The BBC
reports today about two Brazilian women who each gave birth to a baby boy in
the same hospital but were sent home with the wrong child. The BBC calls it “every
mother’s nightmare”. The mistake came to light a year later and the women swapped
their children following a court order.

Obviously
it was hard for each woman to give up the child she had been raising for a year, but as one of the mothers, Elaine, put it, “Now I know it was the
right thing for the children to be brought up by their biological parents”.

This, of
course, brings up the question of whether natural ties are important at all. As
we know, there is a growing and extremely influential body of opinion which insists
that they are not important, and that the ties of love, not nature, are all
that matter.

They rightly
point out that some parents don’t love their natural children, and may even
abuse them. Much better, they say, that such children be raised by people who
will love them.

This is
unarguable, but it is also a false choice. The vast majority of parents love
their biological children and the real question is whether it is better to be
raised by your natural parents who love you, or by parent-figures (‘social
parents’) who love you?

Surely it
is far better to be raised by your own loving, natural parents? This should not
even have to be justified.

Incredibly,
though, this is exactly the position we are in today. Advocates of family
diversity insist there is no special advantage in being raised by your natural
parents and therefore the ties of nature are of little or no consequence.

Among the other things they
cast aside, however, is the importance of identity to many children. We know
from the experience of adopted children that many go in search of their natural
parents. We know the same thing from the experience of sperm-donor and
egg-donor children.

If that
court in Brazil had been influenced by family diversity ideology it would have
decided that because the two children had bonded with their mother-figures and
because the ties of nature don’t matter, it would be better to leave the
children where they were.

That might
indeed have been the case if the children had been older. Then the damage done
by removing them from the only parents they had ever known might have
outweighed the damage caused by any identity issues that may have arisen in
later life, especially if the childen knew they had been wrongly swapped at
birth.

But since
the ties of nature do matter, the court was perfectly right to take them into
account and decide as it did.