The state can't buy you love either

A story about a Doula, the sexual revolution, the abuse of women and a loveless welfare state.

Jan 14, 2025

A doula, a poor working class teen mother and the state ‘expertocracy’

A friend of mine is a doula. She took on a local authority case — a young girl, 3rd pregnancy, 2 babies already removed. Becoming pregnant first at the age of 16, she couldn’t cope and her baby boy was taken away after a year. She misses him. Why were mother and baby not ‘taken in’ together? Although really wanting to keep the second child, the teenager struggled with the six month assessment process. ‘I was set up to fail’ she reflects with a little bitterness. She had not shown up for a couple of sessions because, with so many bruises from the same man who had raped her and got her pregnant, she thought it would ‘look bad’. The trouble is that to the professionals, she’s going to look bad whatever: a ‘trashy white girl’ who is, by definition, unfit to be a mother. And so this time she ‘gave up’ her baby voluntarily: leant on, my doula friend said, by her key worker who ‘helped her to realize’ that she wouldn’t be able to look after her baby. And so here she is back in the system with number three. The busy female doctor in charge clearly recognizes ‘the type’. It may or may not be relevant but she’s Muslim — from a culture that values marriage and family, but is also, at moments, possibly skeptical of the ‘merits’ of individual freedom in Western culture. To be honest, if this particular doctor is skeptical, who could blame her? Possibly, probably, this was one of those moments. Her attitude is also a result of the medicalizing of what is really a social, spiritual and cultural problem. The hospital is about throughput. ‘These girls’ are a logistical problem to be resolved. She wants to get it over with quickly and orders an induction. Riding rough shot over the girl’s wishes, the doctor is less than assiduous in explaining the risks. She’s efficient but not gentle or sympathetic. The situation goes south and the girl ends up with an emergency caesarian section.

Neither mother nor the premature baby are ready to be discharged. When she is eventually kicked out, this teenage mum will be left alone with her wound — along with a deep and terrible sense of emptiness, and probably a large measure of despair — in a council flat, in a tower block, surrounded by grass and dog shit, with no friends, and a few pieces of furniture. She has this to look forward to. But right now, she is there with her baby, just 2 hours old. She desperately wants to hold her, to keep her warm, and to act out the mutual yearning caress between mother and child, that has been honed by 2 million years of evolution. Almost certainly, she wants to be left alone with her baby.

But it’s not to be. There are no less than four agents of the state standing over her: social workers, caseworker, woman doctor — all looking down and passing judgement. No one considers placing the baby at her breast and helping her to latch on. They have seen it all before. Of necessity, their hearts are hardened. You can’t oversee this tragedy again and again, and remain vulnerable and open to the emotion of the moment. Because in that moment, our deepest intuitions are always at odds with the spreadsheet rationality of the state bureaucracy. A mother and a baby go together — like love and marriage, horse and carriage or any number of banal tandems of the natural order. Mother—and—baby!

And so, after just two hours the baby is removed into the care of two gay men. They will adopt the baby, and right now are waiting in the room next door. Probably they are lovely and loving in their own way — albeit not the way of a mother. Presumably they are congratulating each other and looking forward to bringing this tiny new born home. They are less concerned with the mother who is left on her own. She can hear them all next door, but that’s the last she will hear. The baby will never get to experience the comfort of a mother’s breast, or the voice that she has come to love. This victory for inclusion is not a victory for vulnerable working class teenage mothers. It’s not a ‘leap in the air’ moment for premature babies. It’s just the kind of shit that happens when the tissues of inter-generational and community social relationships are dissolved; when the bureaucratic, ideological state replaces love and common sense; when babies and care become transactional and procedural.

The welfare expertocracy

Nothing about this situation is good. But I’m going to go out on a limb. Since the 1940s the balance has tipped decisively from family/community to the ‘expertocracy’ of the welfare state. It happened for the best of reasons — health, equality, child protection, poverty reduction, public education — and in some ways, the new regime was successful. Children learned to read and write. Poor kids got regular school meals. The school nurse vaccinated against polio and measles. Mothers received ante-natal care.

But this new regime brought with it moral hazards and unintended consequences. During the period when the new experts began to take control, the new society of individuals was beginning to take shape. Youth culture blossomed. The sexual revolution severed sex from family and the social reproduction of society. New markets were created for goods and services relating to leisure, lifestyle, street fashion — and sex. Place bound and shared inter-generational culture nose-dived. As women went out to work, the household become a node for mass consumption, divorced from any kind productive activity. Divorce rates began to skyrocket, the average age of mothers increased, fertility declined and both single-child and single-parent families become a norm. Young people became much more mobile: bicycles, public transport, hitch hiking, cheap foreign holidays and car ownership transformed both the horizons and the aspirations of late 20th century teenagers. Middle-class kids went to universities away from home. Working-class kids got council flats and took jobs or claimed dole in different cities. As the State and Market grew, Livelihood —the domain of tight-knit reciprocation — contracted.

