Martina Navratilova, the Sapphic star of the centre court, wants to adopt children, writes Kevin Myers. Why not? She is 45, and no doubt has a lot of time on her hands, so what else is a menopausal lesbian to do but check out the baby market and see what's available? Nor is she the first ageing celeb to announce that, with her own reproductive days finished, she intends to adopt a few babies.
Liza Minelli - and her dingbat, face-lifted, hair-dyed husband - apparently are going to adopt lots of them: Jewish babies and Arab babies, black babies and yellow babies, and probably they'll do a raid on Belfast for a little orange baby and a green baby as well, the poor misfortunate little bastards.
In part, of course, adoption is probably a matter of decor - there's nothing quite so disappointing as a slightly pink standard-issue Paddy baby surrounded by lilac and cerise wallpaper, when what you really need is a striking little African to set the colours off. And sometimes it's nice to spring a surprise on your guests; they go into what seems to be an infant-free yellow room, until a happy proto-Chinese babble declares that the resident baby is simply invisible against the wallpaper.
Designing babies
Indeed, genetic modification seems to promise that soon science will be able to design babies to accessorise your rooms perfectly. It has always been one of God's many deficiencies that babies never came in aubergine, maroon or avocado hues. One could search an orphanage in vain for a baby with fashionable zebra stripes or a stylish plaid hide or a modish gingham finish. Nature seems never to have heard of paisley or pinstripe. The National Maternity Hospital is still awaiting un peau art nouveau.
This could all soon change with GM, and the world will be a far better place - but not necessarily soon enough for Martina and her lover (name, alas, unknown). Yet maybe the latter could herself have a baby, either by conventional means, or by the peculiar technology of AID, the details of which I steadfastly decline to learn.
Now if a fertile woman wants to have a baby, no one can stop her; nor can anyone prevent her raising her baby in a particular fashion, consonant with the law. That's one of the privileges of being a woman. But merely recognising that truth doesn't extend to enabling, as of right, any woman - or man for that matter - to acquire a few babies from the baby-shop whenever the baby-mood strikes.
Equality Authority
We may look to our own Equality Authority, as always, for guidance on this issue. If the authority, the generator of the greatest amount of politically correct bilge in all of western Europe, is in favour of something, then a pound to a penny, the very opposite is the way to go. Go north, declares the Equality Commission; then head for Antarctica. Go up, it announces; then, my boy, reach for your spade.
The Equality Authority has proposed that same-sex couples should have the same right in law to adopt children as heterosexual couples. Naturally, the right of the natural mother over her choice of nurturing-parent tends not to exercise the enthusiasms of the equality industry, whose agenda is focused on batty-isms elsewhere.
Any adoption society will tell you how difficult life can be for adopted children. Strange dynamics are unleashed in the process of separation of natural mother from her child, and of bonding between adopted and adopter, and they have strange effects on them all. That's why adoption societies are so scrupulously careful about surrendering a baby to adoptive parents.
Adopted babies have often had trouble in assimilating, in learning, in socialising, and in developing relationships. Of course, they don't function as one of the minority groups which the loonies of the Equality Authority get their pantaloons entwined over, because they're neither lesbian disabled, nor heterosexual Traveller, nor homosexual black, but instead are all of these combined, and yet none of them either.
Two people have first rights when a child comes up for adoption: the mother, if she chooses to exercise them, and, overwhelmingly, the child. To allocate children here there and everywhere for adoption as proof of how "egalitarian" a society has become is not merely immorally frivolous but is simple Stalinist social engineering.
Australian aborigines
In a way, it's the converse of seizing babies from Australian aborigines in order to improve - as it was argued - the infants' lives; instead, today babies are to be allocated in order to enrich the adoptive parents' lives, and make menopausal lesbians feel useful. For orientation, sexual habit, race, religion: these by egalitarian law may not be factors in the placement of a baby.
Yet common sense says they must be. Common sense says that on the whole, and without making it a point of principle, it seems wiser for a black child to be raised by black parents, and so on. Common sense says that such parents should be cautious, loving and unadventurous, for what their adopted child needs most of all is stolid reassurance, rather than life on the margins; and what a son in particular needs is a strong fatherly presence, not the endless frisson provided by sexually and socially exotic parents.
Adopted children shouldn't be the tools for yet another social experiment by the latest generation of barking ideologists, or playthings of the barren.