II. Are There Lots of Babies to Adopt?, Page 2
- Better contraception means that fewer babies are conceived in the first place to mothers who are unable to care for them.
- Of those babies conceived, fewer are born, due to the availability of abortion virtually on demand.
- A change in society’s attitudes to unmarried parents has now made it socially acceptable for an unmarried mother to keep her child, and in general that must be a good thing. The stark and loveless alternatives often presented by angry parents to the pregnant unwed woman of the 1960s and before — a shotgun wedding, give the baby up for adoption, or be cast out of the family in disgrace — are rare nowadays.
- Welfare payments from the government (including improved council housing and other support services) have made it financially possible for a single mother to keep her child, even without the backing of her family.
Few children born to unmarried mothers grow up feeling any real stigma. Even the legal concept of illegitimacy has been abolished.
As prospective adopters, from our own self-interested viewpoint, we may have different feelings about the rightness of some of these changes, particularly abortion. Seen from the point of view of the children born to unmarried mothers, the changes in general must be for the good. There is no doubt that in general children are better off brought up in their birth families, and there are some children who are given up for adoption, especially of young unmarried mothers or cohabiting couples without supportive parents, who could and should stay with their birth families. Some of these families fall through the social security safety net but are otherwise quite as competent as any other parents to raise their children. To effectively force these people to give their children up for adoption through lack of finance or decent housing is simply state-sponsored child abuse.
The line between what society considers acceptable or not, in terms of standards of child care and single-parent families, shifts constantly according to the current preoccupations of the government and the press and how close it is until the next general election. For politicians to suggest that young unmarried mothers should be coerced into giving their children up for adoption as punishment for their sins and to prove to them that they can’t reproduce themselves into cheap council housing is a very retrograde step, even if it has the effect of improving the supply-side of the equation. Most unmarried mothers try hard and do succeed. Very few fit the popular right-wing stereotype of the uncaring, neglectful, scrounging slut.
On the other hand, as governments shift their priorities children may be more easily left in the care of marginal and incompetent birth families. This I genuinely have doubts about. It seems that too much money goes into supporting families who are obviously no-hopers, and that the social benefit would be greater (that is, the children’s life chances would be better), if society cut its losses early on and removed children from such dysfunctional families sooner, giving them to families where they have better opportunities for growing up to be happy and productive citizens, instead of repeating the cycle of marginal, socially excluded existence.
Too many of these children eventually have to be removed from their families after years of neglect and abuse, in spite of the best efforts of social services in trying to turn these incompetent parents around, and wind up needing adoptive families. But instead of being young and relatively unscarred by their beginnings, years of mistreatment or bad parenting or bouncing back and forth between foster care, children’s homes and birth parents, have left them severely damaged. By then only very special adoptive and foster families and a great deal of expensive therapeutic intervention have any chance of making good the damage which timely removal from their families could have prevented.
© Roger Ridley Fenton
