By Mike Priestley

It's hardly surprising that Home Secretary Jack Straw has met with some opposition to his call for struggling teenage single mothers to give up their children for adoption.

We've spent too many years being brainwashed by well-meaning but sadly misguided people into thinking that a child's rightful and best place is with its natural mother at all costs. Anyone who challenges that thinking has been likely to find themselves despised and denounced.

The result is that up and down the country there are thousand upon thousand of young single mothers struggling to cope and failing hopelessly, and thousand upon thousand of children whose well-being and sometimes even survival depends on constant intervention by the welfare services.

That can't be right, surely. Not when there are plenty of would-be adoptive parents out there who can break into that cycle of deprivation. Parents who come as a pair, to support each other as well as their children, to share the caring and the responsibilities and the worries. Parents with lots of love to give and the talent and enthusiasm to help a child to fulfil its potential when it might otherwise find itself on a one-way ticket from birth to the scrapheap.

There are many young single mothers who cope wonderfully. No-one would deny that. And there are some remarkable children of hopeless mothers who somehow make out, against all the odds.

But in general, inadequate mothers who can't cope with the heavy demands of parenthood rear (with a lot of agency help) children who turn out to be losers of one sort or another.

Surely adoption has to be preferable in those cases? That's what Jack Straw was saying. And he was right.

The chorus of voices raised against him has been predictably filled with righteous nonsense. Moira Gibb, vice-president of the Association of Social Services Directors, was quoted as saying that "the Home Secretary is in great danger of stigmatising all young mothers", seriously misrepresenting what he in fact said.

Ann Furedi, of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, missed the point entirely when she said "a public health campaign aimed at teenagers to promote the effectiveness and safety of the contraceptive pill would be a far more sensible measure."

Sensible, certainly. But not "far more sensible". One birth control campaign after another seems to have failed to get the message across to teenagers that if you have unprotected sex, you will very likely cause a pregnancy.

Jack Straw's proposal doesn't rule out these campaigns. It merely proposes a way to sort out some of the mess when they don't succeed.

Perhaps the daftest quote of the lot came from Liberal Democrat social services spokesman Paul Burstow, who said: "The consequences of the kind of policy Mr Straw is seeking to return to are only just being felt in terms of the numbers of people trying to find out about their real families."

What a red herring. There are more adopted people trying to find out about their natural families because the law has changed to enable them to more easily satisfy their understandable curiosity as to where they came from and who, genetically, they are. It's as simple as that.

I have a great deal of respect for Jack Straw's courage in squaring up to the right-on masses. He'll have a hard battle on his hands. I just hope that he manages to force through a sea change in attitudes - for the sake of all those would-be adopters and all those children who could be given an improved chance in life by them.

And, yes, for the sake of all those teenage mothers who are trapped in poverty and over-burdened by responsibilities when they are still children themselves.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.