MARGINALIA
Why is adoption a last resort?
Indian couples seem to think of adopting a child as the last choice left on the reproductive table.
Divya Saibabu wonders why.
“I already have two children, so I never felt the need to adopt”
“Especially there are couples who do not have children, for them it is much more appropriate to adopt”
Madhuri Abyankar, a social worker from Pune, began working for underprivileged children in 1984. After completing her Masters in Social Work from Nirmala Niketan (Mumbai), she was eagerly looking for a job that would let her work closely with those children who were family deprived or deserted. She landed her first job at Society of Friends of Sassoon Hospital (SOFOSH), Pune. SOFOSH was initiated in 1964 by a group of medical workers and publicly-minded citizens to provide a range of humanitarian services and to supplement the medical services provided by Sassoon hospital which itself had been established by the shipping magnate and philanthropist David Sassoon a century earlier to support indigent patients.
At SOFOSH they had children between one and six years of age. Children above the age of six are not registered under the orphanage. Abyankar says, “To place an eight-year-old boy is very challenging. He may have his own ideas, he may have his own situation and he may not want to change or adapt to the new family.”
Most of the children at the orphanage, as Abyankar says, “were lost and found, they were brought here by the police. Some children are relinquished by their birth parents. They were found in the hospitals, railway stations, in a farm, or somewhere in a crowded area. Someone will hear a child cry and report it to the police. Many times people are not attentive and they may miss the situation or they do not want to report it to the police. These children who are lost and found have to wait from half an hour to even 24 hours till they reach a proper child care centre, a place of rescue.”
There are multiple reasons for children to be abandoned. In her experience at SOFOSH she says, "Sometimes it is by an unmarried mother or a deserted wife. Sometimes the birth mother has been taken advantage of: the man can just leave the girl or a woman but she has to face the situation."
Government policies can also lead to abandonment of children. The documentary, One Child Nation, proved that to be the case in China which had until recently, a strict one-child-per-family unit policy. India does not have any such laws on the books but the State has ways of suggesting the ideal family. The Assam government had in 2017 drafted a policy on population growth, saying that it will not allow government jobs to people with more than two children w.e.f January 1, 2021. Such policies affect the children in the worst way possible. Unwanted children end up abandoned in dumpsters, on the streets and in parks.
31 million out of the 61 million orphans in Asia live in India. Now let us add another statistic to that one.
Abyankar says that on average 15-20% of couples in India (according to the gynaecologists’ statistics) face infertility issues. She feels it is a telling state of affairs that most of these people see adoption as the last option.
Abyankar and her fellow social workers urge gynaecologists to put up adoption posters and brochures in their clinics and hospitals, but these suggestions were more than often overlooked.
“Now we have In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) and what not and it is very painful to the woman. You are pumped full of hormones which make you an emotional wreck. You may need to do it several times over before you have a child and this is expensive. On the other hand, adoption is a wonderful experience that you can have, it means doing something that is socially positive and you don’t damage your body either,” says Abyankar.
She tells us the story of Betty Remedios to whom she was assigned as a social worker. Remedios adopted her only child from SOFOSH.
Story of Betty Remedios
When Remedios came back from abroad in the 1990s, she did not want to work in the corporate sector. While looking for a job in the social sector, she was introduced to a forum that was working for underprivileged children in Pune. There were about 40 NGOs working for the rights of children that came under the ambit of this forum of NGOs called ARC (Action for the Rights of the Child)
Through ARC, she found work with Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey (SNDT) University which was working on a project for the welfare of ‘street children’.
She found that a group of street children tend to live on platform no. 2 of Pune station as they find work there (selling water bottles, cleaning trains or polishing shoes) and can find free food. Going to platform 2 every morning was their easiest form of contact with them “We used to have regular meetings with the government officials so that they saw the problems of the children,” says Remedios.
Through ARC, Remedios and her colleague interacted with other NGOs. They found out that SOFOSH ran a project through which it provided nutritious food, free of cost, to poor children who were suffering from tuberculosis and had come to the hospital for treatment. SOFOSH was situated just a kilometer from the Pune Central Junction, inside the hospital compound itself.
Remedios knew that the children generally paid a rupee for a vada pao for breakfast. She went to SOFOSH with a deal. What if the street children paid SOFOSH that rupee? Could they have a nutritious breakfast for that sum? SOFOSH agreed and decided that they would turn the money right round and buy things like toys and board games for these children.
“We would collect them from the station, come with them to SOFOSH at nine am where they would pay that one rupee to have their breakfast. If they didn’t have money they would get udhaar (credit). But they had to pay it because we found that what is not paid for is not valued,” says Remedios.
While the street kids had their meals, Remedios used to interact with abandoned babies at SOFOSH. Which was how she thought of adoption.
“I did not doubt that giving those children a nutritious breakfast was a good thing but it was just band-aid work. You need to do so much to raise a child right, to give it a running chance. I thought: why not give a complete life to a child? So that’s how I thought of adoption.”
And Somishala came into her life.
“I had a friend over one night and we were discussing names. In fact she is also a single adoptive mother right now. I wanted a secular name for my child. So we came up with this compound word: It has Om from the Hindu faith, Ishwar from the Christian faith and Allah from the Islamic tradition. I added an S because I thought it sounded nice. This fit with my belief system too. "I am secular in that I never judge a person based on her or his religion. I go by the person,” says Betty Remedios.
If only the adoption laws were as secular as Remedios, she wouldn’t have to wait for years to become a mother to Somishala.
In 1994, when Remedios applied to adopt her child, adoption was governed by The Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act (HAMA), 1956. Under this act, anyone who is a Christian, Parsi, Muslim or Jew by religion could not legally adopt a child; they could only apply for guardianship. Except for Christianity, the three religions themselves do not allow adoption as per their personal religious law. Hence, they were governed under a separate act: The Guardianship and Wards Act (GAWA), 1890 which meant that in the eyes of the law, Remedios would only be seen as a guardian to her adopted child and not as her parent. Somishala would be considered her “ward”.
For years it has been argued that it is beyond unconscionable for the State to deny equivalent rights to children adopted by families that do not fall under HAMA. This is the right to be the child and not a 'ward' of their adoptive parents. In 1999, there were a number of parents who filed a petition to the court to get legal adoption for their child, whom they had adopted under GAWA. Then in the matter of Manuel Theodore…vs Unknown, the Bombay High Court set a precedent that would allow even Christians to apply for legal adoption.
According to the website indiankanoon.org, Justice F Rebello held in 1999: “A child needs love, shelter, care, a sense of identity and belonging. These are normally obtained in families. Studies have shown that institutional care does not provide all the needs of a child, especially personal attention. The right of a family to every child is a necessity. Adoption is one of the best means of rehabilitating a child without a family and giving stability needed for its normal growth and development.”
“I could get legal adoption for Somishala because this precedent was set,” says Remedios.
In that at least there has been some change.
Madhuri Abyankar says, “Fortunately, the new Juvenile Justice Law has superseded all the personal laws as far as adoption is concerned. Now legal adoption is possible irrespective of personal religious laws.”
Presently, all the procedures regarding adoption of children in India are governed as laid down in the Juvenile Justice Amendment Act 2006 and its Rules.
Now the laws have changed but our hearts may still be stuck in an old paradigm.
