Kerre Woodham: Adopting a new attitude

Photo / Paul Estcourt

Another week, another dead baby. In the 10 years I've been writing a weekly newspaper column, I can't count how many column inches I've devoted to the tragedy that is New Zealand's child abuse record.

Delcelia Witika was my first abused baby - the first one I grieved for and will remember always.

She was the same age as my daughter when she died and there's not a milestone in my girl's life that I don't think of Delcelia and wonder how her life could have turned out had she not had the great misfortune to be born to a self-serving mother who took up with a brutal bully.

You probably have your own baby that you will always remember - James Whakaruru's cheeky grin is etched on many people's hearts.

Others include the Kahui twins, Coral-Ellen Burrows, or Saliel Aplin and Olympia Jetson, two young girls who knew they were going to die at the hands of their rapist stepfather and nobody did a damn thing to help them.

Now in the past 10 days, we have two more names to add to the roll call of horror.

And in the midst of police inquiries into the deaths of these little ones, the Acting Principal Family Court judge Paul von Dadelszen called for the 1955 Adoption Act to be overhauled, to allow gay and de facto couples to be allowed to adopt children.

Just as an aside, there is no law stopping a single person adopting a child if they fulfil the criteria set out by welfare agencies, so a gay person could and no doubt has, in the past, adopted a child, but gay couples can't.

As I suppose is to be expected, discussion has focused on the issue of gay couples adopting. It's not natural, the critics say.

Well, neither is having a baby conceived in a test tube. Infertile couples are quite happy to subvert nature by impregnating outside the square, as it were, and good on them.

If we all relied on children to be born naturally, there'd be a lot of beautiful babies who would never have been born to brilliant parents.

They'll be tormented at school, say the critics. Well, yes. Schools are the modern-day equivalent of the Colosseum, where anything and anyone exotic or different is tormented for the sport of the locals. Just ask my daughter what intermediate was like with a mother on telly presenting Ready Steady Cook and making lewd jokes about root vegetables.

Red-heads; kids with disabilities; artistic kids; kids from foreign countries; kids with gay parents - name an exotic hybrid and they'll be tormented. So? School lasts only 10 years and after that there's a lifetime of potential and opportunity.

And then there's the visceral revulsion from men who seem to take perverse pleasure in tormenting themselves with the horror of the gay sex act itself and who don't think anyone, least of all a child, should be within a 200km exclusion zone of any gay couple bonking.

Well, prejudice is prejudice and some people aren't for turning, but rest assured, kids are equal opportunity when it comes to finding the thought of their parents - any parents, gay or straight - doing it.

I know with this column I won't change anybody's mind on gay couples adopting . You'll continue to believe what you want to believe, and that's fine.

But if any one of the hundreds of babies who've been murdered at the hands of their heterosexual caregivers had been given the chance to live with some of the kind, committed, nurturing gay couples I know, they would have had the best of lives.

* www.kerrewoodham.com