The American Adoption of Indian Children from Mother Theresa's Orphanages

Abstract

This study explores the family backgrounds and personal motives of 70 families who adopted Indian children from Mother Theresa's orphanages in the late 1970s and 1980s. We ask what kind of people seek to adopt children of another ethnic group and color who also are highly likely to have chronic disabilities -physical, emotional, behavioral, intellectual. Our inquiry, while without formal hypotheses, was informed by depictions of altruists and rescuers of Holocaust victims. We found a...