This thread is getting too bizarre for me. I see johnhemming has joined the thread, the klaxon is now ringing for nananina, and the roadshow has commenced, so I'll be off.
My last comment: I'm an approved adopter who has now read a number of the in-depth reports of children available to adopt. All of them were taken into care at birth, and this nearly always means that there are older siblings who have been neglected or abused for some years before social services involvement. In other words, the mother ran out of chances. There's no question that social services would get involved for no good reason to take a baby with no previous evidence of abuse - how would they come to their attention? How would they have time?
These reports make for very, very depressing reading; it is impossible to envisage the birth mothers ever being able to care for a child (or a gerbil). Only one exception - a young birth mother who had had a terrible life herself, and who had been terribly failed by social services in her own childhood. In other words, if SHE had been taken into care, there might be a hope of her being able to keep her own child, who she undoubtedly loved and was not abusing (but equally, wasn't keeping safe). She had been taken into a mother-and-baby foster arrangement, though, and given lots of support, but too little too late.
I feel passionately about us doing more to break the cycle of abuse and dysfunction, so that fewer children of the future are taken into care. I think social work is vitally important and horribly under-supported, and it is not at all surprising that standards are not as high as they should be. I think foster care is one of the most important jobs around, and that foster carers should be better supported and trained. This doesn't mean it should be professionalised - it should be about family care, not institutional care - but loving, sensitive people shouldn't be put off doing it because they can't afford to, and people who do do it need to be properly trained to support the traumatised children who come to them. What I can't agree with, though, is that it is any kind of solution to leave children in abusive families or engage in conspiracy theories about child-trading.