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 Adopted children are immensely vulnerable. The last thing they need is any additional disadvantages. But this proposal has nothing to do with the interests of children. It is about the demands of adults.
says Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips
| | |  Should unmarried couplles be allowed to adopt?Do you agree? Join the discussion by calling 0870 010 0444, lines open at 1.30pm. | |
LISTEN - Hear Melanie Phillips on adoption
Parliament has once more been convulsed this week over whether unmarried and gay couples should be able to adopt. The issue is ostensibly the need to widen the pool of adoptive parents to end the desperate plight of children who have been abandoned in care.
We know that adoptive children generally do very well while children in care tend to do very badly. So it's obviously important to encourage as many families as possible to adopt them. But this proposal has nothing to do with the interests of children. It is rather a cynical attempt to hijack the issue in order to give cohabiting couples equivalent legal and social status with married people.
The reason so many children are stuck in care is not because the pool of adoptive parents is too small. Plenty of married couples want to adopt but are rebuffed by the political correctness or simple inefficiency of social services departments. Many married couples have been turned away for a plethora of perverse reasons - an inbuilt resistance to white middle class life, or an obsession with placing children with couples of the same race.
Unmarried single people and gay individuals can already adopt. This is because the law recognises that in rare cases this can be in a child's best interests. And no one has ever suggested that such people make anything other than excellent adoptive parents.
But what may be the best solution in a particular set of circumstances is not the best option in general. Adopted children are immensely vulnerable. The last thing they need is any additional disadvantages.
What they need above all is a mother and a father to look after them for the duration of their childhood. Gay couples obviously cannot provide that. But the big issue here is not gay adoption, which was always going to be a miniscule sideshow. The real issue is heterosexual cohabiting couples.
For they are far more likely to break up than married couples. Indeed, the main cause of their break up is the arrival of a child. While 8% of married couples break up within the first five years of their children's lives, this figure shoots up among cohabiting couples to 52%.
Cohabitation is simply not the same as marriage. If a couple are unable to commit themselves to each other for ever, why should we believe they will commit themselves to an adopted child for ever? How can they promise to safeguard that child's welfare when they refuse to make the commitment to each other that is its best guarantee?
The proposal has nothing to do with the needs of children. It is about the demands of adults. It is designed to signal that heterosexual cohabitation and gay relationships have equal status with marriage.
But the increasing acceptance of cohabitation means that family instability is accelerating, and more and more children are becoming casualties.
The proposal would therefore not only act against the interests of adopted children, but also cause more children in general to suffer from fractured family life. It is time to signal firmly that the interests of children must come first.
Do you agree?
Join the discussion by calling 0870 010 0444
lines open at 1.30pm.
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