My vanishing aunt who wasn’t: an impromptu wartime foster child

When things go wrong now, there are no family or neighbours to lean on. Even when there are, questions of legality and liability intrude. Even where the principle of familial love is there to pick up the slack, the system is likely to create obstacles. But it wasn’t always like this.

During the war, my grandpa was the policeman in charge of the Humber Bridge in Hull. My mum and aunt always had a vague memory of a sister who disappeared. Before my granny died, she revealed, in passing, that this feeling was based on reality. Early in the war, a young girl approached Grandpa with a new born baby — a baby she couldn’t look after. He did what, in those days, came naturally. He took the baby girl home — and over the next two years Granny cared for her as a daughter. And then, as suddenly as it begun, it was over. The baby's mother, her living circumstances improved, was able to take her back. For the next sixty years, the incident was never referred to again. The ‘sister’ dissolved into a the strange penumbra of childhood — a waking dream of a sibling who never was.

For my mum and aunt in their twilight years, the confirmation of this hidden family history was disconcerting. The penumbral sister — just a feeling, a fleeting impression — was real. O.M.Gosh, can you imagine? Their first thought was to find and meet this ‘sister who nearly was’. It never happened. It was all too long ago. Grandpa had died a decade before without mentioning a family secret that had probably receded from his consciousness. For the young wartime mother, however, my Grandpa’s intervention must have been a lifesaver. I’m pretty sure that she must have kept in close contact with my grandparents and her baby for the entire period of adoption. The relationship was completely informal. It was, in a way, typical of everything else in war-time Britain: an improvised, ad hoc, low-overhead solution that worked. The responsibility and costs were born by a Constable and his young wife. In those days, community policing was a family affair. The relationship between the young mother and her child was rescued from what, presumably, was an impossible situation. And I like to think that it all worked out well.

States don’t like ‘impromptu’ nor ‘low overhead’ nor ‘improvised’

It could never happen now. Not in a million years. My sister wanted to ‘adopt an old person’ — someone to visit every week with the kids and build a relationship. She wanted to befriend someone. But she also wanted her kids to have experience with a senior citizen, so that they could begin to understand something about obligation and reciprocity. Their own grandparents lived a long way away. She popped into Age Concern and filled out 5 forms in triplicate — but stopped when they said apologetically (because they knew it was all nonsensical BS) that bringing the kids along would be impossible:

‘Not allowed. Not in the manual. Not insured. Not going to happen’.

But in addition to child-protection, health and safety, police checks, public liability, multiple state agencies and myriad operating procedures based on ‘best practice’ — the bottom line is that the state bureaucracy must always insist on the filtering of decisions through a tortuous matrix of policies and procedures all framed by ideological abstractions: ‘human rights’, ‘inclusivity’, ‘gender-positivity’ , the ‘sovereign individual’. The thrust of progressive ideology is to deny the Natural Law of common sense intuition, in favour of a rationalized, standardized kindness that invariably ends up being cruel. For example, covid ‘care’ from kindly professionals stopped my 88 year old Dad, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, from getting a hug from his daughters for nearly 18 months: obviously ridiculous and cruel, but ‘best practice’ nevertheless.

Why do such stories always fail to surprise? It’s basically the irresolvable tension between what ever-optimistic, progressive problem-solvers tell us they can do, and what the real people in messy, spaghetti-rational institutions can actually do. Always viewed abstractly, human beings are construed, by the former, as limitless and self-determining — especially when aggregated in rational, purposeful organizations. In principle ‘humanity’ can and should do anything. Hiving off the social-order from a sacred-order that is now an embarrassing anachronism, humanity is ready to go it alone. If there are constraints on individual behaviour these come not from God or Natural Law and certainly not from anything as gauche as ‘tradition’. Rather parameters for healthy self-regulating individuals come from the state and a collective morality designed by ideological experts. So, just as the New Jerusalem can by constructed here and now — Heaven on Earth — modern Prometheans brook no biological or ecological limits.

From this point of departure, babies obviously don’t absolutely need mothers or even natural families. To some extent, it is an explicit aspect of the creed. From Engels onwards, Marxists had sought to deny the institutions of marriage and family. In the 1920s, Alexandra Kollontai nearly persuaded the young Soviet state to socialize all children into massive state facilities, freeing young women to live their best lives as proletarian individuals (it was always a tautological formulation). There has always been a tendency on the left to see birth and motherhood as a biological hangover that would forever hold women back unless an Enlightened state could step in and pick up the yoke.

