Parents make the best parents

Two developments this week demonstrate the absurdity, not to mention the inhumanity, of the government’s policy towards child-rearing. Firstly, sperm donors were informed that children conceived with the aid of their donations will be given the right to trace them. Secondly, the minister for children Margaret Hodge announced that it would be impossible to reunite thousands of children with parents from whom they were removed as a result of child-abuse prosecutions, even in cases where those prosecutions are ruled to be unsafe.

In the first case, the government is intent on thrusting some of the responsibilities of parenthood upon men who simply wished to help others and who believed the law protected their anonymity. In the second, Ms Hodge asserts the right of the state to decide how children should be brought up, even if the parents from whom they were removed on suspicion of child abuse are proven innocent. The child’s interest, said Ms Hodge by way of explanation, must come first. Yet if it is important for a child conceived with the aid of a sperm donor to trace his biological father, surely it is even more vital for a child wrongfully removed from innocent parents to be allowed to resume his right and proper family life. In the former case, to use the buzzword beloved of social scientists, the government decrees there must be ‘closure’; in the latter it insists that there must not.

Nobody contends that child protection is a grave and difficult business in which police and other agencies of the state have a proper interest. To put it bluntly, some mothers do kill ’em; and fathers too. The case of Victoria Climbié, murdered by her guardians when she might have been saved by more attentive social workers, acts as a reminder to anybody tempted to make the flippant suggestion that the law should never interfere in family life.