healthy children. Though physically disabled children might find a home
with European families, children with severe mental disabilities stayed at
the Shishu Bhavan.
In emphasizing adoption, Mother Teresa was also battling abortion,
which she strongly opposed. She once wrote that with abortion:
the mother kills even her own child to solve her problems.
And, by abortion, the father is told he does not have to take
any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the
world. That father is likely to put other women into the same
trouble. So abortion leads to abortion. Any country that ac-
cepts abortion is not teaching its people to love but to use vio-
lence to get what they want.^2For Mother Teresa, adoption was the best way to combat not only abor-
tion, but the growing practice of sterilizing women to cut down on esca-
lating birth rates. The Indian government advocated female sterilization
as a way to combat population growth. To combat abortion clinics,
Mother Teresa and her sisters sent word to medical clinics, hospitals, and
police stations that the Missionaries of Charity would accept all un-
wanted children.
In addition to adoption, Mother Teresa also became involved in family
planning. The Missionaries began instruction in what Mother Teresa
called Holy Family Planning, which emphasized natural family planning
based on the rhythm method, the only family-planning practice sanc-
tioned by the Roman Catholic Church. The Missionaries also set up a
number of family-planning centers where young married couples not only
learned how the rhythm method worked, but also learned that abstaining
from sex was another way to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Despite the
simplicity of these methods, teaching them to the poor had its drawbacks.
One familiar story involved a woman who had already given birth to a
large number of children. Wishing to avoid another pregnancy, she re-
ceived instruction in the rhythm method and was given a string of beads
of various colors to help her keep track of her ovulation. Several months
later, she returned to one of the family planning centers, obviously preg-
nant. She told the sisters that she had hung the beads around a statue of
Kali, and forgot about them. Then, she could not understand why she be-
came pregnant.
As they had with her practices at Nirmal Hriday, detractors criticized
Mother Teresa’s stance on abortion and sterilization. Many argued that
there were too many unwanted children in India and that there was no
SHISHU BHAVAN AND SHANTINAGAR 83