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Being a parent isn't child's play
Melanie McDonagh16 Feb 2009
Children having children: the consensus about Chantelle and Alfie, or whichever child-faced youth fatherered baby Maisie Roxanne, is pretty well unanimous.
As the PM put it, "we all want to avoid teenage pregnancy". Quite so. So it's time to bring up the A-word in the context of teenage pregnancy. That's right, adoption.
Babies are better off without underage mothers; they're better off outside families where children become pregnant; they're better off being raised away from an environment where their birth means social or financial ruin. My own father was a notably unwelcome arrival for his own teenage mother, a young Protestant girl in rural Ireland at a time when that sort of thing was a familial catastrophe.
He was packed off, a day old, in a basket borne by his aunt, who tried to offload him on to a hospital. Thwarted there, she ended up in a draper's shop run by a co-religionist, put the baby on the counter and remarked that she didn't know what she was going to do with him. The shop assistant piped up that her sister didn't have any children of her own and would like a baby. So she ran off to get her, and my grandmother bore my father back home under her cardigan.
My grandfather was at sea at the time. The family was poor, though my father's natural grandfather, who ran a post office, did send the odd sheet of postage stamps by way of support.
And you know what? It worked great. My father was happy as anything. Far better off, I'd say, than he'd have been with his own people. Adoption was the happy ending for him. It could be the saving of Maisie Roxanne.
* There's a fine new exhibition opening at the British Museum on Thursday: Shah 'Abbas, The Remaking of Iran. It's about the famous 16th-century Safavid ruler who presided over a cosmopolitan court, played host to Europeans and ruled over a relatively pluralistic kingdom. Right now, museum exhibitions are the new diplomacy; and the willingness to export important artefacts - as the Chinese and the Turks do - is testimony to a country's willingness to change the way it's perceived. Iran has, shall we say, an image problem. This exhibition, which has some lovely pieces, projects an appealing take on its past. It can only make us look more benignly at it now.
* We may be in a recession but there's no reason to dress depressed. My own rule is, don't wear black. For anyone with an Irish complexion, it makes you look like a mushroom; a widowed mushroom. So it's the best news that the new collections are a riot of colour. In M&S they can't sell enough scarlet, jade, citrus. My pin-up of the week, then, is Renée Zellweger, right, who flaunted herself in scarlet. It cheered her up; it cheered us up.
Reader views (1)
Glad to hear that your father had such a good experience of adoption - but it's not for everyone, it does not always work (like for myself & a few others from care), nor is it a solution to underage pregnancies.
At some point we'e gonna run out of people who are willing to adopt (in particular babies from ethnic minorities)
We need to deal with the problem of why so many kids are falling pregnant, what exactly are parents doing to combat teenage pregnancies in their family!?
Gov/social services can only do so much, and should only do so much! Adoption just passes the 'initial' problem on without making the parents own up to their responsibility, just give the child away & have another one in a couple of yrs when your ready - sad.
- Lennie, london, 16/02/2009 16:07
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