45 Years After This Little Girl Was Suddenly Adopted, A DNA Test Revealed What Had Really Happened

Denise McCarty joined her family on Christmas Eve in 1974, but that wasn’t the day she was born. The young girl was three years old at the time, and she was being adopted by an American family living thousands of miles away from her home country of South Korea. It was a happy ending for the orphan, and for years, she believed that her biological family had abandoned her. But the truth came to light after she took a DNA test, and her story was even more heart-wrenching than the history she thought was her own.

Upon hearing the first couple of details of McCarty’s life, it sounds like a tale similar to so many others. Between 1953 and 2020 South Korea has had more than 167,000 of its children adopted by families across the world. And for many years, McCarty too thought her story was a relatively unremarkable one.

In fact, the agency that oversaw McCarty’s adoption said that her birth family had left her at a hospital. They stated that the young girl had been sick, so her parents had abandoned her there. And she may have gone on believing this tale if she hadn’t dug into it herself.

But the wheels started turning after McCarty traveled halfway around the world to visit her birth country in 2016. While in South Korea, she signed up for a DNA test provided by the government as part of a nationwide program designed to reconnect adoptees and their biological parents. For years, though, she heard nothing back.

That all changed in October 2020, when McCarty got a phone call that would change her life. The South Korean government had matched her with her biological family. And their subsequent reconnection retold the story of why she had ended up as the adopted child of an American family. It was a tale far removed from the one she had expected to hear.