Clearly Madonna should have Mercy

Telegraph

Madonna may be rich, white, bossy and veiny, but that's no reason to presume she wouldn't make a good mother for a needy Malawian child, says Jemima Lewis.

By Jemima Lewis
04 Apr 2009



Relax, everybody: crisis averted. Madonna will not be adding any more African babies to her collection – at least, not this week. A Malawian court has rejected the muscle-bound matron of pop's application to adopt three-year-old Chifundo, or "Mercy", James.

Madonna was turned down on a technicality: prospective parents are supposed to live in Malawi for 18 to 24 months before taking delivery of their orphan. This didn't seem to matter so much in 2006, when she simply flew in, tucked her first adoptee, David Banda, under her arm, and flew out again. But this time, the courts felt they could no longer ignore the chorus of outrage from child welfare nit-pickers, and plain old Madonna-haters, who accused her of using her money and fame to bend the law.


Even if this is true (and she denies it), it seems to me a pretty venial sin. For a child of Mercy's age, 18 months is an agonisingly long time to wait for anything – let alone a new home. Research shows beyond question that the younger a child is when adopted, the better its chances of settling happily into its new family.

Madonna is not a patient person nor, in this instance, should she be. She has known Mercy for two years. It should not take so long to assess the suitability of a prospective parent (especially one whose entire adult life has been minutely chronicled).

Except that Madonna can be, and routinely is, excoriated for the most common place of failings. She's a single mother, say her detractors – as if such moral outlaws were unheard of outside celebrity bohemia. She has a career, and relies on nannies to pick up the slack. So do I, but no one has yet branded me an unfit mother.

On the scale of undesirable parents, we're hardly talking Michael Jackson, for heaven's sake. She's just a bit bossy and veiny. She is also rich, white and American – which doesn't go down well with the racial purists who have come to dominate child welfare ideology.

Mercy, they say, should be adopted by relatives. Nice idea, if they showed any interest in doing so. Her unmarried mother died shortly after she was born; her father has made himself scarce. She is in an orphanage precisely because her remaining relatives won't look after her.

Are we really to believe she will be better off growing up without a loving family, in a country ravaged by Aids and poverty, rather than compromise her ethnic identity?

Perhaps the best judge of that is David Banda's biological father, Yohane. After seeing his son last week for the first time in two years, Mr Banda declared himself delighted. "He is a big and healthy boy now. He could have died if he was still with me. Madonna is a kind woman; let's have more of such women to adopt our children."