ABSTRACT
Special needs foster children awaiting adoption bore the brunt of Americans’ tendency to pathologize adoptees. Americans’ deep and growing fears about both the drug and AIDS crises helped shape public and professional concerns about damage and disability among waiting children. Although policy experts and social scientists of all political stripes decried dependency as bad, conservative policy makers saw social welfare programs as producers of dependency. The Child Abuse Amendments of CAPTA deepened this debate and intensified its already principal focus on child abuse that had started in the 1970s. As a result of the amended CAPTA, state child protection services began to spend more time and resources on potential abuse or neglect in neonatal care.
