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This chapter details the evolution of the global and national response to AIDS orphanhood and its unintended consequences. Drawing on critical humanitarian studies in order to examine the effects of OVC targeting, this chapter details the development of the definition of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), as well as its cultural translations. It argues that OVC targeting reified vulnerability as an ironically privileged and empowered childhood identity, in which orphanhood can actually raise the status of a child who has lost a parent precisely because orphans are made objects for intervention. Amidst scarce aid resources, then, children and families in need must adjust strategies to meet the criteria for vulnerability that might gain them access to such resources, thereby creating an untenable demand for orphan services.

Despite a proliferation of orphans due to the AIDS pandemic, few African countries until recently have encouraged adoption—domestic or international—as a response. Though AIDS infection rates peaked in Uganda in the early 1990s, the government resisted intercountry adoption in favor of strengthen family- and community-based responses to the ‘orphan crisis’. This chapter returns to the broader national and international context to consider how ‘blood’ as a metaphor of relatedness has prevented domestic adoption from playing a greater role in responses to orphanhood. At the same time, intercountry adoption as a globalized mode of reproduction fixed its focus on Uganda, thus challenging Ugandan blood binds—the moral and political economies—of orphan care. Recent debates have yielded a quagmire of tensions and contradictions surrounding Ugandan attitudes about adoption. This chapter therefore considers what these paradoxes reveal about kinship, cultural politics, and orphan belonging. Borrowing Fassin’s notion of moral economy, the chapter considers how kinship—biological and social—enters debates about the political economy of adoption as a mode of social reproduction and how the broader moral and political economies of intercountry adoption are confronting the moral economy of kinship and belonging within Uganda.

I conclude this book by arguing that although various actors used different methods, the adoption evangelists were united in the purpose of improving the condition of orphaned East Asian children during the 1950s. I also examine the possibilities and limitations of Christian humanitarianism, focusing particularly on how the adoption evangelists of the 1950s helped redefine traditional family values and attitudes toward race in contemporary America. By connecting the dots between history and current trends in transnational adoption, child sponsorship programs, and evangelical missions, I investigate whether they had an enduring effect on contemporary American society as a whole.