So that’s the first thing. The left — and by extension the foundational architecture of the welfare state — sees human bodies and natural functions as an obstacle to a far more glorious and self-determined future. If human beings are angels who shit, we just have to stop shitting. Motherhood and family life are akin to shitting: a social function that is, thus far, indispensable but which reminds us of our fallibility. For would-be Gods it is just downright embarrassing.

Our natural intuitions often reflect the mind of God.

Whatever their sexuality, men shouldn’t adopt new born babies. Neither should the state or corporations adopt. Babies need women — they need a mother (woman b.t.w.), preferably in combination with a Grandma and a couple of Aunties. Children need a mum and a dad. It’s just the way it is, and always has been: Natural Law, 101.

That’s the first thing. Second, is that the state always gets this wrong. There is no perfect scenario, but the sooner we get back closer to networks of families and communities the better. I say ‘closer’ because, as usual, this is all about trade-offs. Modernity has brought great benefits. The society of individuals — freeing mobile citizens from the claims of place-bound tribe and clan — really does have much to recommend it. But in other ways, as Blur put it ‘modern life is rubbish’. Pushed too far, the world of spatially and socially mobile individuals becomes pathological. If allowed to dissolve the embedded, reciprocating network of families, neighbourhoods and associations, the Market and the State will, for sure, take over. And then the solutions to recurring problems become impersonal, bureaucratic and sometimes just evil.

There is a ‘pattern language’ (sensu Christopher Alexander) for doing relationships well and the state is not part of that. It invariably becomes ideological, with an agenda that has little to do with child or mother. A regular older couple with kids already, would be barred from adoption as too old (wrong race, too normal, too much experience, too many of their own children… whatever). Two blokes — no problem. The decision has little to do with the needs of the baby or the mother. It has everything to do with a systemic virtue signalling that incentivizes the endorsement of intersectional victims: the more victimized, the less conventional, the more worthy of positive selection. Overriding an intuitive and common sense concern with the needs of baby and mother, the expertocracy is oriented to the ostensible rights of abstract individuals — in this case, two gay men.

This modern conception of ‘natural’ rights deriving from Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau and given universal traction by the French and American revolutions, is anything but natural. It rests upon the anthropological fiction epitomized by Rousseau’s image of a Robinson Crusoe-esque individual who is born free (but everywhere in chains). ‘Free’ for Rousseau meant without the primary tissue of mammalian relational attachments that underpin family, clan, tribe and even nations. This is why Alasdair Macintyre’s riposte foregrounds human beings as dependent rational animals, born into a web of relationships and interdependencies. Abstract human rights pertain to an ‘abstract person’ — Descartes’ cogito: a genderless, family-less figure existing separate from the material word; a ‘self’ existing independently of the body. It’s easy to see how, as Carl Truman argues, such a conception lends itself to the pathologies of contemporary identity politics.

For a million years, procreation, childbirth, childcare, and socialization have been an emergent function of small-scale, networked social groups — family writ large. The mother’s evolutionary-psychological commitment to her baby, is mirrored by the community’s interest in the success of her motherhood. Being a parent necessarily involved a commitment to (for the most part) a monogamous relationship.

Localism, Livelihood and Self-help

Yes it is going always to be more complex in modern society. But it is not either /or. Catholic Social Teaching emphasizes subsidiarity: solve problems at the lowest possible level. There are certainly difficult trade offs. A centralized, state-run, state-regulated system of adoption and care might, at least in principle, be better at screening obvious abusive malefactors. However, in practice such systems often attract and provide opportunities for precisely those people. State child care institutions are notorious in every society — from upper class British boarding schools, to Canada’s First Nation residential schools, to the hellish state orphanages of communist Romania. And of course Catholic institutions themselves have been subject to endless abuse scandals and mismanagement. In a broken world, this is all probably somewhat inevitable. But even so there are surely better and worse ways.

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It is probably unthinkable, but nevertheless possible, that the state could step back and relinquish control. Usually this would happen in extremis when financial or political crisis leaves a vacuum. But we could legislate for large areas of social policy to be made more open to the domain of familial reciprocation or what I have called ‘Livelihood.’ This would involve the political economy of distributism. The single greatest obstacle to re-balancing the State and Market in this way is actually the structure of liability, insurance and litigation that we have developed over the last 100 years. The transactional way that modern societies now handle risk — a mode that is antipodean to the way of being that is love — often makes stepping up as a citizen, neighbour or family member impractical, illegal, risky, expensive, time-consuming or just impossible. In just about every area of life, we have made self-help and mutual aid virtually impossible. And every time our efforts are mediated by the state, the well of love and generosity dries up (think about the impact of well-meaning but expensive and bureaucratic police checks on men who would otherwise volunteer to run kids sports). As NGOs and charities become professionalized, their cheery local ‘can-do-ism’ is routinized, homogenized and then trained out of existence by best-practice consultants. The bigger the institution — the Catholic/Anglican Church; the National Trust; you local wildlife trust; the food bank — the deeper it is likely to fall into professional sclerosis. However, just like the many residual commons that remind English people of a life before enclosure, there are many residual forms of ‘reciprocating mutual care’ — such as the Basque Txoko cooking clubs —that are iconic of a welfare society that depends much less on the state, and much more on our Natural Law intuitions of communal generosity and shared destiny; and for Christians on our shared life together in Christ.

