At jusarang Community Church, in southern Seoul, a pastor maintains a "baby box" where mothers can leave unwanted infants (pictured above). Its intake is sadly rising. Since revisions were made to South Korea's adoption law in 2012, the number it receives each month has risen from two to 20. The church says the chief reason for this upsurge is the revised law itself. Some babies are delivered with notes pinned to their chests to say their mothers did not want to register them, as the law now requires. Adoptions in South Korea have had an unusually troubled history. After the end of the Korean war in 1953, biracial children who were the product of fleeting wartime unions between foreign servicemen and South Korean women in the 1950s, were abandoned to drift in South Korea's ravaged cities. The waifs-"dust of the streets" as they were called-were shunned by a Confucian society that prized bloodlines and could not countenance raising another's child. Thousands of foreign homes began to take them in-probably the largest exodus of infants from a single country into adoption.
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