The State has assumed the role of father, we have been told. Funny, isn’t it, how the shoebox baby has become public property? Somebody other than the mother has named him Ryan Mark, to which she has objected. A foster family has been found to look after him while the mother and grandmother prove their worth. And doubtless, an entire army of childless couples has been besieging the childcare authorities with offers to adopt him. Fortunately, they can’t do that without the mother’s sworn consent. It’s good, at times like this, to remember that babies aren’t commodities, and that the mother’s rights where her child is concerned may not be violated – even though they can be violated when the mother is 19 years old and from the underclass, and not strong, powerful or vociferous enough to defend herself.
The care authorities are right in keeping the baby for now while things settle down and the girl and her own mother sort themselves out with a little help. At least I hope they’re getting that help. But what in hell’s name – for it cannot be heaven’s name – is the idea behind preventing her from seeing her baby, even when supervised? I’m not a human rights lawyer, but the whole thing stinks and screams of illegality. It’s the sort of thing that could only be done to a 19-year-old girl without the clout, or relatives with the clout, to tell these people where their rights end and hers begin. You cannot deny a mother all access to her child; there are no situations in which it is allowed, unless it is because she assaults him or harms him, and even then it cannot happen without jumping through strict legal hoops. The only time a biological mother can be prevented from seeing her child is when she gives him up for adoption and effectively ceases to be his mother, of her own volition. This is not what has happened here.
Refusing to allow this girl to see her baby, even with 101 nurses and social workers present, is not just wrong, possibly illegal and completely insane. It works against the equitable solution of this problem. If it is true that the girl wants her baby back, then nothing and no one can prevent her from having him back unless she is proved to be a danger to him. Yes, it’s right that there should be a period of monitoring during which the baby is kept in care, but that time should be used to help the mother build a relationsh with her child. She needs to start doing that as soon as possible, and not when some busybody decrees that it’s all right for her to see her child for the first time since she cut the umbilical cord in the washroom.
What good can possibly come from keeping this girl away from her baby, and why in the name of all that is decent is he being sent off to live with a foster family instead of with the Ursuline Sisters? A newborn baby, unlike an older child, doesn’t care where he is as long as he is kept clean, warm and fed. There are no benefits for this baby in being looked after by a foster family rather than the nuns. There is one major difference to the mother, though: she can’t visit her child at a foster family’s home without being made to feel uncomfortable, but she can do so at the nuns’ home.
I hope this girl has been advised by her lawyers to register the birth of her baby immediately, giving him the name she wants him to have, which is the best way to begin ending all further attempts at trampling over her rights. I hope, too, that no manipulative scheme is being hatched to spirit this baby away from his biological mother and straight into the waiting clutches of some friend-of-a-friend couple who are desperate for a baby. I sometimes wonder how many of the young mothers who give their babies up for adoption in their post-partum confusion really want to do so, rather than being persuaded into it. The vulnerable are too easily preyed upon, and with such a high premium placed on newborn babies nowadays, anything is possible and the safeguards against abuse have to be ever stricter.
Everybody who is interfering in this case, or who is performing his duties, should remember: this baby is hers, not theirs. She is his mother. She only tried to give him up because she was afraid of what her mother would say. Nobody may come between the mother-child relationship, and nobody should be allowed to forcibly prevent contact between this girl and her son.
In this day and age of 40-year-old mothers of toddlers and first-time births in the mid-30s, we can forget that it is birth at 19 that is normal and biologically desirable, and not birth at 38. I was only a year older than she is when my first son was born and there’s nothing exceptional about it. Young mothers are more careless and much less fussy than older mothers, it’s true and I can vouch for that, but fussy mothers are not necessarily better for the child. They can actually be a liability to his development. Up to a generation ago, having children at 19 happened all the time. Nineteen-year-olds can make perfectly competent mothers, but they do need emotional and financial support. If the government is going to make it its business to whip into care the children of all careless young mothers, then where is it going to end?
* * *
Recovering from a minor operation yesterday, I was reading some of my mother’s magazines. In one of them there was one of those “for and against” pieces: should fathers be present at the birth? I can’t believe this issue is still being debated. My father was present at my birth, and that was in 1964. Yet the fact that it is still a matter of contention suggests that what we have come to believe is the natural order of things – the man who conceived the child should watch it being born – is actually not quite natural at all. It is only in western society, and then again only quite recently, that the presence of the baby’s father at the birth began to be seen not just as appropriate but as necessary and desirable. Before that, the thought of any man other than the doctor in the birthing-room would have been considered inappropriate, even if the man was the father. This was because men got in the way and performed no useful function, usually not even that of providing succour and support to their agony-ridden wives.
Well, none of that has changed, as every midwife, doctor and wife knows – yet political correctness makes it impossible to say this out loud. In the past women were attended during birth by women relatives and women friends, and even in the present less developed societies this is the case. Having the father around instead of other women is not a modern step forwards but a step backwards into confusion. What a woman in labour wants is not her husband (which is why husbands in the labour room just before birth are so often subjected to virulent abuse), but her mother, her sister or her best friend – possibly even the lot of them. She wants other women who care about her, who have experienced birth and who know what she is going through. She wants the comforting presence of a clutch of women, and not a doctor, a uniformed midwife and a nervous, horrified or even bored-looking man who wishes he were somewhere else.
Contemporary western society has taken what’s normal – the care of women in labour by their mothers, sisters and women friends – and turned it on its head to reflect what we think of as the nuclear family and equal parenting. Yet birth remains the defining and unifying female experience, and men will always be extraneous to it. So many husbands are uncomfortable in the labour room because they know instinctively that it is not their place. Housework may not be the sole preserve of women, but childbirth definitely is.
* * *
The report on the hoarded cheese that cost Malta E288,000 in fines is like something out of Tom and Jerry. I thought only mice hoarded cheese. The tragedy of this costly cheese is that it was probably not the finest Camembert, Brie or Stilton, but that ghastly stuff which comes in yellow slabs that tastes of the plastic it is packed in – faux Cheddar and faux Edam, the only two cheeses in the Maltese refrigerator.