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BABY-MAKERS IGNORE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN

Jude Law is a baby machine

Sunday August 2,2009

WHAT has mother-of-13 Theresa Winters got in common with sexy film star Jude Law? They are both baby machines. Theresa, as I said, is a mother of 13. There’s no good way of reading that sentence. She’s either a mother aged 13 or a mum with 13 children. Either way, it’s a first-class social disaster.

But, as it happens, Theresa, who is 36 but could pass for 50, is pregnant with her 14th baby, despite social services having taken the last 13 into care as babies amid concerns about violence and neglect.

Jude Law, on the other hand, is a doting father of three (and stepfather to a fourth) who is about to become a dad once again thanks to a brief fling with an American model on the set of his latest film, Sherlock Holmes, last Christmas.

Now, you don’t need Dr Watson’s help to work out that these two baby machines don’t have much in common.

Jude is a film star with a bulging bank account and a luxury home, while Theresa lives on welfare handouts in a one-bedroom council flat. Jude can afford to pay for his child, who will be brought up in the lap of luxury. Theresa, meanwhile, will foist yet another innocent babe in arms on to our hard-stretched social services, all funded by the long-suffering taxpayer.

And while Theresa’s children have all been taken into care, Jude is, by all accounts, a doting dad (if you ignore the unfortunate sexual liaison with his children’s nanny while he was engaged to Sienna Miller and the fact that good parents don’t usually have to tell their children that, whoops, Daddy’s accidentally made a new little half-brother or half-sister for them to play with).

Yet, while the welfare mum and the millionaire film star live lives that are worlds apart, the two babies that will be brought into this world thanks to their fecundity will both be the result of the same thing: the selfish hedonism of the me, me, me generation.

While Jude faces hefty maintenance bills for apparently never having heard of condoms, Theresa and her jobless partner Toney Housden are full of self-pity for their own predicament, with Theresa insisting: “I have my rights. Anyone who wants to have a child should be able to have one.”

She keeps having more and more children because, she says, social services keep taking them away. But children aren’t like pet hamsters, you can’t just get a new one because the last one’s disappeared in the night. Not once does she ever mention her children’s right to a loving family.

Whenever these modern-day morality tales are told, the inevitable calls for forced sterilisation are met with shaking heads and we are told that we can’t force women (or men) to be sterilised or use contraception because of the inalienable human right to have children.

But is there such a right? After all, we have any number of rights but none of them is sacrosanct; even the right to liberty. Just ask any burglar behind bars.

P arents who want to adopt are forced to go through months and even years of tough assessments before they are allowed to offer someone else’s child a loving home. Apparently, they don’t have an inalienable human right to a child.

And what about couples who try desperately to get pregnant for years who are denied help from the NHS and have to remortgage the house to try countless rounds of IVF to have a baby? They don’t appear to have an inalienable right to a child either.

If, however, you can get yourself knocked up au naturel every time you take off your knickers then, Bob’s your uncle, you’ve acquired the inalienable human right to be a mother. That seems like a strange sort of right to me.

Yes, of course parents have rights. But don’t babies have rights too? And is it really more cruel to prevent children from being born to unsuitable mothers than to snatch those children away within hours of the umbilical cord being cut?

Once again it is irresponsible parents, whether they’re millionaires like Jude Law or welfare scroungers like Theresa Winters, who wreck the lives of innocent children in the selfish pursuit of their own needs and wants and leave the rest of us to pay the price for our broken society.