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The Netherlands may let children have more than two legal parents

Proponents say the law should reflect the reality of complex families

economist.com, 31/8/2017

FOUR years ago Pepijn Zwanenberg, a club DJ and a city-council member for the GreenLeft party in Utrecht, sat down with his boyfriend Ivo and their friend Janette to plan having a child together. They wrote a letter agreeing to make medical decisions by consensus, to live within cycling distance of each other and to enter mediation in case of quarrels. “Straight people often have kids by accident, or take it for granted. We thought about it much more seriously,” says Mr Zwanenberg. Two years later Janette gave birth to their daughter Keet. All three consider themselves Keet’s parents. But Ivo, who is not her biological father, has no legal connection to her. In the Netherlands, as almost everywhere else in the world, a child can have only two parents in the eyes of the law.

Dutch gay-rights groups and advocates for non-traditional families say this “rule of two” does not match the realities of modern-day parenting, and that the country should allow meervoudig ouderschap, or “multiple parentage”. Until recently, they seemed to be making progress. In December a government commission recommended that children be allowed up to four legal parents, in up to two households. Most of the major parties, including the governing Liberals, quickly signed on.

But multiple parentage has since fallen victim to the country’s four-party coalition negotiations, which have been dragging on since an election in March. The centre-right Liberals and the left-liberal D66 party support the reform, but the Christian Democrats are wary. More important, the Christian Union, an economically leftish and culturally conservative party, is strongly opposed. The negotiations are secret, but leaks suggest the parties intend to put off a decision by calling for more research.

That has frustrated those who hoped that the Netherlands, the first country to legalise gay marriage in 2001, could become the first to pass a national multiple-parentage law. The issue is a global one, affecting not just gay parents but those in fused households following remarriage, or raising children from other relationships. Parents who lack legal status may be unable to check their children into a hospital, enroll them in school, take them abroad or speak for them with the police. They can generally get court orders or permission letters to do so; but it is a hassle. Worse, if their relations with the legal parents sour, they have no automatic right to a share of custody or even to visit their children.

The lack of legislation governing complex families often obliges courts to step in. In some American states, judges have granted legal status to a third parent when they deemed it to be in the child’s best interest. Although multiple parentage is often seen as a gay-rights issue, many cases in America are unrelated to same-sex marriage: the first, in Louisiana in 1985, involved an out-of-wedlock conception, and a recent New York case involved a ménage à trois. California passed a law in 2013 allowing judges to designate third parents; in Canada the provinces of British Columbia and Ontario allow more than two people to register as parents. But no country has adopted the practice nationwide.

Multiple parentage has its critics. Some worry that groups of three or more parents are more likely to break up, leading to unpleasant custody battles. “The more adults have legal rights, the more complicated the primary parent’s and the child’s lives are,” cautions Joanna Grossman, a family-law professor at Southern Methodist University. Similar concerns lie behind the Christian Democrats’ hesitation. The Christian Union’s arguments are more old-fashioned: the party’s leader, Gert-Jan Segers, has said that recognising more than two parents is contrary to “biological reality”.

Yet in the Netherlands, the main obstacle to reform is not ideology but political fragmentation. The probable coalition will have a bare one-vote majority in parliament, and will be split between two liberal and two Christian parties. They are unlikely to reach an accord before the end of September. (The caretaker government nearly collapsed in the interim, before a last-minute deal met a Labour demand to raise teachers’ salaries.) A more stable government would probably move quickly to let Mr Zwanenberg’s boyfriend, and other de facto parents, make their status official. As Ard van der Steur, then the Liberals’ justice minister, said after the government report came out in December: “There is nothing wrong with making regulations for the way the Netherlands actually is.”