Life After Death

Although there are examples of unhappy children in adoptive homes (and there are examples of unhappy children in their natural homes too), all the evidence suggests that the vast majority of adopted children thrive. The alternatives include leaving children in the local authority care system where they will be far less stable and happy, or denying them the chance to be born in the first place. Many childcare professionals say they are in favour of adoption. In practice they seem to search for any reason to disqualify many applicants. I have a friend who is of mixed race. The political correctness to which he and his wife were subjected when they sought to adopt a child was breathtaking. Other families may be told that while they are having fertility treatments, local authorities will not consider them for adoption. By the time they reach their late thirties and the fertility treatments have not worked, some local authorities then impose an age barrier debarring them from adoption. It is palpably absurd that a couple can start a natural family in their late thirties or early forties but are told that they are too ancient to adopt. In practice, many couples of that age have a stable and settled home and a wisdom which enables them to be very good parents. Instead of adoption, children are shuttled back and forth between council care, foster parents and the original parents (who might have abused or neglected the child and continue to do so), and are often traumatised making a happy adoption far less likely. This is not making the child's needs the central issue. It would be a good start if councils had to publicly state how many children they have in care, the time they have been there, and the number free to be adopted. And where there is no contested application, the adoption process should be completed within three months. If adoption were removed from social service departments and vested in voluntary bodies who are genuinely committed to finding good adoptive homes for children in need of them, there might be more happy teenagers like the one I met in Dublin. It might also reduce the need for bodies like the HFEA. In the future, the HFEA will continue to have great influence as the public debates the nature of human life and the respect which it should be accorded. Its track-record does not commend it for this task. Its failure to impose a moratorium on the freezing of human embryos; its opposition to the adoption of "spare embryos"; its connivance in destructive experiments, and its acquiescence as human life is traded on a commodity market, is a dismal record.

Despite this lamentable incompetence, the self-serving HFEA is now, like Lady Warnock's Committee before it, to be a model for others.