Sweden is at the moment grappling with its close to seventy years of transnational adoption that, since the 1950s onwards, has resulted in over sixty thousand adoptions from abroad. In October 2021, the Swedish government decided to initiate a state inquiry. It set up a commission to investigate the widespread problem of illegal and irregular transnational adoption and the systematic use, by adoption-mediating organizations, of manipulated documents and forged identities. The report will be published on March 1, 2025. The background to the government's decision to form what is known as the Swedish Adoption Commission can be found in years of adoptee activism in the form of the persistent voicing, and final breakthrough, of critical perspec- tives on transnational adoption.

In the context of this ongoing and painful settlement process concerning the country's criminal and corrupt transnational adoption activities, this partly autoethnographic article tries to understand why Sweden is such a latecomer when it comes to finding the truth about transnational adoption, especially given that other countries have already gone through a similar settlement process regarding the dark sides of transnational adoption. Why has it until recently been so difficult to bring up the illicit and unethical sides of transnational adoption in the world's leading adopting nation?