Almost all adoptions in Korea take place secretly. That is, when a couple adopts a child, they do it secretly without letting others in the community know about it. The immediate family members or a few very close friends may know about it, but they are asked to keep the adoption secret from others. Nor is the child in question informed of the adoption if he/she was adopted as an infant. Consequently, the child grows up without knowing that he/she was adopted. Apparently Korea is not alone when it comes to this kind of closed adoption. Families in countries such as Japan and China and other Asian countries have similar practices. As for Korea, there are three main reasons for practicing secret adoption:

1) Parents are afraid of the possible ridicule and discrimination their adopted children may face as they grow up in the Korean culture. Children who are openly exposed as adoptees in Korea are vulnerable to other children who are not adopted. Some children (or adults) may look at adoptees as people who are less than equal. Some Korean parents forbid their children from associating with adoptees for fear their children may be negatively influenced by the children who they consider are less than equal. Some parents will not permit their children to date or marry adoptees (or people with orphan backgrounds). Some look on adoptees with pity. If an adoptee makes an ordinary mistake or gets into a trouble, he/she is judged differently from their biological children who get into the same trouble.

Therefore, parents do not want to subject their adopted children to an environment of negative social stigma. Thus adoption in Korea take place in shrouded secrecy.

2) Married couples who cannot have children are culturally stereotyped as failures

in procreating important family blood lineage. This has resulted in negative social stigma being attached to couples without children. In the Confucian culture that permeated the Korean society for hundreds of years, a woman who cannot bear a child was considered incomplete. Therefore it was shameful and embarrassing for a woman if she was unable to have children. During ancient times in Korea, women were unfairly blamed for being childless. In the old days a man could dismiss his wife for any one of the seven reasons found in the "Seven Depravities of Women." Along with adultery, the inability to bear children was one of the seven. This was a serious reason enough for a man to get rid of his wife and find another who can bear children. Though this practice was abandoned long ago, the psychological influence it had on the society for women who can’t bear children has lingered on for many generations and is still felt in the modern day Korea.

The only way for childless couples to avoid negative social stigma in the Korean society is to have children through adoption. But to do it openly (allowing others know about their adoption) means they are letting others know they were not able to have children, thus making themselves vulnerable to social stigma. Therefore they resort to secret adoption. In so doing, they would appear to others as normal families. Many families move away to another neighborhood just before or after adoptions take place. If the new neighbors don't know about their adoption, the family avoids the risk of being embarrassed.

In secret adoption, there have been many cases in Korea where some women faked pregnancy by stuffing soft pillows or cottons under their clothes to appear pregnant. In a typical case, a woman may appear to be pregnant in the eyes of her neighbor. When the time comes, she secretly goes away from the neighborhood for a while, supposedly to give birth to a child, and return a few months later with an infant in her arms, making others in the neighborhood to believe she has just given birth to a child. My friend, a social worker in Korea, has seen many of these "make-believe" pregnancy cases. It is obvious by these examples that the cultural pressure a Korean woman faces is still strong, making her to resort to these kinds of practices to be accepted by the others.

3) People usually don’t do what other people don’t do.

This is true in adoption. If the social and cultural expectations placed on adoption are something to be ashamed of or embarrassed by (not necessarily feeling shameful on adoption itself but on what other people may think of them), people obviously do not want to put at risk themselves by open adoption. Likewise, if the society and the culture see adoption as something beautiful and nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about, people will open up to adoption just like the people in the US and in Europe do.
Helping to remove the fear in adoption in Korea, especially the fear of what others may think about them and their adopted children, is one of the primary missions of MPAK.