the population of single mothers and their children by promoting adoption for single mothers? And (2) through what processes has the maternity home produced both the figure of the single mother, a subject who is depicted as unworthy of motherhood, and the figure of the birthmother, who self-regulates and self-controls her ‘illegitimate’ reproduction via the ‘rational’ decision to give up her child for adoption? By addressing these two questions, I hope to illuminate the various constitutive forces of this welfare agency in its regulatory role of containment, classification, and circulation of populations. Alongside this regulatory role, maternity homes articulate a subjectification of the birthmother in the form of pre-natal alienation before the baby’s birth, which leads to her embodying a virtual existence afterwards. This article therefore offers a nuanced and complex analysis of the processes involved in transnational adoption, which is, as Tobias Hubinette astutely observes, ‘one of the most successful self-regulating and self-disciplining biopolitical technologies of social control’ (2005: 64, italics added) over the population of single mothers and their children from South Korea.
South Korea’s Adoption History and Maternity Homes (1980s–mid 2000s)
The practice of transnational adoption from South Korea can be traced back to the Korean War (1950–3). 6 The war left the country with unprecedented civilian casualties, including more than 100,000 war orphans. In response to this orphan crisis, military personnel, missionaries, and subsequently Christian citizens mostly from the United States set up orphanages and various aid programs, thereby laying the groundwork for what has become the world’s most extensive transnational adoption infrastructure and the origin of the world’s largest transnational adoptee community.
The 1980s marked a significant period in South Korea’s transnational adoption history and its increasing association with single motherhood. As of the 1980s, transnational adoption developed into a full-fledged surrogate child welfare institution. Following the exponential growth rate of the previous decade, the number of children sent overseas continued to grow substantially, peaking at over 8800 children in 1985. 7 The majority of these children were born of single mothers, in contrast to previous decades where birthmothers were largely poor, working-class married women and widows. Annual adoption statistics worldwide reveal that the number of Korea-born children exceeds 20–30 percent of all children adopted transnationally (Kane, 1993; Sarri et al., 1998). Despite this prolific participation in transnational adoption, South Korea’s role in transnational adoption garnered little attention for 30 years, either from its own nationals or from the international community.
The practice came to be scrutinized when South Korea was preparing for the 1988 Olympics. In the lead-up to the Olympics, western media criticized South Korea’s practice of transnational adoption as a baby export business (Chira, 1988; Maass, 1988; Rothschild, 1988). In the face of such criticism, the Korean government intervened and sought to reduce the number of children sent overseas. 8 Transnational adoption has since become a controversial social issue in which single mothers are often blamed for failing to meet standards of sexual propriety. The population of mihonmo has been identified as being culpable for this ‘national shame’.
Over the following two decades, the South Korean government continued to engage in various programs aimed at decreasing the number of children available for transnational adoption. Its major efforts were concentrated on increasing domestic adoption while eschewing a social policy to support single mothers and their children. The government imposed a quota system on adoption agencies so as to ensure their prioritization of domestic adoption placement. In addition, it launched a campaign to promote domestic adoption by offering incentives to its citizens, such as tax benefits, healthcare benefits, and government subsidies. In turn, the number of children placed in transnational adoption dropped significantly. And yet, the share of single mothers in transnational adoption practice increased even more.
What systematic forces are behind this phenomenon of the majority of single mothers giving up their babies for adoption? One factor is the robust, normative family ideology rooted in the traditional patriarchal family structure. Despite changing social attitudes toward premarital sex, the traditional patriarchal ideology upholds a double standard and social stigma against single mothers. One of the most salient examples of this is hojuje, the patrilineal family registration system in which a single mother was identified not as a mother but as a cohabitant with her child, until its abolition in 2008. 9 This legal (mis)recognition of family perpetuated the stigma that exists against the child of a single mother, who is affected by this in almost all aspects of his or her life, including economic opportunities and marriage prospects.
Another factor is South Korea’s particular geopolitical conditions of unending war and the ensuing crisis mentality, compounded by precarious economic prospects following the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Under successive repressive military regimes, the South Korean government consistently maintained an inadequate social welfare policy in the name of national economic security. Even in the late 1990s, when the South Korean government slowly expanded the scope of their social welfare services, the welfare budget for women remained a negligible figure, 3–4 percent, compared with 30 percent for the elderly and 20 percent for the disabled out of South Korea’s slim social spending, well below the average of countries with comparable economic standing (Kim, 2004).
In conjunction with the hostile cultural, legal, and economic environment with regard to ‘illegitimacy’, abortion was effectively the most common self-regulatory measure until recently, when the laws against abortion were strengthened. 10 As Eunshil Kim (1991) points out, the South Korean government did not enforce anti-abortion laws, despite its illegality, and thus indirectly utilized abortion as a self-regulating mechanism over the population of single mothers. According to a report in 2005, over 95 percent of the 150,467 ‘out-of-wedlock’ pregnancies led to termination (Lee, 2010). South Korea’s non-marital birthrate remains one of the lowest among countries with comparable economic standing, ranging from 0.6 to 1.6 percent of all live births.
