Taking newborns into care is the best option

Taking a child away from its parents is the state’s most draconian power. Even thinking about it – a mother’s hands prised from small limbs, the howls of anguish, the child’s frightened face – is enough to fill you with dread. So the news that there has been a “huge rise” in newborn babies being taken into care has understandably caused concern.

One woman quoted in the new study had 16 babies taken from her by children’s courts. She was at the extreme end of the findings, although overall figures showed that 2,018 newborns were the subject of care proceedings in England in the past year – up from 802 in 2008. Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, called the figures worrying and the report described how the women concerned were often in “a state of despair, suicidal and still destroyed by the process”.

“Having children removed exacerbated risky behaviour such as alcohol and drugs misuse,” said one author of the report. And there you have the problem. Leaving an infant with a substance-abusing mother or father is an enormous risk.

A doctor who gives evidence in these cases told me that if a woman hasn’t given up heroin while she’s pregnant, she’s very unlikely to give it up afterwards. So you have a baby shuddering uncontrollably in an incubator as it suffers the effects of drug withdrawal. Once medical staff have managed to cure the baby’s addiction, that child can be taken home by adults who may be so off their heads that they can barely take care of their own needs.

No wonder social workers are keen to scoop up the baby and get it to a safe place. The longer a baby is left in a situation where it doesn’t get proper care and stimulation, the more likely that baby is to grow into an adult with grave difficulties of its own. The empathy centres of the brain, sparked into life by mother love, remain dark and dead. If you don’t get a child out of a chaotic home by the age of two, they are damaged for life.

For far too long, young children were left in neglectful households, with catastrophic consequences. The pendulum has swung the other way after the Baby P case, but I believe that’s a good thing.

If I could, I’d take some of the £12 billion foreign aid budget and channel it into providing extended support for our own kids in care, who so often have no clue how to raise a family of their own and are doomed to perpetuate a vicious cycle.

Until that’s the case, we need to get innocent children out of abusive, chaotic homes – fast.