Adoptees from Korea say they were abused and isolated in the US. Were they also ‘stolen’ from their birth parents?

Lauren White-Gydas, a Korean-born adoptee at her home in Arlee, Montana, who was sterilised while living at a home for adopted children. At left, she views an old album of her childhood photos. Photograph: Rebecca Stumpf/The Guardian

As international, transracial adoptees in their 30s in the US, Jacquelyn Wells and Lauren White-Gydas have things in common.

They were both born in South Korea to unwed mothers in the 1980s. Both were shipped to the US as newborns to join white families who eagerly welcomed adorable, new daughters. And neither knew many other Asians in the towns where they grew up – Wells in Westford, Massachusetts, and White-Gydas in Salem, Oregon.