New Bill says parenting is a privilege, not a right

“Being a parent is a privilege not a right: the only right which matters is a child’s right to safety”.

These are the words of Justice Minister Baroness Levitt KC, explaining why the Government intends to repeal the legal presumption that children benefit from the involvement of both parents. Last week, this intention became Clause 17 of the Courts and Tribunals Bill.

Think about what that means. When family courts decide whether a parent should be involved in their child’s life after separation, the law currently starts from the assumption that the involvement of both parents is a good thing. If this Bill passes, that starting point disappears. Every case will be assessed from scratch, with no presumption either way, leaving it to professionals to decide whether a parent’s involvement serves the child’s welfare. But the signal this sends does not stay in the courtroom. If Parliament removes the principle that children as a rule benefit from both their parents, every institution that deals with families – schools, social workers, local authorities – will take note.

The Government says this is about child protection. And the cases that drove the campaign are devastating. Women’s Aid has documented 67 children killed over 30 years by an abusive parent in circumstances relating to unsafe court-ordered contact.

Every one of those deaths represents an inexcusable failure. But here is the question the Government will not answer: a failure by whom?

The presumption the Government wants to repeal did not apply to any parent who posed a risk of harm. Safeguards were already in statute. The Government’s own Ministry of Justice review found that the existing law was not the problem. Rather, the problem was that professionals did not use it. Courts were ordering contact between children and parents who posed a risk of harm, despite having the legal power to prevent it.

So the law gave professionals the tools to protect children from dangerous parents. They did not use these tools. Even the Government’s own review says so. And yet its proposed solution is to give those same professionals more discretion, not less, while removing the one statutory starting point that said children benefit from knowing both their mother and their father.

The principle at stake here is vitally important. The question is not whether the state should intervene when a child is at risk. Of course it should! The question is what the default ought to be. Either children belong first to their parents, and the state steps in only when there is a compelling reason to do so. Or children belong first to the state’s assessment process, and parents must justify their involvement case by case. This Bill would move us towards the second position, and every parent in this country should be concerned about that.

And this is precisely why marriage matters. If the law no longer presumes that parental involvement is good for children, what does? Marriage. Marriage exists to do what no Government department can: it binds a mother and father to each other and to their children before any crisis arises, before any professional decides whether their involvement is a net benefit. It says this bond was formed by commitment, not by state permission. When the law treats parental involvement as a conditional privilege rather than a presumption, it replaces the permanent bonds that marriage creates with arrangements supervised and revocable by the state.

Coalition for Marriage champions marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman because it is the foundation for children: a mother and a father, publicly and permanently committed. Every erosion of parental standing is an erosion of what marriage is for. If that matters to you, share this email.