BABY TALK

15-10-2006

Adopting an African baby is this season's celebrity “must have” apparently. First it was Angelina Jolie with an infant from Ethiopia, now Madonna's getting on the act. But why, wonders Ros Dodd?

So, Madonna has become the latest in a line of celebrities to adopt a child from a Third World country. Madge and her husband Guy Ritchie were this week granted an interim adoption order in Malawi to allow them to become parents to 13-month-old David Banda, who has spent most of his short life in an orphanage.

How lovely, you might think, that this little boy is to be transported from what is almost certainly a wretched existence to live in opulence with the world's most famous female singer.

But I think it's wrong - for several reasons. Firstly, this little boy isn't even an orphan. He has a father, Yohame, and no doubt a host of relatives besides. The farmer took his son to the orphanage after his wife died from birth complications and he couldn't cope on his own. I bet he could have coped, though, if someone like Madonna had offered to support him financially. It would hardly have dented the pop star's £235 million bank balance to maintain the lifestyle of people who live in mud huts, cook on open fires and sleep on grass mats.

That way, little David would be able to remain in the land of his birth, surrounded by his kinsfolk, where he would be fully accepted and understood.

Instead, he's going to grow up in the West, with superstar ‘parents' who are in every way a world apart from the one he's left behind. Will he ever feel he truly belongs? I doubt it.

And what if Madonna and Guy Ritchie split up? Their marriage reportedly has been rather shaky of late. If they were to part a few years down the line, then little David would have to go through yet another emotional upheaval on top of the ones he's already suffered.

If the superstar couple had wanted to adopt a child for purely altruistic reasons, they would have looked no further than their local children's home in London. There are thousands of British kids crying out for a loving family to take them in. But because of a lack of babies and the fact all kids in care are emotionally damaged, adopting a youngster from the UK probably didn't appeal to Madge. Which tells us that this is more about Madonna than it is about alleviating the plight of an African baby.