Because there's no one to blame.

We like to have someone to blame.

If the birth parents had behaved irresponsibly, that would salve our vicarious wounds: serve them right.

If the adoptive parents had manipulated the situation, their manipulation would provide a high horse onto which we could all climb.

But this is a tragedy without a villain. The birth parents couldn't bring themselves to tell their own families that they were expecting a baby. The mother, who could have had an abortion, chose to bring her baby to full term, to go through labour and leave the maternity hospital empty-handed. Unlike most new mothers, she would have coped with the drying up of her breast milk and post-birth mood swings without the marvel of her baby's presence to ameliorate either.

The two birth parents had to deal with a grievous loss in sad secrecy, while working out what they meant to each other and what future they had together. They attended counseling. They married. Ten months after the handover of the baby, they put on record that they wanted to stop the adoption process.

They did the best they knew how.

Right up to (and including) the 23 long agonizing days when they found themselves in front of a judge fighting for the return of their daughter.

The adoptive parents did the best they knew how, too. They welcomed Ann into their home, loved her, came to believe nobody could meet her needs as well as they could, and went to court to try to keep her.

In court, both sides, according to the judge, behaved with great dignity.

To say that MacMenamin had to deliver a Judgement of Solomon is easy, obvious . . . and wrong. MacMenamin had to deliver a much more difficult judgment than Solomon.

Remember, in the biblical story, two women contended before Solomon that each was the mother of a particular baby. Solomon cleverly said he'd have to cut the baby in two and give half to each woman.

One of the women, horror-stricken, immediately abandoned her case, insisting the baby be left intact and alive. Which in turn proved to Solomon that she was the birth mother. It also proved the other woman is fighting for possession, for ownership, not for the good . . . or even the survival . . . of the child.

Solomon had an easy task of it, with so clear a heroine and so inescapable a villain. MacMenamin's judgment, by contrast, was not just difficult and distressing. It was also paradigm-shifting.

Until now, irrespective of other considerations, the law tended to ensure that natural parents won out. This reverence for the bloodline, this assumption that giving birth gives ownership rights, survived almost 50 years of implicit challenge, beginning with the publication of Dr. John Bowlby's Can I Leave my Baby? in 1958.

Bowlby came down heavily on the side of continuity and closeness of maternal care as the key ways to prevent later psychological disorders.

Although Bowlby's stress on the need of a child for a close, continuous relationship was overstated by his followers, who used it to browbeat generations of parents, suggesting that a mother going out to work would cause grievous damage to her offspring, it was nonetheless the beginning of a new and important understanding of the importance of bonding and attachment in the very early years of a child's life.

That newer understanding, however, didn't do away with the notion of parental ownership. That notion has in recent years been rejected by groups such as the Children's Rights Alliance, which holds that children have rights of their own and are not simply family members or chattels of their parents. (In this context, the successful application of the Adoption Board to make public the judgment can have an enormously positive outcome in widening public understanding of the rights of children. ) While the birth parents have exercised their right to take the decision to the Supreme Court, it has to be hoped that some intervention will happen which would allow them to have access to their daughter and build up a strong relationship with her which would enrich, rather than take from, her security and happiness.

Because, ultimately. this is not about parental rights. It's about the best interests of a child.