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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday January 20 2002 01.12 GMT
Children are so cherished that those who don't have any are lining the pockets of those who can deliver them: private fertility clinics have mushroomed in France and Italy; and the number of desperate would-be parents who undertake fertility treatments in Latin countries is now almost double the number in Britain. Imagine then the horror with which the natives of the Algarve reacted to the news that a baby had been ditched at the roadside by his mama. Men and women would have crossed themselves at the sheer blasphemy of it: this girl was rejecting what they hold sacred.
Katherine Penny's unmaternal act was certain to offend more than Latin sensibilities, though. The investigation into the case revealed that the 24-year- old had already dumped an older child, whom she had left for her mother to raise. Charles, the three-month old baby she left near the airport of Faro had a cleft lip and palate.
As for the motive, Penny and her boyfriend had been determined to flee Portugal, where they owed money, but had been unable to obtain a passport for their baby; fearing that without it they would be stopped at the border and sent back, Penny made her choice.
For Katherine Penny, her baby was not a bundle of love but a bag of bones. She had to free herself of this inconvenience - and she did, dropping him off as if he were a parcel too cumbersome to fit in the overhead luggage compartment.
Penny was young and healthy. There is no evidence of her having suffered the horrific post-natal depression that one in 10 women suffer after childbirth. She had a partner who might have had a cash flow problem but claimed he had only left Portugal because he'd thought their baby was in care and now was determined to return to the Algarve to claim him.
Her mother works for the children's and families' department of Hampshire social services. This may not sound like a Ladybird book scenario, but there is enough support here to conclude that Katherine Penny could have managed with a baby. What she couldn't manage, with the baby, was an instant passage home. Her choice to ditch Charles, then, was prompted by convenience rather than desperation.
You don't need to be a sentimentalist raised by a pasta-making matriarch in a home filled with portraits of Madonna and Child to feel revulsion when a mother abandons her baby. Dismissing a life as if it were an uninvited guest; opting for instant gratification rather than long term commitment; placing self above others - all deserve to be roundly condemned by Anglo-Saxons as much as by the natives of the Algarve.
Yet it is not. Or at least not by the liberal commentators, whose take on Penny's act would make the Portuguese choke on their sardines. These apologists, noisily shaking their rattles, dribbled nonsense about the young mother being a free agent who should not be condemned for making a difficult choice. 'It is not always easy being a decent parent,' proclaimed one headline, above a piece which went on to lay the blame for bad mothers like Penny squarely on - you guessed it - men. This kind of argument, no more cogent than nursery babble, reduces tragedies like an abandoned baby to an exam question in a gender study course: 'Where does father fit?' It allows young women to regard motherhood as a project which entails no more commitment than a Berlitz course in French, which they can excel in, do poorly in, and always drop out of.
These very same commentators will have vehemently attacked the treatment of the Taliban prisoners whom Americans caged, shaved, and flew to a military camp in Cuba; they will be foaming at the mouth about the trial of 17 women accused of going to an illegal abortion clinic in (ironically) Portugal. Under Portuguese law, only rape, a threat to the mother's health, or serious disability in the foetus are permitted as reasons for aborting. The media megaphones for Britain's liberals will boom their condemnation of those cruel and uncivilised nations that can conceive of stripping war prisoners of human rights and women of their life-and-death choices. They will proclaim that you can judge a society by the way it treats its criminals and its minorities; and happily ignore that you must judge it, too, by how it deals with the most vulnerable.
When justice is not an absolute but an arena for competing rights, the rights of the child cannot strong-arm those of the mother: if his existence is seen as an impediment to her happiness - he is small, has a birth defect, doesn't have a passport - she wins, hands down, every time. And she can rest assured that there will be lots of supporters who, from their cosy crib of consensus, will raise a wail of apologies on her behalf.
· Cristina Odone is deputy editor of the New Statesman
