by Tobias Hübinette

About the author: Tobias Hübinette (Korean name Lee Sam-dol), a Korean who was adopted by a Swedish family, is a graduate student in Korean studies at Stockholm University, Sweden.

What is fundamentally wrong with intercountry adoption is that white Westerners adopt children, while non-whites in non-Western countries relinquish and supply those children. Intercountry adoption is in other words a one-way traffic and not an equal exchange of children in need between countries. Since its beginning after World War II when the supply of working-class children for domestic adoption started to run short, intercountry adoption has been the last resort to have a child for infertile couples belonging to the elite who feel a strong social pressure to fulfill the standard of the nuclear family. Intercountry adoption is widely perceived as a progressive...