Mother of Transracial Adoption: Pearl Buck's Special Needs Adoption and American Self-criticism

In 1949, Pearl Sydenstricker Buck founded Welcome House, the first transracial and transnational adoption agency in the country, marking the beginning of the transnational adoption of mixed-race ‘Amerasian’ children. Contrary to the prevailing understanding that her humanitarian advocacy was a political act that promoted American global hegemony during the Cold War period, this article argues that her humanitarian work was motivated primarily by three forces: (1) her sense of American political and moral responsibility, (2) her desire for personal connection and motherhood, and (3) her mission of global friendship and unity. Buck actively fought racism in America, advocating the adoption of mixed-race Asian children and children with disabilities. Unlike evangelical agencies that catered to a conservative Christian audience, Pearl Buck normalised the notion of transracial adoption across America through her potent prose. This study examines her work in the context of the rise of Protestant liberalism, accentuating her role as the pioneer of the transracial and transnational adoption of Amerasian children and demonstrating that her ideology was congruent with her lifetime motto of human solidarity and anti-racism.

Chinese Special Needs Adoption, Demand, and the Global Politics of Disability

This article explores three related phenomena: first, the abandonment and institutionalization of children with disabilities in China that increased disproportionately in the 2000s; second, the important relationships between such abandonments, culture, economics, and politics in contemporary China; and third, the relationship between such abandonments, the increasing rates at which Chinese orphans with disabilities are being adopted to Western countries through Inter-country Adoption (ICA), and the global politics of ICA and disability. Although the rise in the proportion of ICA from China of "children with special needs" is widely acknowledged, the reasons for the recent increase in abandonments of children with disabilities have been largely analyzed from the perspective of Chinese cultural views regarding disability (Holroyd 2003; Qian 2014), market economics (Wang 2016), the lack of Chinese government support for services for families (Shang 2008), as well as government coercion (Johnson 2016), thus, relatively divorced from the demand side of ICA. However, this article highlights the relationship between the disproportionate abandonment of children with disabilities in China and their increasing rate of ICA from China, arguing that discrimination toward persons with disabilities, or ableism, is not merely operative in abandonments of Chinese children with disabilities, but also embedded in the global politics of ICA.

Special Needs Adoption and Foster Exigencies (SAFE): A Model for Case Managers

Children with special needs disproportionately receive child welfare services in out-of-home placements, such as foster and adoptive homes. This theoretical model has been developed to describe or explain exigencies of adoptive and foster families of children with special needs (n = 82). A web content analysis, including theme, feature, link, exchange, and language analyses, of online discussion forums of adoptive and foster parents of children with special needs using a phenomenological framework was conducted. Inductive and quantitative web content analyses were conducted on themes. Parenting concerns were clustered into two main themes, disability and placement issues, and focused on children’s pre and post placement needs. A phenomenological analysis resulted in the development of the Special Needs Adoption and Foster Exigencies (SAFE), which outlines exigencies of adoptive and foster parents of children with special needs during engagement, assessment, and intervention phases of case management.