AS an adoptive parent myself, I am sorry for Mr and Mrs Kilshaw, adopters of Kimberly and Belinda Wecker.

Internet advertising of children for adoption carries risks, but at present it exists, and the Kilshaws used that means to find two needy children to care for. "Buying" children from agencies or from their birth parents is condemned, but the "purchase price" paid by the Kilshaws is only a small part of the money and effort they have put into travelling to America to help these babies. I personally give them credit for their good intentions.

In the last few days the media have talked as though systems of adoption, and people who adopt, are the same thing. They are not. Each country, and each local authority, needs a system, constantly checked, by which children can be safely adopted.

But that means nothing unless people come forward to adopt, volunteering to take into their own family, and to cherish permanently, someone else's needy children. I have not heard that the Kilshaws want to do anything different from that.

But haven't the media hounded them! In your own paper, Howard Davis cheerfully quotes rumours that the Kilshaw house is undesirable; criticises Mrs Kilshaw for walking out of an interview (why should the woman submit to endless interrogation to entertain armchair audiences?); and even titillates us with tales of the paranormal (January 19). Next, because it's a 'woman-blaming society', we're told of how Mrs K smokes and drinks.

If the proper authorities, in due course, prove the Kilshaws to be unsuitable to adopt, so be it. Until then I will think of them as people who, like numerous other adopters, have gone to enormous trouble and expense to give two needy children, from a minority background, a stable home which they might not otherwise have known.

Arthur Robinson,

Brecksfield,

Skelton,

York.

...ARE the Kilshaws scapegoats for the Social Services who are so overburdened by their caseload of child abuse victims in biological families that they have to be seen to care what happens to the two Internet babies Belinda and Kimberly in their adoptive family?

Most families are pretty dysfunctional at some time or other, and at least the Kilshaws are experienced parents who have a decent home, and the motivation to travel halfway across the States and pay through the nose for the American cast-offs. Good luck to them.

Betty McIlwrick,

St Chad's View,

Headingley,

Leeds.

Updated: 10:45 Tuesday, January 23, 2001