Mia Lee Sorensen’s Danish parents used to tell her that her birth family in South Korea had put her up for adoption. According to her adoption papers, she was born prematurely in 1987 to a family that could not afford her medical bills and wished for her to have a "good future” abroad.
But when Sorensen found her birth parents in South Korea last year, they could not believe she was alive. They told her that her mother had passed out during labor and that when she woke up, the clinic told her that the baby had died.
South Korea has the world’s largest diaspora of intercountry adoptees, with more foreign adoptions overall than any other nation. About 200,000 children have been sent abroad since the end of the Korean War in 1953, mostly to the United States and Europe.