When the first openly gay Prime Minister, Rob Jetten, announced in 2026 that he and his partner—Argentinian hockey international Nicolás Keenan, ten years his junior—were expecting a child via surrogacy by 2027, dissenting voices were preemptively labeled hateful and angry, as though supporters of a child’s right to a father and a mother were born evil. Even stating such a view may now be construed as a criminal act of discrimination against a group of people, punishable by up to three years in prison—namely, against gay couples who cannot themselves be both mother and father.
Mainstream media aired only the voices of those who found the surrogacy arrangement “wonderful” or “progressive.” It was to be a foursome indeed: a coming-together of a sperm donor, his partner, the surrogate mother, and the anonymous egg donor. Depending on the race of the egg donor, the child might grow up as a poster child for racially diverse family systems—the surrogate is Asian, Keenan is White Argentinian, Jetten has traces of undisclosed Indian or Indonesian ancestry, and the egg donor may well be a Black African woman or of another variety.
Perhaps the four-way solution also had to do with Article 151, second paragraph, point (b), of the Dutch Criminal Code, which states that someone who desires to be a parent becomes criminally liable when publicly announcing a search for a surrogate mother. The law is quite sensible and intends to prevent the financial exploitation of poor or financially needy women, precisely to avoid turning surrogacy into a morally reprehensible illegal baby trade. Nonetheless, there are loopholes, by design.
