The Missionaries of Charity (MC) congregation has agreed to resume its service of giving children for adoption. The congregation founded by St Teresa of Kolkata, commonly known as Mother Teresa, dis-continued giving babies from their orphanages for adoption in Oct. 2015 after disagreeing with a new federal law that allowed single and divorced woman to adopt children.
The congregation has revised its stance and will join the centralized adoption service system set up by the government, said Maneka Gandhi, who heads the Ministry of Women and Child Development.
A delegation of three MC nuns including Sister Mary Prema Pierick met the minister on Oct. 29 and decided that children in its 79 homes can go into family care. The nuns in a Nov. 2 press release said they had agreed to register all their childcare homes with respective state governments as man-dated by the Juvenile Justice Act of 2015. Most MC homes for children are already registered and the remaining homes are in the process of completing registration formalities, the release said.
