Minister quickly halts “unnecessary” plan to drop word “mother” from national registry

The Dutch Cabinet quickly reversed course on Monday about plans to stop using the word “mother” in the population register. A proposal emerged earlier in the day that the word would be replaced with the gender-neutral phrase “parent from whom the child was born.”

“An unnecessary mistake that will soon be rectified by a memo to the Tweede Kamer about changes,” wrote Hugo de Jonge on X. “The word 'mother' is beautiful and deserves a place in our law,” said De Jonge, the minister of the interior and kingdom relations.

The Cabinet proposal was submitted to parliament as part of a package of adjustments to the wording of existing laws. The change involving the word “mother” was explained as a necessary adaptation because of a 2022 modification of the Civil Registry Decree.

At that moment, the national government included an exception for transgender people who become parents so that someone with the biological characteristics of a woman is not identified as a mother when their own legal registration categorizes the individual as a man. The term, “parent from whom the child was born,” is then utilized in place of “mother” on the child’s birth certificate.

Far-right Christian party SGP expressed outrage that the word “mother” would be completely removed from the registry. In an interview published on Monday in AD, MP Andre Flach demanded a debate with De Jonge over the “extremely sensitive change” that Flach thought was intentionally buried in the legislative proposal.

“Now they want to remove the designation for everyone when there is already a solution for a small group,” Flach told AD.

De Jonge said the proposal would be changed after many other political leaders pounced on the story. Geert Wilders, the leader of far-right political party PVV, said the change amounted to “woke madness.”