[Malcolm Armsteen]

What has Dacre got against adoption?

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/nick-ki ... f=uk&ir=UK" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Generally the Mail seems neutral, then this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/artic ... ARLER.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

This means that the current pool, from which around 5,000 children a year are adopted in England alone, have been taken from birth parents not fit to care for them.
The children being adopted now are the offspring of our drunks, our derelicts, our damaged and our junkies.
And the result is an untold scandal, blighting the lives of thousands of well-meaning families.

Wow. Really nails the old nature vs nurture argument, there.

[randomelement]

This comment was 19 green 4 red:

This is going to earn me thousands of reds - but here goes! If I want to breed ethically a litter of puppies, their parents have to be registered, and the details of their ancestors will be on record. The owner of the stud dog (father) has to sign a form to say that their dog was the sire. I would not use the dog unless he had had the appropriate health tests; and I would not mate a female unless she, too, had health certificates. You can use the KC website to input sire and dam, and it will give you a breeding co-efficient (how close - or i-n-b-r-e-d - the progeny will be). The KC will not register pups over a certain percentage co-efficient, ie, father-daughter, sister-brother. And yet any drunken idiots can procreate behind the village hall, and society has to pick up the tab, and unsuspecting adoptive parents suffer the consequences ... Ridiculous, or what?

[Fozzy]

It's the usual Mail ambivalence. Every time someone whose children have been taken into care wants to sadface in the paper about their stolen children, the Mail is well up for it (usually with a few Rentaquotes from that idiot John Hemming) and sits back and waits for the social services bashers. The scenario there is generally that the parents are sadly misunderstood upstanding members of the community who have done nothing wrong and are being needlessly persecuted by leftie social workers with an adoption quota to fill. Yet when a child who obviously needed action to protect them from their abusive or neglectful families is adopted, it's somehow outrageous that adoptive parents are saddled with dealing with the problems that child will inevitably have.

From what I hear from adoptive parents, the reality is certainly often extremely difficult. A child who has spent years being abused is obviously going to be severely messed up; likewise a child whose mother spent her pregnancy drinking and/or on drugs. Unless the Mail is saying they should basically be chucked into children's homes and forgotten about - which I wouldn't put past them - what really needs to happen is a massive increase in adoption support, and a massive increase in funding for child mental health services. I suspect that what the Mail would like to happen is a return to a society where abortions are much more difficult to get resulting, they hope, in a steady supply of naice non-messed-up Anglo-Saxon babies ready to be adopted by naice middle class families.

[The Red Arrow]

Has Mrs Gove got anything to say on the matter?

[Jollity]

I don't actually know the story of Michael Gove's adoption, but I'm going to hazard a guess that it was somehow completely different from the modern PC left-wing social services adoption system of today.

(my cousin and her husband adopted some slightly older children from a bad home. I don't actually know the details of how their bio-parents fucked up, because I'm not allowed to know. But, Ms Sarler will be disappointed to find, they appear to be ordinary children. Although the boy is fond of pink things, and the girl likes football. Perhaps that's the horror being unleashed)