Friday 9 January 2009

License to conceive?

Its two am in the morning and she’s come to the hospital with abdominal pain- ‘I cann’y do nothing for this pain, doctor’. Okay, so what have you been doing- ‘I wuz at the pub with ma mates…I”d had a few shots of vodka when this pain started...I’m in agony doctor’. And then she very conveniently stretches out on the couch and the next thing I hear is the sound of her loud snoring. With a growing sense of dejection I open her case records and see a series of admissions, each time after either drug or alcohol overuse. This woman is six months pregnant…and every conceivable drug misuse has been documented in her clinical notes, throughout the pregnancy.
I come home in the morning and have a rant, before an increasingly perplexed looking Rohit. ‘Look at Soumya and Piyush….they cant have children, despite the fact they’d be the most loving and caring parents in the world....and here is this woman, who’s got a brood of, god knows, six or seven already, from some six or seven different partners, all in different care homes or foster homes now, and she continues to breed!’ I blurt out in a single breath.
The sense of ‘acute lopsidedness’ of this world stays with me throughout the day. Soumya n Piyush have been trying for a baby for years. They are now on the waiting list for adoption. But the very long red tape bound around these issues means that they may have to wait for years. There are a dozen different checks to be done. Checks?
Does anyone check to see whether the woman I attended to overnight is fit to be a parent??
This has become my pet hate of late. People who take no responsibility for their lives whatsoever and produce an army of traumatized, scarred little kids who are doomed to a bleak future. And this is the land of ‘equal opportunity’. What kind of opportunities is this child going to get?

Have we reached a point in our society where we should be proposing a ‘license to conceive?’ i.e. you can’t be a parent if you’re deemed unfit to be a parent.
You don’t get to be the third sales assistant at Primark without producing some form of evidence of competence. So why should you be a parent without one?
I’m probably too tired from the night….should get some more sleep and hate the world a little less....