Did You Know?

​

Vietnam's intercountry adoption program was already years old by the time the war ended. Between 1970 and the start of 1975 alone, at least 3,100 Vietnamese children were adopted internationally through licensed agencies working with the Vietnamese government. Adoptions from Vietnam are known to have occurred before 1970 as well, but reliable statistics for those earlier years haven't yet been found, so they're not included in the figures above.

​

Then, in the final weeks before the fall of Saigon, roughly 3,000 more children were evacuated in a matter of days. The best known of these efforts was the U.S. government's Operation Babylift, which processed over 2,500 children in total, most bound for the United States, with several hundred more placed in France and other countries. But it wasn't the only national effort: Australia ran its own government-organized airlift, and independently organized evacuations also brought children to Canada and the United Kingdom. Altogether, we've documented more than 6,000 Vietnamese children adopted internationally between 1970 and 1975 alone, many with little to no documentation about their origins.*

​