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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.

In Uganda, there has been a proliferation of foreign-supported orphanages encouraging poor parents to place their children in care and relinquish them for adoption to meet the demands of a very profitable “orphan rescue” movement. Instead of reuniting children with family, these institutions actively discourage contact to keep children in the orphanage or make them available for international adoption. Ugandan parents tend to think of these new practices as a global expansion of local informal fostering practices, but rarely do they have a clear understanding of the detrimental effects of institutionalization on children, nor the permanency of adoption—a fact some unscrupulous intermediaries prey upon for profit. This chapter sheds light on “orphan rescue” interventions and argues that such efforts have effected a worrying shift in local parenting norms, responsibilities, and practices around schooling and childcare—seriously jeopardizing family preservation, child protection, and child well-being.