Yesterday I was pretty wound up about Nottingham Council refusing to allow a Mother, Rachel Pullen, to look after her own child because they deemed her to ‘lack the intelligence’ required to look after a child with a serious illness. In tackling the issue I did simply resort to satire, though, so this time round let’s have some Opinion instead. So, the story so far:

Three years after her child was put into care, Miss Pullen is now taking her case to the European Court of Human Rights, because she has been unable to win her case in the Family court or the Appeals court to prevent her daughter being adopted by her foster parents – which would mean that Miss Pullen will lose visitation rights and be, in the words of The Times, ‘barred from seeing’ her own daughter. For more background reading, have a look here and here

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Now, first of all, from what I’ve seen so far, there is nothing which suggests that Miss Pullen has any intention of harm toward her daughter. According to the Times, the Appeal Court said that “[her] love for her daughter is not doubted”. A psychiatrist said of her that “She has no previous history of learning disability or mental illness and did not receive special or remedial education. Miss Pullen fully understands the nature of the current court proceedings, can retain them, weigh the information and can communicate both verbally and in writing.” On that basis, if there are further grounds on which her daughter was taken away from her, I for one would like to hear them.

The thing that bugs me the most is that Miss Pullen was never allowed to attempt to prove these allegations wrong. The social services deemed her to be a threat, and that was it – her baby was gone. Because Baby K was taken straight from the hospital and placed in care, we’ll never know how capable her Mother would have been at looking after her. Had she been allowed to try, and then subsequently put her child’s life in danger, there would be grounds to take action. Before that happens, though, nobody has any definite grounds on which to say that Miss Pullen has done wrong.

And that’s the crucial point here, really – without having been given that time with her daughter to prove herself able or otherwise to look after her, she’s only at most guilty of aloofness, or of not spending enough time visiting the hospital, or of nurses and social workers not liking the cut of her jib. These are not crimes sufficient to remove a child from someone who could quite easily have been a wonderful Mother. In fact, these are crimes disturbingly reminiscent of the events surrounding Christine Collins, whose ordeal with the LAPD inspired the recent film Changeling1.

You see, not only is their brash assertion that Miss Pullen ‘lacks the intelligence’ to look after her daughter not grounds to take her child off her, it isn’t conceptually any different to any number of other attributes which could potentially be barriers to parenting.

If we accept that taking a child away from a Mother because of issues of intelligence is okay, then we’re implying that we get to decide, in advance, who’s going to be a good parent and who’s going to be a bad parent, and, furthermore, that if we decide, for any reason, that we think they’ll be a bad parent, we can just take the kid away from them without recourse.

Is your Mother disabled? That’s fine, come along with me, we’ll find you a new, able-bodied Mother. She’s gay? Don’t worry, there’s plenty of straight ones to choose from. Atheist? No trouble, we’ll find a nice Christian family for you to live with.

I don’t know about you, but that’s not the society I want to live in. Not by a very very long way.

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Clearly, our Social Services system exists for a good reason, and that reason is to look after the welfare of children. They do vitally important work to prevent children from coming to harm, and we only actually hear about them when something goes wrong – we rarely hear about the good work that they do every day. If this case is as reported so far, though, I simply cannot for the life of me figure out how that purpose is being served.

Charlotte raised the very good point that now that we’re in this situation, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to remove the child from the foster parents – who have, after all, spent three years caring for a very sick child and have built up a relationship with her. There is a good case to be made that now we’re here, the child’s interests would be best served remaining with a loving family than being passed from pillar to post.

The Times article is fairly unclear about whether her natural Mother is actually trying to get her daughter back, though, or just prevent the adoption process so that she can retain visiting rights. Personally, I don’t see how the welfare of the child would be served by denying access to her biological Mother.

However, even accepting that it may be better for the child to stay with the foster parents, I still can’t help but focus on the fact that, unless there’s far more to this story than meets the eye, there is a Mother out there who has been cruelly deprived of the chance to bring up her own child. Would it really be good enough for the council at this point simply to turn around, admit they were wrong, apologise and say ‘Oh well, chin up, nothing we can do about it now, really, is there’?

Because if that was my daughter, and she had been taken away from me like that, I don’t think I’d take no for an answer.

In fact, I know I wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  1. In fact, everyone commenting on this story should make sure they get round to watching three fantastic movies on the theme of parenthood and forced adoption: Changeling, Gone Baby Gone, and Coraline [↩]