Adoption crisis is a scandal (From The Northern Echo)

Adoption crisis is a scandal

10:46am Tuesday 4th October 2011 in Peter Mullen By Peter Mullen

ONLY 60 babies under the age of one were adopted in this country last year. Yet thousands of couples are queuing up to receive children into their homes and bring them up with love and affection.

But their kindly ambitions are frustrated by politically correct social-working academics who will always find a hundred reasons why any particular child must on no account be adopted. It may be because those wishing to adopt are white and the child is black. Or it could just as easily be the other way around. There is only one word for this dogmatic policy, and it is “racism”.

Why shouldn’t a little white boy grow up perfectly happily in a family with two black parents – or one black and one white parent, or two parents who are sky blue pink with yellow dots on? I thought we had long ago put all this sort of mindless prejudice behind us.

And I have heard reports of even worse sorts of social engineering in the matter of adoptions. An adoption will be denied, for instance, because the candidate for adoption is adjudged cleverer, or not so clever, as other siblings in the family. It is ironic – no, it is worse than ironic, it is wicked – that socialworking ideologists are denying a family life to thousands of orphans.

What’s the alternative? It is, of course, to place the orphans in care homes. And in the majority of cases “in care” just means a place where nobody cares. All the evidence runs in the opposite direction. Children who are adopted, on the whole, grow into decent, honest, schooled adults. Of course they do. What else should we expect? It is blindingly obvious to anyone, except a social worker, that the family unit is the best place to bring up a child. But ideological social workers hate the family. Families are too natural, too traditional.

These social-engineering professionals much prefer their own created and abstract institutions such as the care home.

But again, the evidence is all against them.

The number of children actually physically and sexually abused in so-called care homes should make us weep. I saw this first hand many years ago when I was training for the priesthood. We were sent out on tasks known as “pastoralia”.

My particular assignment was to visit a care home in a Liverpool suburb, talk to the kids, play table tennis and snooker with them. It was quite enjoyable in parts. But there was – how shall I put this? – an atmosphere, dark and sinister. I was only 22 and pretty naive and I couldn’t work out what was wrong.

Then the truth came out, suddenly and shockingly: many of the children were being sexually molested by the “caring staff” appointed to look after them.

And this is not the end of it. Such a high proportion of children in care – what a lying, Orwellian phrase that is – emerge from their decade or more of incarceration to turn to crime, drugs, prostitution and worse.

The number of teenage pregnancies among girls aged between 16 and 19 who spent their early years in care is double that for those who were raised in natural or adopting families.

I apologise for having to repeat myself, but this is all the result of a century and more of the socialist mindset: the idea that the state knows best.

The state does not know best. And that is why our most eminent political philosophers and statesmen – I am thinking of Edmund Burke – sought to reduce the power of the state. It is a pity that we seem to have learnt nothing from them