In response to the high abortion rate and the prevalence of child abandonment, Korean maternity homes were established. These maternity homes had as their goals the mission of salvation and to save life according to Christian ethics. 11 The first maternity home, Duri Home, 12 founded in 1926 by the Salvation Army, initially offered shelter to homeless women and prostitutes and in 1966 expanded its services to include single, pregnant women. The second maternity home – Ae Ran Won – was built in 1960, established by a US Presbyterian missionary. Ae Ran Won began offering services for single pregnant women in 1971. The third maternity home – The House of Mary – was founded by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic organization, in 1979.
Over the next two decades, the number of maternity homes increased substantially. This growth can be directly attributed to the establishment of maternity homes by adoption agencies. 13 As of the mid 2000s, 10 – or more than half of all maternity homes in South Korea – were run by three adoption agencies, the Holt International Children’s Service (HOLT), the Social Welfare Society (SWS), and the Eastern Social Welfare Society (ESWS). These three adoption agencies were also founded by devout Christians who supported the welfare of single mothers based on Christian ethics and who believed adoption to be an expression of God’s love and part of a Christian’s duty for salvation.
Maternity homes, whether established as a charitable organization or as a part of an adoption agency, have long maintained proximate working relations with adoption agencies. Grounded in a 1976 revision to the adoption law, adoption agencies were mandated to take financial responsibility for orphanages and other welfare institutions in order to continue the practice of overseas adoption. The government mandate of having adoption agencies subsidize welfare costs created an environment in which maternity home services developed in alignment with the interests of adoption agencies. For instance, in 1982, the Daily Economics reported that Ae Ran Won offered services to single, pregnant women who agreed in advance to give up their unborn children to an adoption agency (Seung, 1982). In return, Ae Ran Won and many similar maternity homes have received regular donations from adoption agencies. 14
The collaboration between maternity homes and adoption agencies further intensified to the point where the boundaries between these two organizations are often blurred. Particularly in the case of those maternity homes run by adoption agencies, one often finds the maternity homes located in the same building as the founding adoption agency or within walking distance of it. 15 On my visit in 2004, Haerimwon, an SWS-affiliated maternity home in Dae-Gu, shared its main office with the local adoption center. Furthermore, these two organizations often share employees. It is not uncommon for veteran adoption agency workers to serve at a maternity home or vice versa.
This historical, physical, administrative, and geographical proximity may not be just a natural consequence of organizational development derived from common causes or faith-based principles. Rather, inadequate government support for these maternity homes and the government mandate making adoption agencies responsible for welfare institutions rendered maternity homes partly or fully dependent on adoption agencies for support. Such dependence, combined with the lack of social services for single mothers, placed upon the maternity home the precarious structural condition of ‘adoption facilitation rather than family preservation’ in order to survive (E. Kim, 2010: 75). In this light, adoptive parents overseas can be viewed as subsidizing South Korean welfare institutions, including maternity homes (2010: 75).
Homes for ‘Unwed Mothers’: Biopolitical Welfare Institutions
In order to understand the phenomenon of single mothers’ overwhelming association with adoption, I begin with Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. Foucault argues that biopolitics is a technology of power over life, rendering the population a political problem. Under the field of biopolitics, any event that ‘sapped the population’s strength, … wasted energy, and cost money because … treating them was too expensive’ is subject to a regulation and intervention (2003: 244). Drawing upon Foucault’s idea of biopolitics, I engage with the phenomenon of single mothers, and their ‘out-of-wedlock births’ that are perceived as a social illness, a risk, or a liability for a population.
In Foucault’s scheme of biopolitics, sexuality is described as ‘a field of vital strategic importance’. According to Foucault, ‘Sexuality exists at the point where body and population meet. And so it is a matter for discipline, but also a matter for regularization’ (2003: 251–2). By highlighting the procreative effects of sexuality, Foucault treats the domain of sexuality as one of the most important elements in biological processes through which disciplinary power over individuals intersects with and articulates into regulatory power over the population. What permeates the membranes of these two techniques of power is the idea of norms, which take effect in the optimization of all elements of life at the level of population. Norms are not a fixed constant; rather, they function as a modality of optimizing elements for life, which entails a complex interplay of power to maximize the level of security for the population.
