If we had to add another heartbreaking story of Maddie in 2007 it would be the one of twins who married without knowing they were twins, and who had their marriage annulled in the UK’s High Court last year.

You might think this is impossible but this is what can happen when you are not entirely honest with your kids about where they have come from, whether it is through adoption, sperm donation, egg donation surrogacy and all the other commendable ways through which people have families.

Children very simply have a right to know. They have a right to know who their parents are. Sadly, in recent years many countries have put the need for privacy before the inalienable rights of children to know where they came from, and perhaps how they came too.

Neither of the adoptive families, incredibly in my view, chose to tell the children they were adopted, nor saddest of all that they had a brother and a sister respectively. So when these two met (the UK Court put a ban on any of these details appearing in public) they had an inevitable attraction for each other. This case was raised in the High Court last month when there was a debate on the Human Fertility and Embryology Bill to show why all children should be given full access to all their birth records, and we can only be happy that we are so rigorous here.

Sadly conception, adoption et al are not properly debated here. We are so obsessed with our world-renowned status of being anti-abortion and even more stupidly anti-divorce that we close our eyes to a whole raft of ethical and moral dilemmas that come about when we create children. The point surely is not only to respect human life, and indeed all life at the moment of conception. The point is to continue with that respect through childhood and adulthood, something where we fail as conspicuously and as often as our more secular and non-religious neighbours in Europe.

We have just as many paedophiles, we have just as many children who are maltreated by their parents, we have just as much stepfather confusion despite all our protestations of religion and all our church-going which is all too often a smokescreen for getting away with the most cowardly, nasty and unchristian behaviour you will find anywhere in Europe.

Perhaps at school and at catechism lessons we need less religion and more common sense and compassion. Perhaps in all our religious instruction we should be more humanist and less Catholic. Perhaps we really should start, if we want to have kids, to live the lesson of putting children first. Because if you did and they were adopted you would certainly tell them they had siblings, wouldn’t you? It must be so crazy for these twins who married. After all the trauma of finding out they were twins, of having to have their marriage annulled after having sex with their brother/sister, they now have to continue and somehow form a new bond with their sibling.

It is a herculean task and you do wonder if it is even possible. As the Judge said, “The right for children to know the identity of their parent is a human right. There will be more cases like this if children are not given access to the truth. The needs of the child must always be paramount.” But I wonder how the adoptive parents are feeling? How the poor mother who had to give them up for adoption must be feeling, if she knows, if she is still alive that is. In Malta the situations that can arise are even stranger because so many of the adoptees, and also donor sperms and eggs tend to come from abroad, so it is very easy for Maltese parents to disguise and hide the fact that children are adopted, who their real parents are and whether they indeed have brothers or sisters.

Should that perhaps be a condition of adoption from overseas? That parents must be willing to release all the details to their children? Sadly though it would undoubtedly have the effect of perhaps lessening the number of adoptions, as well as of those parents who go for sperm and egg donation abroad. People who donate egg or sperm will also have to think afresh. Do they one day want to meet the offspring they produce? Will they want to know who their children are because after all you could easily donate sperm or eggs and then have a familial connection with yourself too?

Many people who read this will just wish for times when infertility was almost non existent. But infertility is growing and people want to be part of families. We just need more honest debates about the rights of children and parents in these situations, and move away from the dead end debate on divorce and abortion.

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