Two children are waiting for the world to decide their fate.  Unfortunately, the world is not very good when considering the well-being of individuals, and so all kinds of other factors are allowed to cloud the issue.

Most experts agree that in general a child's potential is more likely to blossom in a family than in an institution.  There are almost 60,000 children 'in care' in the United Kingdom waiting for adoptive or foster parents to give them love and nurturing.  So when the ‘Internet Twins’ found themselves in a family that wanted them so much they had been prepared to pay a substantial sum of money for the opportunity it should have been an occasion for rejoicing.

However State, Federal and international laws might have been broken, and regardless of the children’s welfare justice must be done.  Bureaucratic systems that contrive to keep too many children institutionalised creak into operation and seek to effect another disruption in the twins’ lives.  Perhaps the new parents were not vetted and approved; they live in the wrong community, the wrong country; they might not possess the ideal family profile or social background.  And so the experts try to do what is never done naturally.

Any couple, however unsuited to each other or to parenting, can have babies without any approval whatsoever.  Any woman, it now seems, can arrange to have a baby as a sole parent.  Parents can separate and find new partners.  There are no suitability tests.  We depend on neighbours, doctors, teachers and welfare officers to be alert for the small number of cases where children’s rights are seriously abused.  But when it comes to fostering or adopting we assume that would-be parents are unsuitable and motives suspect until proved otherwise.

Over the years children have been subjected to some bizarre well-intentioned schemes.  Early in the twentieth century boat loads of children were removed from Britain to start a new life with unknown parents ‘in the colonies’.  In the second world war children were evacuated from their city homes to be cared for by strangers in the country.  After the international ‘police action’ we now remember as the Korean War, many Korean and mixed-race children were adopted by Americans, sometimes inappropriately.  In her autobiography Ten Thousand Sorrows Elizabeth Kim contrasts her early Buddhist life in Korea with life in America following her adoption by zealous evangelists.  What was wrong was not the fact that she was rescued from a cage in an orphanage and placed in an alien environment, but that in her new home she was denied love.  Sadly, the middle-class American society in which she went to school failed to see the emotional (and physical) abuse inflicted on her by her adoptive parents.  Even so, Ms Kim survived the ordeal and went on to become a loving parent herself.  There cannot be many cases so extreme, so perhaps unsuitable foster parents are better than no parents at all.

There are no easy answers, but there is a starting point:  individuals are willing to give a loving home to an unknown child.  That is a strong foundation on which to build.  Displacing the Internet Twins yet again might please the bureaucrats, but this case could become a watershed in our attitudes towards adoption.  Should barriers be erected to prevent similar cases, or should accepted procedures be changed to facilitate the placing of more children?