Perfection or two gay dads

Rows about freezing eggs or surrogate mothers serve only to divert attention from grave everyday issues about real children

The complex world of childbirth and upbringing was thrown into yet more turmoil this week. Controversy over fertilisation, homosexual parenting and William Hague's call for the responsibility of children in care to be handed over to churches and charities, will do nothing to ease the already heavy burden suffered by countless unhappy families.

Without wishing to disparage the fine work achieved by these sectors, I do feel it incumbent to point out to little Willie that while this option may sound logical, the fact is that there are plenty of adults in these isles whose experience of charity or church care suggests that irregularities are not unknown to have occurred here either. With Britain's population of children in care hovering around the 53,000 mark, and the total number of children placed under adoption last year reaching an unimpressive 2,000, a better solution might be to relax some of the ridiculous bars to adoption.

These vary round the country but include such diktats as potential mummies and daddies having to come from the same ethnic group as the adoptive child. We imported this piece of idealistic impracticality from the United States, although it has now been dropped on the other side of the Atlantic due to its lack of workability. It did not help that the joint age of potential adopters could not be more than 65. This is ludicrous in an age in which the trend is for natural mothers to postpone having a family until their thirties.

Not only do couples therefore find rather too late that they cannot have a baby of their own; they also find that while the 40-year-old next door with a partner of 55 has just given birth, they are themselves considered too old to be parents. Of course, it is easy to slag off social services, but it does seem that some of the rules surrounding adoption strive so hard for perfect placements that all efforts are doomed to failure from the start. In the light of the very real privations that standard care visits on children, it seems daft to insist that they remain there unless they can join The Brady Bunch.

Barrie Drewitt and Tony Barlow, the British gay couple who last week won the right to be named in California as the joint parents of twins, are a case in point. They hit the headlines a few months back when it emerged that with the help of egg-donor Tracie Matthews, surrogate womb Rosalind Bellamy and an overall expenditure of pounds 200,000, the two men were expecting twins. The twins, Saffron and Aspen Two-Dads Drewitt-Barlow, are doing well, although their dads say that they will leave Britain if they are not granted British citizenship. If I were Barrie and Tony I'd leave Britain if Section 28 was still in existence by the time the children's education started.

Can the child of two gay dads be recognised as existing within the British education system at all? Wouldn't just having them in a classroom be promoting homosexuality?

Whatever you may feel about homosexual parenting, these men do now have a family. The sad thing is that, thanks to the regulations surrounding adoption within the Essex health authority, some child is, as we speak, languishing in care instead of settling down to unorthodox family life with these committed parents and millionaires.

Of course, two gay dads are not ideal, but they surely can offer a more stable and loving background than the care system, which has been shown again and again to produce adults who are susceptible to educational difficulties, drug problems, homelessness and the rest of the entire gamut of social ills that we so successfully promote in this country. Further, it might be argued that a child removed from care into the hairy but loving arms of two dads, would be better able to adjust to their circumstances than the twins whose conception is not an everyday story of parental failure but an exotic tale of high finance and possibly compromised altruism. What net gain has been made from the decision of Essex County Council? None at all. Gay men will find ways to have children whatever council policy may be. Can't we find a way of accepting this perhaps imperfect fact of life? Meanwhile a Belfast woman, Carolyn Neill, is determined to have a baby who is biologically her own, even though cancer treatment has rendered her infertile. The 34-year-old took the precaution offered to her in the outer reaches of reproductive science of having her ova removed and frozen by the Assisted Reproduction and Gynaecology Centre in London.

Ready now to begin the complicated process of attempting to have a child by these pioneering techniques, she and her doctors have run into a problem. While the clinic has a licence to freeze the eggs, it does not yet have a licence to thaw them and fertilise them. It is legal in Italy and the US to do this and so far around 40 babies have been born in this way. However, the technology is new, and it has been impossible for any long- range studies on the possible complications of birth by this technique to take place.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has therefore ruled that it cannot allow the next part of the process to be licensed at this time. As Ruth Deech, of the HFEA, said: "We are really concerned that any child born from this treatment might exhibit signs of genetic abnormality in later life. We all remember Thalidomide and we must never allow something like that to happen again." But neither Carolyn nor her medical adviser, Dr Mohammed Taranissi, are at all convinced by this, and will appeal against the decision. "What is the point in having your eggs frozen in the first place if you are then banned from using them?" asks Ms Neill.

"The only purpose of freezing eggs is to use them for future treatment," Dr Taranissi points out. "If there was any doubt about the safety of the treatment they shouldn't have given a licence for freezing them in the first place."

Or, to look at it from a quite different angle, what is the point of telling a young woman who has recently heard the news that she has cancer and that the chemotherapy may make her infertile, that this detail is no bar to her having children? What is the point of applying for a licence to freeze this woman's eggs without at the same time applying for the licence you know you will need to unfreeze them? The great trouble with assisted reproduction technology is that it is risky and often disappoints. It is expensive as well, sometimes just as expensive as getting others to have babies for you in California. Ms Ellis's eggs remain frozen in the clinic at a cost to her of pounds 2,800 per year. Even if she does get her licence, there is much doubt that she will ever get her baby. Meanwhile, time is running out for her and for the 53,000 children in care. Wouldn't it be humane to counsel this woman that there is only the slimmest of chances that she will ever have a baby of her own, and suggest to her that there are many thousands of other children in the world waiting for the chance to love and to be loved?