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Our daughter is very much on board with the idea that, unlike her, many other five-year-olds don’t have two fathers and a mum. “Only has one dad,” she’ll remark in a confidential tone of a newly made friend at the trampoline park or the swimming pool.
My husband and I live in Amsterdam, a short cycle from our daughter’s mum, who is a longstanding mutual friend. Our daughter’s time is split between the two households. We are just one of many rainbow families in the Netherlands, where parents (often, a gay male couple and a single woman, or a lesbian couple) choose to have and raise children in constellations of more than two adults. The Dutch have a proud history of championing gay rights – it was back in 2001 that Amsterdam’s then-mayor presided over the world’s first same-sex marriages – and families such as ours have long been embraced here. And yet, from a legal point of view, we are unseen and, consequently, disadvantaged.
Before my daughter’s conception, the three of us drew up a co-parenting agreement in the presence of a notary, planning for her arrival in (I dare say) more detail than most parents-in-waiting, affirming our shared desire for a three-way split in terms of responsibilities, and noting our collective attitudes to topics of consequence, from education to vaccination.
But this kind of document is not legally binding because the Netherlands, in common with – well – everywhere, has no national legal provision for families such as ours. Most egregiously, the rights and responsibilities of the “non-biological” parent are unrecognised: only two names can be registered on a birth certificate.
This disparity is a situation that Dutch lawmakers have been promising to rectify since 2016, when a government commission – with the support of gay rights organisations and the rainbow parenting foundation Meer dan Gewenst – first advised the government to recalibrate the definition of parenthood to reflect and recognise the way that children are increasingly being raised in a country that has long prided itself on progressiveness, pragmatism and tolerance.
New research carried out by Ipsos on behalf of the independent research institute WODC suggests that between 1,700 and 9,200 “intentional multiparent families” exist in the Netherlands today – in a small country of 18 million inhabitants, that’s a whopping margin of error. But – paradox klaxon – how do you accurately quantify an invisible cohort?
In our case, this political sloth affects the non-biological father most. While it might not affect us day-to-day, he is forbidden, for example, from making medical decisions on our daughter’s behalf, or travelling with her internationally without written permission from “the other two”. Our daughter may not discriminate between us as fathers, but the law certainly does. As a fellow gay dad told the Economist in 2019: “Legally I’m nothing to [my daughter]; emotionally I’m everything to her …”
On 12 March, Teun Struycken, the state secretary for legal protection, attended a parliamentary debate to defend his decision to torpedo the latest attempt at “recalibrating the family” on budgetary grounds. While Struycken (who, ironically, is an appointee of the New Social Contract party) was at pains to signal that some of his best friends were in rainbow families, he said he wouldn’t be granting them legitimacy in law because the cost of implementing the proposed change, with its associated adjustments to the Netherlands’ tax and welfare systems, would be unjustifiably high.
Struycken is part of the most rightwing Dutch government in years, a fact that led critics such as Michiel van Nispen of the Socialist party to ponder whether his decision was a lack of political will dressed up as parsimony – that other famed Dutch characteristic.
It’s a shame. Even if you regard the scenario with extreme cynicism, the lowest estimate for activation (€11m) seems like a small price to pay for some very eye-catching pinkwashing, restoring the Netherlands back to its halcyon days, when it was regarded as the progressive capital of Europe.
A matchmaking service for “queer platonic coparenting” in the UK recently advertised a guest seminar by the Dutch author Sara Coster, whose speed-meeting events for prospective co-parents attract hundreds. She has even developed a set of discussion-provoking flash cards to that end (sample question: “Your child is ill and it’s changeover day. Will you bring your child to the other household, or let them recover first?”). Couldn’t “Dutch coparenting advocate” be a new kind of prestige cultural attaché, like a French sommelier, or a Japanese organising consultant?
At the annual gay pride parade on Amsterdam’s canals, the number of revellers aboard the rainbow family-themed vessel grows visibly with each passing year. My two cents? We’re going to need a bigger boat.
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Mark Smith is an Amsterdam-based writer
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