Adoption in an age of social experiment

Marriage is not a big institution in my family and, paradoxically, it has been the co-habitors who have lasted the longest

It is a sobering thought that any children needing to be adopted would, according to the House of Lords, be better off if they were placed with Peter and Sonia Sutcliffe, the Shipmans, or the Crippens than with me and my partner. For these last three couples have all been married, and me and the missus haven't. Marriage is not a big institution in my family and – paradoxically – it has been the co-habitors who have lasted the longest, and the marriers who have split up. True, after 25 years together my older sister and her boyfriend did get spliced (at Hackney City Farm), an event that was attended by her two grown-up sons and several hundred other people. They said they did it for the pension.

In the Lords, just before the summer, Lady O'Cathain explored this argument in some detail. "On a range of social indicators," she argued, "the children of married couples generally have much better outcomes in life. In general, they have better health, do better at school, are safer from child abuse, have fewer behavioural problems and are less likely to have under-age sex. It is a devastating statistic that the rate of infant mortality is between 25 per cent and 35 per cent lower among the children of married parents than it is among children of co-habiting parents." So, the argument for permitting adoption applications from, say, Fred and Rosemary West and not the Aaronovitch-Powells, is that, according to Lady O'Cathain, "all the research shows that non-married couples do not provide stability".

Lady O'Cathain, like many who call themselves "family campaigners", seem determined to insult others who do not share all their attachments to institutional formalities. When the good peeress asks rhetorically "Why do cohabiting couples not want to get married?" and then, without waiting for a reply, answers herself with another question – "They do not want to make the commitment to each other so why would they make a commitment to adopt a child?" – she ignores the answer that there are nearly as many responses to that as there are people. Why am I not married after 12 years and three kids? Because we didn't want the hassle, because my partner didn't want a wedding with her as the centre-piece, because what is important is not a piece of paper but how you behave, because we're waiting till the kids grow up, because we probably will get married one day.

Of course we are atypical. Most co-habitors are much younger and are indeed more likely to split up. The same is true of many gay male relationships. But these emotional transients are not the couples who are likely to apply to adopt children; those will surely tend to be the most committed. And even then they will be vetted (as will the married couples) for the stability and permanence of their relationships. This test, rather than a blanket prejudice about the motives of the unmarried or the innate promiscuity of the homosexual (an observation never true of lesbians in any case), seems more likely to optimise the number of good homes available for prospective adoptees.

So far, so liberal and exactly what you would expect from me. It's all been gays, blacks and Jews join hands and dance around the maypole with your knickers off sort of stuff. And the solidarity of the Rainbow Front is exactly what you get when faced off with people like the Christian Institute, (with which the late Baroness Young was associated). The CI recently conducted a poll and claimed that "the results show that... most ordinary people know that placing vulnerable children and orphans with homosexual couples would be terribly damaging to the child. Most parents certainly wouldn't want it for their own children. If homosexual adoption is legalised, children will suffer." As the MP David Hinchcliffe revealed in the Commons on Monday night, the poll question had been: "If you died, would you like your children to be adopted by two homosexual men?" The Institute has also issued a pamphlet with a picture of two men and a child, entitled: "If you died, who would they give your children to?" To which my reply is: "Anyone but the Christian Institute".

But the odious nature of our opponents' arguments shouldn't blind us to the possibility that one at least of their accusations might have some justice. Their regard for the institution of marriage and their phobia about transgressive sexuality mean that they certainly place the wellbeing of children second to their own idées fixes. Liberals, however, must be certain that we do not do the same. Actually I think we may, indeed, be open to the accusation that sometimes we do give more emphasis to the rights of adults than we do to the welfare of kids. If we want it, we imagine that they should be able to cope with it.

Here people must consult their own consciences (and many do). But would we say, in general, that it doesn't matter at all if children are brought up without fathers? You don't have to be a devotee of psychoanalysis to understand the argument that comprehending difference is a very important part of a child's psychological development. What do we think we know about the impact on a child of not having a mother? Haven't some of the claims about how children are hardy little souls who almost invariably "recover " from divorce seemed just a little self-serving? Is nothing lost to the child if in the future, say, a lesbian couple were to reproduce through cloning one of the partners? What did Diane Blood plan to tell her child about how it came – deliberately – to be born of a long dead man's sperm? Is it sometimes in a child's best interest never to be born?

Liberals have to be tremendously careful not to allow their natural tendency towards a cosy relativism to run riot. Everything is not the same as everything else. And yet, at the moment, social and economic changes are bringing about unpredictable transformations in family structures. A huge and almost unprecedented experiment is going on. We have lesbian families, gay families, dad-only and mum-only families, test-tube families, old-enough-to-be-your granny families, dead-dad families and multi-stepparent families. We have families where the parents behave like the kids, families where the kids behave like the parents, families where love rules and families where egoism is king.

Not all of these phenomena are good. Some of them, indeed, could turn out to be disastrous, not least for the children who have to endure them. The truth is that we simply don't know. However, just because the moralistic right has made us fed up with its rushes to biblical judgement, that doesn't mean that we can forgo making our own judgements. Many of these will not be legally enforceable, simply because we will not assume the right to control the fertility of others (no matter how we are tempted), but will rely instead upon discussion and example. However we will certainly want the child agencies that operate on our behalf to make hard decisions about what is and what isn't good for children.

Or, to put it another way: if we thought for one minute that our being married would confer any real benefit on our children, we would hire the church, synagogue or Zoroastrian temple tomorrow. And be glad to.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com