So what procedures does the regulation of the population entail and what kinds of subjectivities does it produce? Jesook Song (2009), in her analysis of South Korea’s neoliberal society, emphasizes the roles of civil society – non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and their partnership with government organizations. This partnership illuminates two features of governance in relation to population management. First, the regulatory mechanism of population management is not a direct intervention of the state but rather involves a variety of social institutions and actors. Second, various social institutions and actors employ certain techniques and efforts in a way that produces self-governable and self-responsible subjects, who make the most ‘rational’ choice for themselves, thereby serving as a normative element for the population. In other words, coordinated efforts from social institutions and actors, as well as a subjectification of normative individuals, operate as a mechanism of population management.
In light of these two dimensions of a biopolitical apparatus of security for the population, I frame the maternity home as a key departure point – one of the earliest and the most comprehensive – from which to understand the regulatory mechanism of the single mother population in South Korea. A thorough analysis of the maternity homes’ operations highlights the collaborative nature and detailed mechanics of social governance of single mothers that require orchestrated efforts from various social institutions and actors such as family members, social workers, medical doctors, and adoption professionals. Another key dimension of the regulatory mechanism that is ensured throughout the maternity homes is the production of normative individuals who, in this case, choose adoption for their babies. Via adoption, troubled single pregnant women become good birthmothers who willingly uphold the security apparatus for the population.
Positing the maternity home as a dynamic, constitutive political field that enacts a disciplinary and regulatory power on a population, I examine three stepwise functions of the maternity home: (1) the containment of women’s deviant sexuality and reproduction; (2) the classification of single, pregnant women’s bodies as unfit for motherhood and their babies’ prospective life in Korea as grim, as well as their reclassification into good birthmothers and adoptees with better life opportunities overseas; and thus (3) the circulation of babies and their birthmothers via adoption. By analyzing this preemptive regulatory mechanism – adoption – of the population of single mothers, I delineate the paradox of motherhood at play in the maternity home in which the single pregnant woman attains the subjectivity of motherhood by renouncing her motherhood. Thus I argue that transnational adoption has been deployed to regulate the population of single mothers via the maternity home, which gives rise to birthmothers whose experiences are subject to a series of pre-natal alienation processes and whose existence remains virtual.
Two Mothers: 16 1983 and 2005
It was 1983. I was only 18 years old, working at a factory, handling fur. I found myself pregnant while dating the baby’s father, whom I knew from my hometown. Initially, I thought about having an abortion. But I didn’t have enough money. So, for the next four months, I saved up money for the medical expenses and went to a hospital. There, I was told to wait until a later stage of pregnancy because a termination might jeopardize my health, suggesting that I would still be able to induce the baby still-born at the eighth month. Finally, when I went to a hospital to terminate the pregnancy at the eighth month, another doctor, now, I suspect, a good Christian, criticized me for trying to murder the baby and refused to provide medical service. My boyfriend and I didn’t have a place to go with the growing belly…. So he took me to his older brother’s house where I stayed for another month. One day, his brother’s wife took me to a midwife facility where I then was taken in a van, without my own or my boyfriend’s consent, to a maternity home run by a Christian organization. I didn’t know where I was until I saw numerous pregnant women. No one told me…. The baby arrived a month after the due date…. Some time, a day or two, passed. An adoption agency worker came by and took the baby. Though I didn’t think consciously about adoption for my baby’s future, what seemed certain to me was that raising a child as an unwed mother was unimaginable. There, they all sent their babies away. There was a tacit agreement that the baby would be given up for adoption upon my entry. No consulting! We made some paper flowers, sewed, and a few went into training to become hair stylists. I was there for about three months, during which time my boyfriend thought I was missing. No one knew where I was. I was not allowed to go outside. The only place that I was allowed to go to was a church affiliated with the facility. That’s where I gave birth and ‘decided’ on adoption. I was unmarried. (Soonyoung Lee, personal interview, Seoul, 14 January 2011) In 2005, I found myself pregnant a month after I broke up with my boyfriend. Considering abortion as an option, I went to see a doctor who, unlike many others, didn’t ask about my marital status. Instead he just performed an ultrasound exam. I was in my mid thirties. [After the exam,] I wanted to keep my baby, but didn’t want to disappoint my family. Marriage to my ex was out of the question. Days passed and months went by while I was waiting for my decision to arrive. My friends or colleagues who knew of the pregnancy persuaded, begged, coaxed me to terminate the pregnancy. By the sixth month, I fled the pressure and disdain of my friends and went to a maternity home. Upon my inquiry to availability, I was asked whether I wanted to keep or give up my baby. ‘There is no availability, if you want to keep your baby after delivery in our facility’ was the answer. I said, ‘I haven’t decided yet.’ They told me, ‘Then, one spot is available for you.’ Every month, adoption agency staff members visited the home and offered adoption workshops in which the advantages and disadvantages of domestic and foreign adoption were explained, and followed by Q & A. After a long period of hesitation, when my mind was moving more towards adoption, I set up an appointment with staff members from all three adoption agencies. On the first day of meeting for one-on-one conversation, each adoption agency case worker showed up with adoption paperwork at the visit to my then-residence, an unwed mothers’ facility. Since it was before the baby’s birth and I had not finalized my decision, I refused to sign the paperwork. Finally I decided on one adoption agency that promised open adoption, which is foreign adoption. The delivery date came earlier. My baby was born a few hours past midnight. The very next morning, an adoption agency worker came by and asked for my signature on two items of paperwork, one being the adoption paper, and, the other, a parental custody relinquishment paper. In the hallway, I signed both documents, and was instructed to write, ‘I, Heesun Choi, will take sole legal responsibility for this adoption made without the baby’s father’s consent.’ (Choi, phone interview, Seoul, 5 March 2011)
Soonyoung, 49, is now the mother of two and recently lost her husband, the father of her first child. She reunited with her first son, who now lives in France, in 2005, 17 22 years after she decided to give him up for adoption. Heesun, 42, is a single mother raising her 8-year-old son and has dedicated her time to the Single Mothers’ Movement since 2007. Her advocacy work includes providing public education to fight the social stigma of single motherhood, urging lawmakers to increase social welfare for single parents, and organizing birthmothers. 18 Soon after I met her, Heesun confessed that in 2005 she initially gave up her baby for adoption, and then reclaimed him one week later with support from a maternity home staff member. Reclaiming one’s child was not a common practice at that time.
While Soonyoung’s and Heesun’s final decisions were quite different, both accounts, set nearly 20 years apart, illustrate the systematic forces at work at maternity homes surrounding the great majority of single mothers’ decisions to relinquish their child for adoption. Soonyoung’s and Heesun’s accounts resonate to a great extent with many birthmothers who chose adoption primarily because they were not married. It became clear through my interviews that not every birthmother made the decision to give up their child at a maternity home. Nonetheless, birthmothers wove their stories of adoption with accounts of any combination of major institutions – the church, the law, medical facilities, and adoption agencies – by which Soonyoung’s and Heesun’s residential experiences were shaped. In other words, a careful analysis of their experiences with maternity homes demonstrates the conditions and limitations of these facilities, but also reveals a panoply of social governance that leads to what appears to be an inevitable and logical solution, the adoption path for single mothers.
Containment: Exclusion by Inclusion
Both Soonyoung’s and Heesun’s sexual transgression and their subsequent failures to terminate the pregnancy 19 resulted in exclusion and hostility from their own communities (i.e. family, friends, the workplace, school, 20 and their neighborhoods). Soonyoung had to leave her job and work-based dormitory, while Heesun suffered constant pressure to terminate her pregnancy from work associates and friends. Additionally, neither Soonyoung nor Heesun could seek aid from their families for financial reasons and for fear of shaming them. Without the family, a major institution whose support is indispensable given the structural absence of public provision in South Korea, unwed mothers such as Soonyoung and Heesun find themselves hopelessly excluded and ostracized from society (Kwon et al., 2007).
Furthermore, Soonyoung and Heesun did not actually choose to enter a maternity home in the strictest sense. Both of their entries were, in fact, mediated and facilitated primarily by a combination of family members and medical institutions. In particular, Soonyoung’s entry was required by law. Under the Prostitution Prevention Law, one is supposed to report sex workers and poor and working women who are likely to engage in sex work to a municipal authority so that these women can undergo rehabilitation. The very same law provided the legal foundation for maternity homes from 1961 to 1989. Under this law, Soonyoung was identified as a potential sex worker because of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy and economic status, and was thus handed over to a maternity home. Her entry was not an extra-legal act committed by family, clinic staff, or maternity home employees; rather, it resulted from lawful procedures orchestrated by dutiful citizens and medical professionals under the mandate of the Prostitution Prevention Law.
Upon their entry, Soonyoung and Heesun submitted themselves to the institution, and in return they received support during their pregnancy and delivery. Temporary full-time residence is mandatory. Soonyoung recounted that she had to hand over all of her belongings to the office on arrival, including her own clothes. This live-in requirement allows maternity homes to exert maximum control over single pregnant women and thus subject them to its institutional premises, procedures, daily regimens, regulations, and supervision. Maternity homes contain the single mothers and their pregnancies.
Under the Prostitution Prevention Law, maternity homes were prescribed primarily as a job training facility for vulnerable women, in order to prevent the women from succumbing to prostitution. According to the law, they must offer job training and round-the-clock supervision for the residents. Soonyoung, who previously worked at a fur factory, continued to engage in such work, including sewing, cross-stitching, and making paper flowers. Even after 1989, when the Prostitution Prevention Law was no longer in effect, job training continued to be integral part of the daily regimen at maternity homes. While presented as practical measures to prepare for the future, these training sessions can still be construed as disciplinary measures aimed at containing single pregnant women’s bodies.
