Don't punish innocent child

There was a happy ending to a tragic story this week when a three-year-old Indian born out of wedlock was allowed to leave Bahrain and join his mother who had been deported without him when her sponsor found out she had a son.

It's such a heartbreaking story on so many levels it's hard to know where to even start. It appears that the boy's parents met while working in the same hotel and started a relationship. She got pregnant and had little David but when the father broke up with the mother, he called her sponsor to inform him that the woman had had a child out of wedlock.

The sponsor then sent the woman home to India when he found out but as the child didn't have any identity papers he had to stay here with a friend of the mother's since the father had run off to Qatar soon after reporting the mother.

First and foremost what kind of man/father would report the mother of his child, knowing full well that it was going to cause such huge problems? This is pure speculation on my part but it looks very much like the father either had a severe hatred for the woman, once the relationship was over, or just simply didn't want to have to deal with the responsibility of providing for a child.

To hate someone is one thing - a waste of energy yes, but it's human nature to feel intense emotions about things and love and hate go hand in hand - but to take it out on an innocent little boy (or girl for that matter) is the lowest of the low.

There are fathers all over the world, here included, who walk out on their children without ever providing for them. It's wrong and against the law in many places but it happens, so why bother going to the extreme of having the child separated from its mother? To abandon your own flesh and blood is one thing but to go so far as to leave your child without both its parents it cruelty on a whole other level.

Right or wrong, to have a child outside of marriage is against the law here so I'm not going to argue the morality of it but it stands to reason that it's going to happen anyway. While breaking the law of any country should, quite rightly, incur some form of punishment, taking it out on the innocent is quite simply wrong. There are other forms of punishment in the world than deportation and when a little child is involved it seems to me that there should have been a way to try and keep mother and child together.

As for the sponsor, it's hard to know what to think. On the one hand his sponsee (if there is such a word) had broken the law and I'm sure he felt that he had to do something about it but on the other hand he had to know that the child would be left stranded here in Bahrain while the mother would have little recourse back home without papers to prove the child was hers.

The fact that the sponsor has a heart is evident in the fact that he's paid for the child's immigration fine now that the problem has been resolved and the child can leave so it's hard to understand why there wasn't another option available to him rather than deportation.

At then end of the day this story had a happy ending but not all do and it seems to me that there are already far too many orphans in this world without creating more unnecessarily. It's high time a law was passed that somehow allowed children who are born out of wedlock here to have some kind of documentation, so that when their mothers are deported the children aren't left stranded at the mercy of strangers.