11-year-old Poppy Lee-Burrowes has finally been allowed to donate her hair to make wigs for sick children. The Little Princess Trust, which provides real-hair wigs to sick children, managed to use fragile afro hair.

Poppy, from Rhondda Cynon Taf in Wales, wanted to do this since she was five.  

Traditionally the Little Princess Trust curled straight hair; it had found it difficult to locate a hairpiece maker who worked with donor hair from black and mixed race people.  Now, however, it has developed a wefting method with the help of a company in London.

The Daily Express reported that: “Mum Jessica said her daughter was ‘ecstatic when the policy changed, while her other mum, Beki, said: ‘It’s really important they’re now accepting afro hair … obviously to help all children keep their identity.’” 

This begins as a heart-warming story. But it is chilling to read that this generous little girl has two mothers. Apparently, Jessica Lee-Burrowes   and Beki Lee-Burrowes are in a same-sex relationship, and in order to keep their identity, everyone else must play “let’s pretend”.

We are encouraged to distinguish between different mothering roles with the terms “step-mother”, “adoptive mother”, “foster mother”, “mother substitute”, etc., but we are now expected not to distinguish between these two women simply because they happen to be in a same-sex relationship.

Thanks to reproductive technology, it is now possible for one woman to supply the egg to make a child, while the other gestates the resultant embryo, but even so, a child thus produced will be genetically related only to the one who supplied the egg.

Presumably both these “mothers” had only one mother, so this might be seen as a case of social evolution, if it were not for the fact that science – which we are continually urged to follow – says that human beings can only have one mother.

King Solomon would agree. He had 700 wives and 300 concubines and numerous children, mostly illegitimate, but he had only one mother; he knew that a child cannot have two mothers, and demonstrated that fact when two mothers claimed the same child. He called for the baby boy to be cut in half so that each woman could “share” that child, prompting the real mother to surrender her claim so the child could live.

But (leaving aside the awkward detail of scientific fact) feminists who once decried the stereotype of the “mother of two” now insist that children can have two mothers or indeed two fathers. They believe that this is a huge compliment to women, but in fact it means demanding that the real mother surrenders her claim to be mother, and will no longer have any special say in the child’s life.

After discarding unborn children like rubbish for so many years, it was inevitable that the unique role of motherhood would eventually be thrown into the dustbin of history.

As usual in campaigns for equality, justice for children comes a poor second to concerns about justice for women, and the “two mothers” fad will inflict existential agony on children; they will have no say in the matter at all, but will be expected to carry on the charade by calling two women “mummy” while going along with the pretence that they have no daddy.

It is good that they can now weave afro wigs for sick children, but it is not so easy to weave together a child’s life after it has been torn in two. Even King Solomon was never so cruel as to suggest that children should be cut in half as an equality measure.