The maternity homes are temporally enclosed, finite environments in which single pregnant women are cared for until their ‘illegitimate’ babies are born. 21 A majority of maternity homes were not equipped with child care units, particularly the homes affiliated to the adoption agencies, until 2007, when the South Korean government mandated that maternity homes provide child care facilities. Prior to this law, even those maternity homes that were equipped with child care facilities were limited in number and often unavailable. It was under such conditions that Heesun’s experience with the maternity home took place. Upon contacting the home, the facility immediately attempted to ascertain Heesun’s plans for the infant in order to determine whether to give her institutional support. In other words, a single pregnant woman’s access to institutional aid depends on her willingness, or at least openness, to putting her unborn child up for adoption. Such conditional acceptance on the part of the agency was a commonplace practice in maternity homes. This could simply reflect the structural conditions of the maternity home, which cannot offer services for women who want to raise their children. Yet it is hard to deny that a lack of child care at the maternity home has worked to preemptively contain, if not predetermine, single mothers’ choice of adoption.
One can stay at a maternity home for up to six months, which can be extended for an additional six months. A great majority of expectant mothers, like Heesun, seek entry during their last trimester and stay for an average of one to three months (Bae, 2001; Lee and Choi, 2005). During their brief stay, these young, single women, usually first-time mothers, must make life-altering decisions regarding their pregnancies. Because maternity homes do not allow children, residents are unable to take their babies back to the maternity home after giving birth at the hospital. If a resident cannot decide what to do with the baby by the end of her pregnancy, she is usually deemed to be unfit to parent due to this ambivalence (Huh, 1993). A birthmother, Yoomee, 21 years old, described her adoption circumstances: ‘Immediately after my delivery, staff at the maternity home told me that I should call the adoption agency. Until my delivery, I was unsure of my plan. I couldn’t take my baby back to the facility. So I called the adoption agency’ (personal interview, Seoul, 2 January 2012).
While the Prostitution Prevention Law and a lack of child care facilities at the maternity homes regulate the physical dimension of containment, Christianity regulates the residents’ spiritual dimension. Maternity homes incorporate Christian ethics and practices in their daily programs. Residents are asked and encouraged to pray before each meal and participate in weekly Bible studies and a Sunday service. The church organizes anti-abortion sessions, a pledge of purity, and baptisms for newly converted residents (Kim, 1994). During the pledge of purity, residents swear that they will not engage in premarital sex in the name of God and each one is given a ring to wear as proof of this at the end of the session.
At the heart of all these technologies of containment lies the regularization of single mothers’ sexuality and their reproduction. Soonyoung described her decision to follow the adoption pathway as a tacit agreement upon her entry into the maternity home. The spatial politics of exclusion by inclusion disbarred her potential as a mother before she could even become one. Meanwhile, Heesun’s account suggests that the temporal structure of these facilities logistically pressures single pregnant women to choose what is most readily available: adoption placement. Within the group home, the spatial and temporal logic of inclusion excludes single mothers from the possibility of motherhood. Then, through what particular ways does the logic of containment render adoption as the only honorable and rational choice?
Classification of Single Mothers: From Unfit to Sacrificing Mothers
Upon entry to the maternity home, ‘unwed mothers’ must fill out an application and provide comprehensive background information. New residents must detail their work history, educational background, religious practices, socio-economic status, medical history, abortion history, previous pregnancies, and any past substance use. The application also delves into the detailed status of their relationship with their family and the baby’s father, as well as their general understanding of pregnancy and childbirth. Finally, the application inquires into their plans for the baby’s future. There are three options: relinquishment, full parental rights, and undecided – listed in that order. During their stay, residents undergo psychological and personality testing, IQ testing, and several other forms of emotional and intellectual assessment. These records are kept in a permanent file for each individual resident. These files, accumulated over the last 30 years, constitute the primary body of knowledge for the mihonmo population, underlying the very production of mihonmo as a category, which serves as the basis for the ongoing management and regulation of women who become mihonmo.
Not only do maternity homes directly extract information from the body of unwed mothers, they indirectly facilitate the development of mihonmo discourse. As a welfare site that exclusively serves single pregnant women, maternity homes have been a rich field for researchers gathering empirical data on unwed mothers. As a result, residents of these homes were oversampled and their profiles determined the characteristics of Korean single mothers in academic literature, cultural productions, and public policy research 22 (Cheon et al. 2002; Chun, 1989; Hwang and Yoon, 1996; Ju et al., 1997; Kim, 1974; KWDI, 1984; Kyung Hyang Daily, 1976; Lee and Park, 2008; Nho and Kim, 2004; Park et al., 1975; Park, 1977; Yoon, 2002). By rendering residents as readily available research subjects, these welfare facilities have served as social laboratories for the mihonmo population.
