The producers of the South Korean version of "Saturday Night Live" have apologized for a sketch in this week's episode featuring comedian Kim Doo Young playing a foster child adopted by a foreign family that is reunited with his birth mother.

In the controversial sketch, the video clip of which has since been removed from the television network tvN's website, Kim plays the adopted child, who has trouble reading a letter out loud in Korean.

"If you abandon your child, you get punished," the child tells his birth mother in the sketch.

In a statement on Tuesday to the microblogging website Twitter, the show's producers issued an apology for the skit, which they claimed to agree went too far.

"We bow our heads and sincerely apologize to the Korean adopted children living in other countries and their families who have been hurt by the sketch," the statement read. 

"'Saturday Night Live' which has worked hard to find humor in difficult subjects and to satirize serious issues facing society, did the sketch to explore the difficulties of Korean adoptees adopted in foreign countries. However, we unintentionally hurt families affected by this issue through the way the subject was handled." 

The statement blamed the incident on the "carelessness of the production team, who failed to handle a sensitive matter with the utmost care."

"We apologize and will get rid of the people involved," the statement added. "From now on, the program's production team will do our best to prevent a similar occurrence."

According to the Wall Street Journal, foreign foster parents in the West adopted 165,000 Korean children between 1958 and 2012.

But one anonymous "Saturday Night Live Korea" producer defended the controversial sketch in a statement made on Tuesday through a spokeswoman for the entertainment conglomerate CJE&M, which owns the tvN network.

"Satire can tackle darker social issues too," the producer said. "The message was [meant to cause] remorse about the painful past and current reality."