June 23, 2014

Dutch newspaper calls all new moms MILF

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:55 pm

A Dutch newspaper has seemingly let one of their young male interns equate new mothers with their ‘bangability’ when calling them MILF in an article on the statistics of new mums going back to work after having had their first child. The title of the article is ‘New MILFs are working more’.

Luckily, Dutch women and men alike took this pathetic attempt at journalism in stride, but everyone was surprised to say the least. Many people claimed that not all mothers are MILF, and even if someone thinks they are, that’s some pretty vulgar language for a mediocre free ‘dead tree publication’. This also means that the newspaper thinks it’s OK to refer to mothers as MILF, which is 50 freaking shades of wrong.

It is remotely possible that what many imagine to be an idiot of an intern doesn’t even know what MILF means, which is almost up there with calling American performer Rihanna a n*****bitch, saying it was meant as a compliment. However, there are editors at a newspaper and obviously they think this is fine.

Are men and women as parents equal in the Netherlands? Not by a long shot.

UPDATE: According to real journalists on FB, the newspaper has claimed that “MILF is not a derogatory term”. I’m claiming ‘shitty newspaper’ and ‘shit intern’ are nicknames then.

(Links: m.spitsnieuws.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)

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August 11, 2013

Open season on sperm donors in the Netherlands

Filed under: Health by Branko Collin @ 1:19 pm

City governments are pressuring single mothers to reveal the name of the fathers of their children, so that they can then force said fathers into paying some sort of alimony, Dutchnews reported last Friday.

Apparently a man from Rotterdam, Eric van Deurzen, was ordered by a court to pay either the city or the mother 486 euro a month. (If I am being vague it’s because my sources are.) Volkskrant quotes two law professors, Paul Vlaardingerbroek and André Nuytinck, as saying that only the mother can bring suit.

Professor Nuytinck told Gelderlander that this also puts certain kinds of sperm donors in a tough situation: “Sperm donors who haven’t gone through a sperm bank may have difficulty proving that they did not conceive the child. For conception [as a legal term–Branko] there needs to have been intercourse.”

Since everybody is being so incredibly vague I had to do my own homework here.

Title 17 of Book 1 of the Dutch Civil Code (Burgerlijk Wetboek) states that “he who conceives a child that only has a mother […] is obliged to contribute to the cost of rearing and caring for the child until it reaches the age of majority […].” Although the law does differentiate between a father, a conceiver (verwekker) and a donor, it does not state that there is a difference between a donor and a conceiver when it comes to financial responsibility for raising a child.

Several websites and professor Nuytinck do make that distinction though, which leads me to believe that there must be a separate, more specific law detailing the rights and responsibilities of sperm donors somewhere. Not all the cost of artificial insemination are covered by basic health insurance and in 2010, a lesbian couple was refused treatment by a hospital in Leiden.

The law I quoted above seems to have especially dire consequences for gay couples. The partner who is not the parent only has rights if they’ve gone through official, sometimes homophobic channels and the donor has expressed the wish to remain pseudo-anonymous (in the Netherlands a child always has the right to know its father once it turns 16).

It is still not clear to me why a municipal government would have standing in a case where they ask for the determination of fatherhood.

(Photo by Gniliep, some rights reserved)

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