The figure of the unwed mother is consistently presented as an unfit mother. 23 As the single mother came to represent the birthmother, she has been depicted as inadequate for the task of motherhood because of her low socio-economic status, her unmarried status, her immaturity, and her unstable family background. The greatest indication of her inability to mother is her deviation from prescribed sexual norms (Chun, 1989; Huh, 1993; Kim, 1974; KWDI, 1984).
Mihonmo discourse was not only limited to the mothers. In 1984, the Korean Women’s Development Institute (KWDI) stated, in its first comprehensive research finding, that the children of unwed mothers were more prone to premature or underweight births and were highly vulnerable to mental and physical disabilities. 24 A wealth of literature from various disciplines (e.g. medical research, psychology, criminology, and public policy) also identified children from single mother households as more likely to develop juvenile delinquencies due to social ostracism and discrimination (Bae, 2001; Cheon et al., 2002; Choi, 2010; Kim, 1974; Kim et al., 2004; KWDI, 1984; Nho and Kim, 2004; Park et al., 1975; Yoon, 2002). Accepting poor social welfare and the social stigma against single mothers in Korea as an unchangeable status quo, the discourse of mihonmo claimed that ‘illegitimate children’ had no viable future in Korea. The discourse of ‘no future in Korea’ penalized a single, pregnant woman for her sexual transgressions and affirmed the unwed mother’s negative influence on her child.
Scholars, policy makers, and adoption professionals continue to rationalize, unequivocally, that adoption is the best alternative. Aligned with this adoption-best narrative, maternity homes impart adoption knowledge to their residents in two ways: a regular, monthly adoption workshop and a meeting with Korean adoptees during their motherland visit. Maternity homes, in collaboration with adoption agencies, offer a series of monthly workshops promoting adoption as the best choice for their children’s future, as noted in Heesun’s accounts. At the workshop, single pregnant women learn about average adoptive parents’ profiles – well-educated, professional, middle-class heterosexual couples – as well as about two different kinds of adoption – transnational and domestic adoption. Echoing Heesun’s accounts, transnational adoption is presented as open, which allows for the possibility of an ongoing exchange of photos and letters with the child, as well as a potential reunion in the future. In contrast, domestic adoption is presented as a closed adoption that forecloses any of these possibilities with the child, reflecting South Korea’s closed adoption practice.
Information about adoption disseminated through these monthly adoption workshops becomes a valid and legitimate truth that is then corroborated by meeting with Korean adoptees who are on ‘motherland tours’. 25 During adoptee visits to maternity homes, birthmothers share the circumstances and dilemmas surrounding their pregnancies and potential decision to give up their child for adoption, thereby providing a plausible past that many adoptee participants may have experienced but have no memory of. Adoptees then share what expectant mothers are most curious about – their lives as adoptees. Via this meeting, expectant mothers come to relate to the adoptees as though they were meeting their babies-to-be. By and large, adoptees’ lives are presented as successful and happy, thus turning abstract ideas of adoption, particularly of transnational adoption, into embodied, rewarding lives. Such meetings work to convince single pregnant women that adoption will afford their child better opportunities in life. 26
The efforts to produce a specific kind of understanding of adoption at maternity homes often culminates in a confession by birthmothers addressed to their child, actively claiming that adoption is their expression of motherly love. Since 1999, maternity homes have published four edited volumes of letters written by residents. 27 A majority of the letters addressed to their children, either intended for or already relinquished to adoption, convey single mothers’ pain, shame, and guilt. 28 They also express their love toward their baby and their desire to reunite with the child in the future. This desire is often expressed in religious terms. 29 In one of the most prevalent themes, the letters articulate the most powerful rationale for adoption: the possibility of a better life. In I Wish You a Beautiful Life, an edited volume of letters from residents in Ae Ran Won, one letter reads:
As your mother I was always concerned about you. There was no way for us to live together. I gave birth to you, so I had the responsibility to provide a wonderful environment for you. I preferred to say good-bye to you rather than to live with you, if that decision could bring you better opportunities…. Therefore, adoption was my gift to you. (Dorow, 1999: 37)
In this passage, the mother’s decision to relinquish her baby is rationalized through the profound belief that adoption will provide ‘better opportunities’ and is expressed using the language of gift-giving. Throughout the letters, relinquishment is depicted neither as abandonment nor as a denunciation of the unwed mothers’ motherhood; instead, it is presented as its supreme affirmation. Throughout these confessional letters, maternity homes narrativize unwed mothers as repentant birthmothers who confess, admit their mistakes, and eventually display their love toward their baby by making the greatest maternal sacrifice.
