SPEdtAT
The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WCIN 2LL Telephone: 071-405 1706; Telex 27124; Fax 071-242 0603
THE FAMILY WAY
The problem has changed significantly since the early 1970s. First, there are many more single-parent families. In about 430,000 of the 1.3 million such families, the Woman has never married. This number has doubled since 1986. In many cases she is reliant entirely upon the state. Second, a once popular solution to this problem has been disregarded. In 1971 22,000 children were adopted in Britain. In 1991 that num- ber had fallen to just over 6,000. A rise in the number of abortions does not nearly account for the fall. The fact is that, until the welfare state took over what had previ- ously been family or individual responsibili- ties, women who could not afford to bring up their own child had little choice but to have it adopted. In many cases the girl's own parents would bring the child up; but the welfare state has undermined the idea of the extended family.
Adoption remains a possibility, but the unmarried mother has been increasingly encouraged to think that it is her right to bring up her child at someone else's expense. The cost to the taxpayer of sup- porting single-parent households is £6 bil- lion a year, equivalent to threepence on the basic rate of income tax. Feminists argue that women living in deprived circum- stances have children as a way — often the only way — to provide themselves with a sense of achievement. In their view it does not detract from that sense of achievement that this luxury is only made possible by the taxpayer. What the apologists for unmar- ried mothers fail to understand is that the
welfare system does not liberate them and their children but, rather, enslaves them. Many single mothers are the children of the single mothers of the 1970s. And their girl- children may well be single mothers too, unless the State puts the burden for child- rearing back on private individuals.
Mr John Redwood, the Welsh Secretary, has identified the problem and hinted at the solution. Fathers can now be forced, under the Child Support Act, to pay towards the upkeep of their children, so a mother choosing to keep her child should not have to rely on social security for every- thing. However, many absent fathers are themselves on social security, and unable to make anything other than a notional contri- bution. The child in question will still be
brought up in relative poverty and (as statistics prove) will be much more likely than a child from a two-parent family to lapse into a life of under-achievement and, quite possibly, crime. If the interests of the child are as paramount as all the soi-disant caring professions claim them to be, then adoption by a secure, loving, married cou- ple must be a better solution to the prob- lems of child deprivation.
There can, of course, be no question of compulsion. But adoption can be made more attractive to unmarried mothers if they are faced with the prospect of the State scaling down its generous support of them. Removing the obligation of local authorities to provide accommodation for them would signal the Government's inten- tion to put down the burden of the self- indulgence of unmarried mothers and their men. No one has yet made the link between the Government's funding of these mothers and the shortage of children for adoption. But the link is there.
Partly because so few children are offered for adoption, and partly because politically motivated social workers set absurd and often irrelevant criteria (varying from one local authority to another) when judging whether adoptions may take place, there are many suitable childless couples who can only adopt foreign children. With so many British children in need of good homes, this is a scandalous state of affairs.
The Government has announced its intention to review adoption policy. It must do so urgently, to ensure that couples are not barred on the grounds of local govern- ment workers' avant-garde concepts about race, class or age. The only grounds upon which a couple should be deemed unsuit- able should be if they cannot offer a moral- ly secure, safe and loving environment for the child. Once a sensible national policy like this has been established, the Govern- ment can then set about promoting adop- tion as an alternative route out of depriva- tion for both mother and child. Such a poli- cy would be resisted by those who view childbirth as a woman's right and the child's subsequent sustenance as society's respon- sibility. It will, though, be a problem not so much of re-educating the mothers, but their social workers.
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