Missionaries of Charity to stop adoption work in India

“We have already shut our adoption services, because we believe our children may not receive real love”, Sister Amala of Nirmala Shishu Bhawan, a New Delhi orphanage run by the Missionaries of Charity, said.

Thirty orphanages that are part of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charities system have made a decision to shut down adoptions rather than comply with an Indian law that eases the adoption process for divorced and single people. Gandhi was quoted said, “We are trying and persuading them because they are valuable, good people and have experience”.

Following revision in guidelines on adoption by the Centre, the Missionaries of Charity, had said in a statement yesterday that it had stopped adoption at their orphanages two months ago. According to her the charity was voluntarily giving up its recognized status to run adoption centers. “But if they do not follow the central guidelines, we will be left with no option but to derecognize the orphanages run by them and shift the children to other places”, Gandhi added.

The new “Guidelines Governing Adoption of Children, 2015” were notified by the ministry of women and child development (WCD) in July, which also allows each application to be tracked online.

The Charity’s request comes after a change in law, that apparently, makes it easier for single, separated, and divorced parents to adopt children. It said, “Complying with all the provisions would have been hard for the organisation”.

The MoC statement also said, “The Missionaries of Charity is synonymous with helping the needy and the afflicted”.

Sister Amla, from the North Delhi centre of the Charity, confirmed the organisation’s decision to end adoption services, and de-regulate adoption centres; she told the media that, “The new guidelines hurt our conscience”.

Mother Teresa, head of the Missionaries of Charity order, cradles an armless baby girl at her order’s orphanage in what was then known as Calcutta, India, in 1978. We will continue to look after the children, but we do not accept the new rules. About 50,000 orphaned children are estimated to be in need of homes.

Around the same time that the new guidelines came into force, TOI had reported that for the first time in three years, adoption of children had seen a slight increase with 1,368 children finding new homes in the quarter between January-March 2015.