Call me a hard hearted bastard but I have never wanted children. My nieces refer to me as ‘Uncle Herod’ so perhaps it’s just as well. Some of us have the child-rearing gene and others of us don’t. My partner would love to have had children and it’s only recently that I have come to realise what a sacrifice he has made by never pushing the issue with me. It came about like this…

Adoption and fostering are two issues I cover quite a lot on my LBC radio show and one day we talked about the challenges facing gay parents. We had dozens of calls but one stuck in my mind. Rob and his partner were in their early thirties and lived in Eltham, I think. He almost had me in tears at one stage as he described the unconditional love they have for their little girl. Even I began to get a little broody and when I got home I thought I would investigate what you have to go through to foster or adopt. I wasn’t sure if I really meant to take it any further or not, but one thing that Rob said kept running through my mind. He believes that if someone is in a position to offer a child a loving home, they have a responsibility to do so. I don’t know if he was trying to make me and my listeners think about our own situations, but I certainly did.

Having ascertained that the process wouldn’t necessarily take years or be too complicated I plucked up courage and said to my partner “You know you’ve always wanted a child, well….” His reaction rather shocked me. “Trust you to wait until we’re too old,” he said, and left it at that, apart from reminding me that we didn’t have a spare bedroom and were in the process of buying another property in Norfolk. I felt slightly deflated at his reaction, but decided not to argue about it. Maybe the status quo was for the best.

But were we really too old? I was 50 and he was 48. Neither of us feel particularly old and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to adopt a new baby, but maybe society expects parents to be under the age of forty and frowns on people who don’t belong to the ‘norm’. But then again, society used to frown on gay parents, didn’t it?

There are of course people who still find the concept of gay parenting difficult to deal with. Some imagine that if the parents are gay, that inevitably means the child will grow up to be gay. It’s nonsense of course, but there are still such people around. Then there are the very few people who still equate homosexuality with paedophilia and imagine that gay parents will prey on their children. They are right, of course. There will be the odd ones who do just that, but surely not on the scale of straight parents who more commonly abuse their children.

Prospective gay parents need to worry about barriers being put in their way. Of course there are rigorous background checks. There should be. But adoption charities and local authorities now positively welcome applications from gay parents (and older parents), and it can now take under a year for the application process to be completed. If you want to adopt a baby the wait can be longer, but if you are willing to adopt an older child, or even siblings, you can expect to be fast-tracked.

There are 68,000 children in care at any one time in this country and the number rises all the time. Not all of these are available for adoption, but there is a huge shortage of foster parents, who are willing to foster children for anything from a week to several years. For some, fostering is more appropriate than outright adoption, although for me it would never work, as I am sure I would get too emotionally attached too quickly.

Whenever I host a radio discussion about adoption, I have to admit I do often wonder what kind of parent I might have been. To be honest I’m not sure it would have worked. But I’m sad it never happened as I know my partner would have been a brilliant Dad, and for that I shall for ever retain a feeling of abject guilt.

This article first appeared in the February edition of Attitude Magazine.