A Seoul court yesterday officially recognized a South Korean-born adoptee as the daughter of her biological father in a landmark ruling that she described as “momentous.”
Kara Bos, 38, broke down in tears after the Seoul Family Court delivered its ruling entering her in the man’s family registry, a move that could set a legal precedent.
His relatives had wanted nothing to do with her, despite an online DNA match.
Photo: AFP
Bos — who was abandoned at the age of two and adopted by a US family — embarked on the legal battle to discover her birth mother’s identity, and her lawyers said that she could now access official records on her father’s family.
“This day is momentous for all of us adoptees just to have a right finally,” she told reporters, visibly emotional.
“The struggles we faced with not having any rights whatsoever to be able to contact our family ... and I hope this can change in [South] Korea.”
South Korea was once among the biggest sources for international adoption, having sent at least 167,000 children abroad since the 1950s.
However, accessing records for returning adoptees is notoriously difficult due to laws prioritizing birth parents’ privacy over adoptees’ rights — the issue has long been shrouded in secrecy and linked to stigma.
Neither the man nor any of his relatives were present at the hearing.
Growing up in Michigan, Bos, whose Korean name is Kang Mee-sook, rarely thought about her birth family, but when her own daughter turned two, she started thinking about what her separation must have meant for her biological mother and decided to try to track her down.
After her initial efforts to trace her through adoption records and distributing leaflets proved fruitless, she submitted a DNA sample to an online genealogy platform in 2016 and found that she was related to a young Korean man studying abroad.
With the match, she was able to locate her half-sisters — the young man’s mother and aunt — but they wanted nothing to do with her, barring her from meeting her father, the only person who could tell her who her mother was.
One of them called the police when Bos begged on her knees at the woman’s door.
In November, she filed a paternity suit — her lawyers said that she is the first South Korean-born overseas adoptee to have done so — and a court-ordered DNA test showed there was a 99.987 percent probability that he was her father.
Inclusion in the family registry gives Bos a legal entitlement to an inheritance, but she said that all she wanted was to find out about her mother and the truth.
“If secrecy ... hadn’t shrouded my adoption story, then maybe this could have all been resolved with my birth father’s family with a five-minute phone call,” she said.
Bos said that she plans to meet her father next week, and hopes that he will finally reveal her origins.
“I hope ... with this media attention, if my mother is watching, that she will step out and be an example of someone who can have courage just like I did to fight this fight,” she told reporters outside the court.
“Omma, I want to meet you,” she told the cameras in basic Korean. “Really, don’t be sorry. Please just come.”
DISPUTED WATERS: The Philippines accused China of building an artificial island on Sabina Shoal, while Beijing said Manila was trying to mislead the global community The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) is committed to sustaining a presence in a disputed area of the South China Sea to ensure Beijing does not carry out reclamation activities at Sabina Shoal (Xianbin Reef), its spokesperson said yesterday. The PCG on Saturday said it had deployed a ship to Sabina Shoal, where it accused China of building an artificial island, amid an escalating maritime row, adding two other vessels were in rotational deployment in the area. Since the ship’s deployment in the middle of last month, the PCG said it had discovered piles of dead and crushed coral that had been dumped
Experts have long warned about the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI) going rogue, but a new research paper suggests it is already happening. AI systems, designed to be honest, have developed a troubling skill for deception, from tricking human players in online games of world conquest to hiring humans to solve “prove-you’re-not-a-robot” tests, a team of researchers said in the journal Patterns on Friday. While such examples might appear trivial, the underlying issues they expose could soon carry serious real-world consequences, said first author Peter Park, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in AI existential safety. “These
The most powerful solar storm in more than two decades struck Earth on Friday, triggering spectacular celestial light shows from Tasmania to the UK — and threatening possible disruptions to satellites and power grids as it persists into the weekend. The first of several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun — came just after 4pm GMT, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. It was later upgraded to an “extreme” geomagnetic storm — the first since the “Halloween Storms” of October 2003 caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged
Using virtual-reality (VR) headsets, students at a Hong Kong university travel to a pavilion above the clouds to watch an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated Albert Einstein explain game theory. The students are part of a course at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) that is testing the use of “AI lecturers” as the AI revolution hits campuses around the world. The mass availability of tools such as ChatGPT has sparked optimism about new leaps in productivity and teaching, but also fears over cheating, plagiarism and the replacement of human instructors. Pan Hui (許彬), a professor of computer science who is leading