Over the course of their development, maternity homes have participated in and facilitated the knowledge production of the mihonmo, the child, and adoption. Such knowledge production has produced a discourse wherein single mothers are portrayed as unfit and inadequate parents and their children’s lives, as children of single mothers in Korea, are presented as worthless. This discourse is introduced through a regular adoption workshop and becomes an embodied truth delivered by transnational adoptees, thus serving as a rationale for presenting adoption as the best alternative for single mothers. Throughout their residence, a great majority of single pregnant women – once perceived as irresponsible, sexually delinquent, unfit mothers – turn themselves into self-sacrificing birthmothers who are ready to make the best decision for their children.
The Circulation of Bodies
In what ways, then, does the maternity home facilitate adoption? According to the Adoption Promotion and Procedure, 30 for any child to be considered for adoption, he or she must be an orphan both of whose parents are dead, incapable, or unwilling to raise the child. In other words, an orphan in the legal sense is not necessarily a parentless child; in fact, a considerable number of children available for adoption have at least one living parent. In such cases, the adoption procedure begins with rendering the child an ‘eligible orphan’. This process requires the complete severance of a child from his or her natal parent and the subsequent legal transfer of custody from a parent to the adoption agency (E. Kim, 2010; J. Kim, 2009; Yngvesson, 2003). This is a precondition for a child to be eligible for adoption, and is the background against which Soonyoung’s and Heesun’s adoption consultations took place and were facilitated from within the maternity home.
As indicated by Heesun’s experience, once she showed an interest in adoption, adoption agency workers immediately took the necessary steps for orphan production. Adoption agency workers visited her then-residence of the maternity home and offered individual consultation. At the initial intake of each case, a representative from all three adoption agencies presents the mother with adoption paperwork, including a form for termination of parental rights and relinquishment papers. In this way, maternity home residents give up their baby before giving birth, thereby terminating their parental rights even before the infant is born. By signing the adoption papers at the facility, a single, pregnant woman agrees to give up all her potential parental rights and to transfer her would-be custody of the baby to the adoption agency; in turn, she becomes a birthmother who, as Christine Ward Gailey (2000) notes, is legally dead before giving birth. Thus, the baby is born a legal orphan. Under heavy visitor restrictions and constant monitoring, only with the maternity home’s permission can an adoption agency worker meet with an expectant mother and facilitate the severing of an unborn baby from an expectant mother. And, by assisting with the preemptive completion of the adoption paperwork at the facility, maternity homes take part in the initiation of the orphan production at the earliest possible moment.
The preemptive completion of the adoption paperwork authorizes the agency’s legal custody over a child, regulating the amount of time that the birthmother can spend with her baby and dictating the separation of infant and birthmother at its own convenience. Upon delivery of a baby intended for adoption placement, no birth registration needs to be issued, in contrast to the common practice of reporting a baby’s birth registration to a local government community center within a month. Instead, within a range of several hours to two days, an adoption agency caseworker arrives to take the newborn, who has already been processed for adoption. The time between the delivery and collection is hard to manage without the coordinated efforts of medical professionals and the maternity home, both of which directly monitor the residents’ pregnancy and delivery. The homes’ dissemination of a client’s delivery information is indispensable in order to safely transfer the baby from the mother to the adoption agency. The maternity home’s cooperation with adoption agencies, ranging from preemptive completion of the adoption paperwork to the immediate collection of children upon delivery, demonstrates their joint efforts to circulate children into adoption.
Not only does the maternity home prepare for the circulation of babies into adoption, it also helps to prepare single mothers to return unscathed to society. Lee Kyung Ae, who has worked at a maternity home for 17 years, told me that each resident is given her own serial number to access government-subsidized health benefits. Under this temporary serial number with which she receives public relief, her medical records of pregnancy and delivery are concealed from her regular health insurance file. This, combined with the lack of birth registration, means that she does not have any legal or medical record of the fact that she has given birth to a child.
The maternity home also provides a sex education workshop that aims to help residents develop healthy relationships and engage in ‘appropriate’ sexual conduct, as well as to impart accurate information about sex and contraceptives so as to prevent a subsequent pregnancy (Ae Ran Won, 2010: 106). Medical doctors administer a more direct measure of prevention against pregnancy before residents leave the maternity home. Youmee, a 21-year-old single mother whom I met in 2012, gave up her first child for adoption at the age of 16. Before Youmee returned home, she went to see a gynecologist who was affiliated with the maternity home for a follow-up appointment after her delivery. She provided Youmee with an IUD (intra-uterine device) for birth control (2 January 2012, Seoul, Korea, personal interview).
