Korea’s 3rd Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) crossed its 100-day milestone earlier this month, revealing that 437 new cases detailing human rights violations in overseas adoptions have been filed since Feb. 28. Tucked inside those numbers is a shift that demands our attention. For the first time, the voices demanding the truth do not belong solely to adult adoptees — they also belong to the Korean birth mothers left behind. I recently stood with one of these mothers in Seoul and saw the other side of erasure. I watched what it costs to be told your child is gone, to mourn her as dead and to learn years later that she had lived. In 1993, Lee Aeri Rana gave birth to a daughter in a hospital. She was told her baby was ill and needed to be transferred to a larger hospital. She was not allowed to see her. One week later, she was told the child had died. She believed this for years. When she finally tried to find where her daughter was buried, she discovered there was no grave. Her daughter had not died at all. She had been sent — on falsified documents, without her consent —