This cute little guy is one of thirty-five special-needs children living at the Starfish Foster Home in Xi’an China (read prior posts about Starfish). He posed for this photo before I could get my camera set up and mugged for the camera off and on all day. I gained a real appreciation for the beauty of a child who doesn’t necessarily look or act like the rest of the kids. At Starfish, they’re all that way.
There are about one million orphans in China; most are healthy little girls and the rest are special needs children. Because of a strong cultural preference for boys, China now bans gender identification procedures during pregnancy to discourage abortions, but this, combined with the one-child policy increases the number of live births of unwanted children. To be clear, most of these healthy girls and many of the special needs children would have a happy home with their birth parents but for China’s one-child policy.
Poor parents, upon learning that their one allowed child has a birth…