Was there an alternative in this case?

So what about this young woman and her baby? Was there an alternative? Probably! In this case, clearly —quite bloody clearly — what should have happened is that someone should have adopted the girl and her child. Palming the baby off onto two men, unequipped by nature to care for an infant, has solved the immediate problem of what to do. But in the same stroke, the state and the community have abandoned the mother in the most callous way. She has been given no opportunity to grow into a new life. Motherhood — loving and caring for someone else — is probably the one thing that could have created a path for salvation for this child (and yes she’s a child). Through the experience of unconditional loving might she have started the long process towards loving her self and perhaps even being able to accept real love in her own life. This young woman needs adopting just as much as her baby needs its mother. And there are normal people around who would take this on, but the bureaucracy says no. The legal quagmire is made impenetrable. A better solution with such cases would be to put it out to churches in a well-networked community and see who steps forward. Most generous spirits are unlikely to step-up in advance, in anticipation of need — because the bureaucratic hurdles, the scrutiny and the unavoidable self-doubt are so daunting. But faced with a real person, in obvious need - then people do step up and do incredible things. The state acts to minimize actual contact between real people — those in need and those with generosity of spirit and resources. But this option would be much cheaper and much more effective, however difficult, because it is predicated on love and not ‘best practice’ check-box protocols, and lame training programmes led, in all probability, by pseudo-experts, probably without any actual experience of child rearing.

Family is not a social construct

With regard to adoption, since the 1990s there has been a strong push to normalize same-sex parenting and to use research to confirm the there is no significant difference in outcomes (e.g. APA 2004).1 More recent research has however, shown significant differences with children from same-sex adoptive couples doing significant worse in ways that are comparable to children from single parent households.2

On the other hand, given the shortage of candidates for some classes of adoption, it would be punitive and damaging to rule out a whole class of potential volunteer parents. There may well be situations with older teenagers, in particular, where adoption by a gay couple might be the most appropriate and affirming option. But babies and young children need mothers, which is to say they need biological women —as night follows day. If adoption is the only possible avenue, there is basically never a situation where it’s impossible to find a married woman in an established household. The fact that the left has come to construe child rearing as an individual human right without regard for biological realities; and that this right should take precedence over the needs of the child; and that it must be serviced through the state adoption system — all demonstrates just how upside down our culture has become.

Consider, for instance, the La Leche League breasting feeding organization which has been ripped apart in UK, Canada and America because of an absurd battle over ‘chest feeding’. Taking their credo from the league of flying hippos, a small number of activists have decided that Monty Python’s Life of Brian was a documentary and that men have a pre-ordained right to breast feed ‘their’ babies — babies conceived by an actual mother who has often been ushered off stage by some part of the baby management Leviathan. Very soon we will have the possibility of artificial gestation and men ‘giving birth’. Once a technical possibility, the social justice industry will move quickly to frame male pregnancy as a human right. And with a trickle of ‘successful’ male births, it will be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.

Very obviously, this is all a monstrous middle finger to Natural Law. It is the logical end point of a Faustian culture that brooks no constraint. It is what Yuval Harari celebrates as 'Homo deus … the human will to divinity. In classical mythology such hubris never ends well. Once again, like Adam and Eve, we have reached a point when we human beings are insisting that we should arbitrate what is right and wrong. Like the denizens of Babel, technical man seeks to conquer the heavens. Modern society is raising our childlike lust for self-determination, both individually and collectively, above our dependence on God’s grace. We can’t rid the world of suffering. But the hubristic denial of natural constraints which is driven by this utopian megalomania, is stripping us of the capacity to interact with each other as concrete persons with tangible problems which are tractable to loving care, the generous giving of self and neighbourly concern.

My friend tells me that the hospital in question in the North East of England has a reputation as an adoption conveyor belt, with dozens of young mothers being processed and giving up their babies every year. This is what happens when a bureaucracy replaces love, and transactional culture displaces a culture of less self-centred reciprocation. It’s really time that Catholics began seriously to challenge this secular billiard ball way of doing modernity.

The Haeft

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