What records exist about the Missionaries of Charity’s Mother Teresa Home for Infant Children in Washington, D.C., and how many adoptions did it process?

1. How the home is recorded in contemporary press and organizational accounts

Multiple outlets record that a Mother Teresa Home for Infant Children was established in Washington in mid‑1995, a project publicly tied to Mother Teresa and to Hillary Clinton’s efforts at the time, and the opening date is reported as June 1995 in press summaries ^{[1] [3]}; religious‑community websites list U.S. Missionaries of Charity houses and ongoing D.C. ministries but do not supply adoption logs for the Washington infant home ^{[7] [8]}.

2. What on‑the‑record investigations found when seeking records or testimony

Investigative reporters who visited or phoned the Washington Missionaries of Charity encountered closed doors and refusals to speak on the record: a nun told a caller she could not give her name or answer questions and that the sisters currently at the house were not the ones who had run the adoption home, leaving journalists without institutional records or interviews to document adoptions ^{[4] [5]}.

3. What reporting says about adoptions the home may have processed — and its gaps

Several pieces explicitly state that it remains unclear whether the D.C. home “facilitated any adoptions,” with outlets repeating the absence of verifiable adoption counts; one contemporary summary notes the home housed eight pregnant mothers and their babies at opening but still finds no documented evidence of placement numbers ^{[2] [3]}. Some commentators and partisan accounts assert the project “didn’t bear fruit” and suggest the home closed by about 2002, but those reports cite no adoption‑registry data and rely on local recollections or secondary sources ^[6].

4. Broader organizational context often conflated with the DC story

Public statements about the Missionaries of Charity’s high adoption activity refer primarily to international work—Mother Teresa’s houses in India where large numbers of children were placed—yet those global claims do not substitute for Washington‑specific records, and several sources caution against conflating international adoption practices with what happened in D.C. ^{[3] [7]}. Separately, reporting from India documents policy disputes in later years over registrations and adoption systems there, including the order’s choice to stop placing children under some government adoption mechanisms, but those developments are about Indian institutions rather than the small D.C. home ^{[9] [10]}.

5. The bottom line on records and adoption counts

The available reporting documents the existence and opening date of the Mother Teresa Home for Infant Children in Washington, D.C., and records journalists’ inability to obtain operational records or confirmation from the Missionaries of Charity; however, none of the supplied sources contain verifiable adoption‑registration numbers or official public records showing how many adoptions—if any—were processed by that specific D.C. facility ^{[1] [4] [2]}. That absence is itself a factual point in the record: reporting repeatedly emphasizes the lack of clear documentary evidence about adoptions from the Washington home ^{[2] [5]}.

6. Alternative explanations and why the record is thin

Sources suggest several plausible reasons for the sparse public record—short lifespan of the program, voluntary closure or shift in ministry focus by local sisters, privacy and confidentiality norms around adoption, and the Missionaries’ own limited press engagement—none of which is definitively confirmed by primary documents in the sources provided, so the claim that records do not exist in public reporting stands but cannot be proven exhaustive without archive searches or agency records requests that the present sources do not show ^{[4] [5] [2]}.