Goodness, I love technology. I stumbled across this gem tonight while searching for new adoption feeds. It's an article in The Korea Times that features a DVD about the birthmothers (from Korea) that were forced, unwillingling, to place their children for adoption.

The DVD itself is called Resilience. The story gets more and more interesting as we're introduced to a Pastor who runs a guesthouse (for lack of a better word) for adoptees returning to Korea to search for their birthmothers and answers to their questions. The Pastor then contacted a Korean adoptee from the US to produce the documentary as he felt an adoptee would have a bond with a birthmother while he was simply an outsider.

The documentary itself sounds fascinating:

"Resilience" finally gives birthmothers who had to give up their child a voice about being single mothers, international adoption practices and society. The documentary allows them to contemplate this serious, but often ignored and misrepresented, social issue in Korea. The personal stories about how and what happened are sometimes shocking and very emotional to the women.

It sounds like a tear-jerker to me. Even worse is what I'm briefly learning about Korean culture from this short little article. From the sounds of it, single parenting is frowned upon even more than in our society. (For those who are about to argue, "Oh, but single parenting is so accepted here!" I'll beg to differ.) Sad, really.

The Rev. Kim continues, "Until the 70s poverty was the main reason for sending babies and children abroad for adoption. Nowadays, almost 98 percent of the babies and children are from single mothers." Single mothers are hardly accepted in Korean society.

Simply placing a child for the sole reason that you can't be a single parent in a country is so disturbing to me that I can't begin to comprehend. Yes, the stigma of single parenthood in my small-minded area of origin was one of the factors in Munchkin's placement yet it wasn't the only reason. Nor was it the main reason.

We complain about how difficult government assistance is in our country. And it is difficult. During my pregnancy, I had to fight tooth and nail to keep my medical coverage for the pregnancy, which they took away twice because of technical errors on their side. However, facts like the following leave me thinking that our system is flowing with gold:

The single-mother houses are the only government support single mothers receive and they can only stay there for two years, during their pregnancy and one year after birth; after that there is no more support.

I don't know. Perhaps if we gave families two years, exactly, to get on their feet, we'd have less abuses of the welfare system as we currently see it happening. Yet, at the same time, what about the families who legitimately need these resources. Ohio just raised our minimum wage, thank the Good Lord. Perhaps people will be able to actually live on this "living wage." Who knows.

The documentary is set to be finished in 2007. After that?

"I hope this documentary can also help and inform adoptive parents in western countries, social workers and Korean and western society." However, "In the first place the documentary is for adoptees and birthmothers. For the premiere we want to invite many birthmothers and we plan to travel with "Resilience" to Europe and America to screen it to adoptee organizations. I hope it will help adoptees with a question to find an answer."

I hope it gives them answers as well. And I hope, in the process, these birthmothers find their peace. I can't wait to see this one for myself.