The arrest of USA Baptist missionaries for the abduction of children in Haiti (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2010/feb/05/haiti-usa) is a welcome move. The history of 'child-saving' demonstrates repeatedly how the forced migration of children (either within or across national borders)has been done in the name of rescuing children from poverty and in their best interests. The missionaries justified their actions - subsequent to their arrest and in their attempts (sometimes apparently successful) to persuade parents to give up their children - by claiming that migration to the USA would improve their lives. This is the same rhetoric that has been used to justify the practice of transnational adoption. International agencies have also been culpable in using a discourse of 'orphanhood' to include children with one known parent and especially where the child(ren) have been placed in care. This practice, which is sometimes termed 'social orphanhood', is justified by explaining that the level of poverty of single-parent families is higher than that of two parent families and so a kind of 'orphanhood' is produced with the loss of one parent (see, e.g. http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/publisher,IRIN,,KGZ,4896c4711e,0.html). This argument which symbolically erases the mother and essentially claims that parenting is of no importance unless it can sustain the child(ren) at a specific material level is precisely how so-called 'child-saving' of children living in poverty can be deployed to permanently separate children from their families and countries. It also ignores the extent to which orphanages as the only available social care institution for children are used by many low-income families in Africa and Latin America as respite care (see, also Claudia Fonseca's work on 'child circulation' amongst the Brazilian poor, http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/21/1_74/111).