I SHARE the outrage of the grandfather who is to suffer the legalised kidnapping of his two grandchildren. I speak as a person who, from the age of 22 months, was raised by my grandparents.

As such, I had opportunities that children given over to adoptive parents never have: 1, A natural transfer of the love they had for my mother over to me; 2, A loving acceptance amongst family relations who had known my parents; 3, A place in the continuing history of the family to which I belonged; 4, The good fortune to be brought up in a genetically related family; 5, The understanding of characteristic traits that my grandparents recognised as inherited from my mother and father.

When I left school and went to work, I was able to repay my grandparents in ways that would not have been possible had I been taken away from them. Everyone therefore benefited. And when I married and my grandmother died, both my wife and I were frequent visitors to my grandfather, so that he was not as alone as would otherwise have been the case had I been adopted.

By complete contrast, in later life, a close friend of the family had had a daughter in her teenage years and the baby had been taken away by social workers. The mother never forgot the pain of losing her child and asked me if I could find her.

This was, and I believe still is, unlawful. Suffice to say I did find her, a grown woman of 30. She had been brought up by loving adoptive parents, but she had been a cuckoo in a nest of swallows. She felt inwardly rejected by her birth mother, whom she had never known. Her adoptive parents could only tell her what they had been told by social workers.

By the age of 16 she had had enough and left home. Social workers took no interest, they had done their job. The judge who sanctioned the order had long ago forgotten she ever existed. Unfortunately, with no known blood relatives, she found a substitute for these in the underworld of illegal drugs.

She escaped from this, but only into an unhappy marriage where she was frequently beaten. That was when she was reunited with her birth mother. She is now very much happier, but has never forgotten the pain she was made to suffer.

I therefore say this. No child should ever be removed from its natural family environment unless it is in physical or moral danger. Social workers build up case reports to show that they are a necessary part of society. In many cases of legalised kidnapping this can do more harm than good.

Judges who rubber stamp these adoption cases after reassuring themselves that the authorised procedures have been followed, should seriously ask: Is the child in moral or physical danger? If the answer is no, then reject the application and give the child a chance to grow up amongst its own family members.

Name and address supplied