An analysis of the third aspect – circulation – of the regulatory mechanism illuminates the final stage of the life cycle undergone at a maternity home, reiterating the completion of its institutional mission. For example, Esther’s Home (2011) describes itself as ‘a place for consolation of unwed mothers and consultation for the babies’ future’. Another maternity home, the In Ae Welfare Center (2011) in Kwangju, aims ‘to help single, pregnant women with their crisis and help them to find their way back to being dutiful citizens’. Both statements acknowledge the sexuality of single pregnant women as an aberration and transgression, and thus articulate an institutional commitment to rehabilitate these women. 31 Central to the rehabilitation process is ‘consultation for the babies’ future’, suggesting that salvaging the unborn children is the route by which unwed mothers’ sexual transgression can be redeemed and thus allow the mothers to ‘find their way back’ to healthy citizenry. By facilitating the circulation of babies from the unwed mothers to adoption agencies, the maternity home casts the rehabilitated body of the population as healthy and dutiful mothers-to-be.
Pre-natal Alienation and the Virtual Birthmother
So far, we have examined the social governance underlying the maternity home in three aspects – containment, classification, and circulation. As a unique social welfare agency for single pregnant women, maternity homes stand at the nexus of a regulatory mechanism that contains the sexuality of single, pregnant women and their unborn children. The practice of containment facilitates the development of a system of classification in which motherhood and life for a mihonmo and her child is preordained as unfit, thereby rationalizing the circulation of babies via adoption placement. By ensuring the circulation of babies and mihonmo by adoption, the maternity home completes the regulatory cycle of securitizing the population of single mothers and their children. As shown throughout the article, this regulatory cycle operates in concert with key social institutions – the family, law, medicine, and the demand-oriented adoption market. By going through this cycle, single pregnant women – in other words, the population at risk – are transformed into self-governable and self-responsible birthmothers who are now normative elements of the population.
In her critique of transnational adoption, Jodi Kim articulates that the birthmothers’ quality of life is mired in ‘profound natal alienation, or the capacity to give life but the severing of rights to claim to parent that life’ (2009: 857). Extending Kim’s observation of birthmothers’ quality of life to the largest category of birthmother – ‘unwed mothers’ in South Korea – I describe the conditions and processes circumscribing adoption as pre-natal alienation. Under a principle of preemptive governance, single, pregnant women are subjected to a series of pre-natal alienation processes – alienation from reproductive choice and their reproductive labor (life-sustaining labor), and reproduction itself (their babies). A single pregnant woman feels compelled to make her reproductive choice, with the alternative being dismal life prospects for herself and her child, which Eleana Kim cogently describes as ‘the nonchoice between adoption or something worse’ (2010: 254). This preemptive adoption decision carves out physical and psychological conditions in which her life-sustaining efforts become alienated reproductive labor from her expectant future – the relinquishment of her baby. Upon the birth of her child, she undergoes two levels of alienation that entail a foreclosure of any further relationship with it. First, she is alienated from her motherly duties and responsibilities and, second, she is alienated from her legal ties to the child.
Driven by the patriarchal ideology of normative family, birthmothers’ pre-natal alienation works in tandem with moral, irrevocable motherhood, shaping a particular refraction of mothering for the single birthmother. Paradoxically, her motherhood is only actualized in adoption, wherein her maternal existence is acknowledged as a form of exclusion. Having surrendered their children via the maternity home or elsewhere, birthmothers are able to return to their homes, workplaces, and schools as dutiful citizens. The ‘maternal choice’ of selecting adoption for their babies leads to their social death, a condition of living that is bound up with the double stigma of sexual transgression and absent mothering, deeming single birthmothers’ experiences of pregnancy, birth, delivery, and adoption unspeakable. Thus they remain as virtual birthmothers, joining hundreds of thousands of silent birthmothers 32 in Korea.
Currently, single mothers and child abandonment are once again at the center of controversy 33 regarding the implications of a new adoption law (see note 30). This current controversy with respect to single mothers’ reproductive choice – whether to choose adoption or not – illuminates the shocking degree to which the social governance of single mothers’ reproduction is saturated by the market practice of adoption and exposes those biopolitical mechanisms that have been used to regulate single birthmothers in South Korea. However, my critique of this systematic regulation of single mothers does not imply that all single mothers should and would decide to raise their children themselves if more support such as public provision and favorable living conditions were available, and if the prospects for themselves and their children were not so diminished. Rather, this article argues for reproductive justice for single mothers and calls for a critical scholarship on the biopolitical dimensions of transnational adoption in a neoliberal global market.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank the anonymous reviewers who rigorously engaged with the article and provided supportive feedback. In addition, I deeply appreciate the birthmothers, and the staff members at the maternity homes and adoption agencies who participated in this project.
Funding
Support for this project was provided by a PSC-CUNY Award (2010–11, Out of Cycle), jointly funded by the Professional Staff Congress and the City University of New York, and the Faculty Fellowship for Publication Program in 2011.