Two gay men and a baby

BARRIE DREWITT and Tony Barlow are "taken aback" that their fathering of twins by in vitro fertilisation has attracted such intense media attention. The millionaire pair, who have now been together for 11 years, claim that starting a family just feels like the natural next step in their relationship.

What could be more natural than going to America, signing up with a Los Angeles agency specialising in helping wealthy gays to have children, sourcing an anonymous -female egg donor, arranging to mix two lots of male sperm in with the eggs, then having the resulting four embryos planted into the womb of a surrogate?

Well, deciding at age 10 that you want to have a baby, then having your wish fulfilled when a pregnancy test undertaken in a supermarket lavatory two years later comes out positive. Underage sex may be illegal, but it is not "unnatural".

While the child from Sheffield, the third 12-year-old to join the underage mother statistics in recent weeks, has had no trouble in organising the pregnancy she craves, she and her 14-year-old lover will undoubtedly run into greater problems when it comes to caring and providing for their baby. The gay men, on the other hand, have been interviewing nannies and plan to hire three who will "work together" in both their Chelmsford and their Beverly Hills homes.

Neither set-up is generally considered to be ideal, and the fact that both instances have provoked much debate at least provides the comfort that such conceptions are not the norm. But it is worth noting, in the case of the gay fathers-to-be, that adoption and artificial insemination with a friend were both explored before the two opted to make a baby in a US laboratory.

It is worth noting, as well, that there is, in the minds of many, a link between the acceptance of "gay rights" and the fact that teenagers are having sex. The embracing of homosexuality is, for logic-starved family campaigners, one of the reasons why heterosexuals don't have moral standards any longer.

Taking a look at these two tales, you can't help wondering whether homosexuality has been embraced firmly enough. In the good old days of single-sex education, it was supposedly rampant among schoolchildren, without the smallest fear of pregnancy ensuing.

More seriously, it's rather irritating that these two men appear not to have been allowed to adopt a child - the continuing failure of the adoption services meant last year that the number of children in care rose to 53,000, while the number of children adopted fell to a shameful 2,000.

Public and expert opinion still appear to be against adoption by same- sex adults. The announcement by the leading charity the Children's Society in July that it was dropping its ban on adoption and fostering of children by gays was widely criticised, with the Evangelical Church Society suggesting that its members should protest by stopping donations to the charity.

The Children's Society, however, is simply following Department of Health guidelines and falling in line with the theoretical policy of all other adoption agencies. The charity is not now condoning adoption by gay couples because it wishes to "promote homosexuality", but simply out of pragmatism.

Or, as its chief executive, Ian Sparks, put it: "There are not enough families available to look after older children, especially boys. We believe that if these children are to have the choice of a family and home of their own we should not exclude anyone who has the special abilities or experience to provide the right home and care for them."

Not that any of this would have helped Drewitt and Barlow to adopt a child, rather than order and buy one. For while it is true that there is no legal bar to the adoption of children by gays, there is a bar against unmarried couples doing so.

The implications of this law are so tortuous that they limit all kinds of other legislation. Take the pounds 200m shake-up of the criminal compensation system being planned by Jack Straw. One of the inconsistencies that the reorganisation wishes to eradicate is the fact that homosexual couples don't currently qualify for criminal compensation.

So, in the wake of the Admiral Duncan bombing, Gary Partridge, whose partner John Light was killed, received no compensation, whereas his friend Julian Dykes, whose wife Andrea was also killed, received pounds 10,000.

The review, which is now under way, has suggested that since the criminal injuries compensation scheme has already been extended to include heterosexual couples who have been together for more than two years, the same should apply to gay couples. While this may sound like a simple extension of gay rights, the worry has in fact been rather more complex than just a reluctance to accept gay liberation.

The argument goes that if same-sex couples were granted the right in law to be regarded by the state as a family unit, then the logic would be for all heterosexual unmarried couples to be treated as a family unit, which, in the case of social policy decisions, would mean that unmarried heterosexual couples would have the right to adopt children. Finally, in the last roll-back of this cascade of equalities, there would no longer be any legal case for denying gay couples the right to adopt.

Complicated? It certainly is, especially when the net result of all this legislative juggling seems only to be defending the rights of children to remain in care. While there is much hand-wringing debate over how we can stop teenagers from having babies, there is little practical recognition of the fact that there are plenty of adults around who would happily care for children whose parents become unable to care properly for them.

So when Jack Straw declared a few months ago that pregnant teenagers should think more carefully about adoption, there was a massive furore, led by social workers who continue to pursue policies which are hostile to the process. While it is true that adoption is not ideal for children, it is also true that all the talk of stable family units with a loving mummy and daddy is nothing more than talk.

Prospective parents are not just rejected for being in a gay relationship; they are also rejected for being too old (even if they are not beyond childbearing age), too poor (even if the income in question is merely modest, rather than below the poverty line), too white or, less regularly, too black - or even too isolated (one couple was denied the right to adopt because they lived in a farmhouse in the country).

It seems astonishing to me that all kinds of social policy-makers, surely those people among us who are most clearly aware of the fractured society we live in, continue to make and implement policy as if we lived in fairyland (though a special fairyland, which doesn't have any parent fairies).

Meanwhile, a 14-year-old boy who impregnated his 12-year-old lover will be questioned with a view to convicting him of statutory rape - or maybe they should both be charged - and a stable, wealthy, committed couple have had to hire not one but two women to help them make babies for themselves.

For this is what should be remembered during policy-making about adoption. People can always get their hands on children somehow, and from somewhere in the world - especially gay people, who seem constantly on the look- out for someone to have babies with.

Denying them the right to adopt is simply inviting them to find a baby from elsewhere, and leave the child whom they might have brought up perfectly well, to languish in care. While only rabid hardliners could possibly disagree with the idea that the perfect family is headed by a loving and happy natural mum and dad, this is the option that by definition will never be part of the adoption equation.