Maternity Homes, the Birthplace of the Virtual Mother

Abstract

The previous chapter examined the historical, military, geopolitical, and economic links between the development of transnational adoption and South Korea’s national family planning policy, and established the platform for a critical analysis of transnational adoption as a technology of population control. By examining the structural determinants under which numerous working-class women became birth mothers during the 1970s and the 1980s, Chapter 2 argues that birth mothers participated in transnational adoption as part of a national, population control measure, thereby serving national and family security under the developmental state. In this chapter, I focus on single mothers, the largest and fastest growing population of birth mothers from the 1980s to the mid 2000s, and discuss the elaborate system of social governance through which the transnational adoption practice has been deployed as a biopolitical, preemptive measure against single mothers and their “illegitimate” children.