The longing for the real parents

Recently, the Supreme Court recognized the right of children at home to know who their parents are. Why the longing for the real parents? 'It's the trivial questions you want answers to. Who gave me those sweaty feet?'

Daphne van Rossum

May 18, 1994 – published in no. 20

THE FIRST TIME I saw my father I was twenty. Tall and gray, he was waiting at a table at the Americain Hotel. We were strangers to each other. I was barely three when he left. How was I supposed to greet him? In the film, people would have flown around each other's necks. I shook his hand. The meeting was inevitable.

For years I tormented myself and those around me with questions about this man. According to my mother, he didn't even deserve the designation father. She invariably called him 'your begetter'. My aunts told terrible stories about him, they knew no one more impossible than him. So over the years I have developed a strong desire to meet him. There must be something wrong with him, right? After all, I was also a sweet child, and who gave me that cap nose?

Due to an official name change procedure, the search was carried out by the police. The meeting that followed was disappointing. We were both terribly nervous and only talked about things that didn't matter. He talked about his marble bathroom for at least half an hour. The burning question: 'Why did you leave?' I couldn't get past my lips. When we got up for an awkward goodbye, he gave me a hundred guilders. I think he felt guilty for not being heard from for nearly twenty years. For a long time my mother couldn't forgive me for taking that money.

IN APRIL, five daughters of unmarried mothers WON the Supreme Court trial in which they requested access to their parentage records. The pivot of this joint action is fifty-year-old Riet Monteyne. She was born in 1944 in Moederheil, the home for unmarried mothers in Breda that is now called Valkenhorst. A child of an unmarried mother was a disgrace in those years. Monteyne: 'If you asked a question about your origin at the time, you didn't even get an answer, they sent you outside to play. Never mind that you were given the right to see your own files, that would invade the mother's privacy too much. They never thought about the rights of the child in such institutions, they simply did not think it necessary that you know where you came from.'

There are things about which Monteyne can still get angry: expert counselors who downplay her desire for identity by saying that she is worth a lot as an individual, people with two grandfathers and grandmothers and a nice father who think they are not so should be appointed. 'I can miss the criticism of people who do have a baby book like a toothache. They don't know what it feels like to have grown up without roots.'

A new guideline has been issued with the court decision. The years of proceedings that Monteyne and other fellow sufferers conducted against their birthplace have come to an end. The Supreme Court has sided with the daughter and finds that the child's right to know who the biological father is, outweighs the mother's right to keep this secret. After the verdict, at least six women reported to Valkenhorst every day who wanted access to their file.

In 1989 Monteyne started her action with a hunger strike of thirty-one days and partly because of this prevented Valkenhorst from destroying five thousand parentage files. It was the first step in a long series of protests, until the Supreme Court finally decided that knowledge of one's own origin is a fundamental right. In his written explanation, Advocate General T. Koopman explains that the right to an individual identity is part of the right to personality and that knowledge of descent is indispensable for knowledge of that identity. The child who demands knowledge of his descent therefore exercises a fundamental right, even though the personality right is neither explicitly recognized in the European Declaration of Human Rights nor in the Dutch constitution.

It was quite a triumph for Monteyne that the 'descendant children' were found in the right by the highest court in the Netherlands. There was never a shortage of opponents. In De Tijd of June 30, 1989, Dr. J. Kremer, professor of the study of human reproduction, dismissed the desire for knowledge about the biological parent as 'a rather fashionable movement from the corner of psychologists and pedagogues, mainly the television has been propagated and picked up. In practice, it usually turns out that contact is limited to one time and that meeting is a turn-off for many children.'

Soon Riet Monteyne will now look for her biological father and open the file that contains information about him. The question is whether her father is still alive, and if so, whether he is willing to meet her. 'It is a necessity of life to know where your roots lie', explains Monteyne's all-encompassing desire to find out her biological data. 'Sooner or later, you'll want to know where you come from. Until now there has always been something missing in my life. Actually, I was only half alive. There are so many questions I'd like to ask, things I've wanted to know all my life. For example, I am a creative person and who did I get that from? I've also had sweaty feet all my life and you eventually want to know where that comes from. Finally, I'm particularly hot-tempered - did I get that from him? Just like that weird thin hair I was saddled with when my mother had a beautiful head of hair. It's the trivial questions you want answers to.'

THE DESIRE to get to know HER background was so great for Monteyne that during the years of campaigning, she hardly got around to her fashion business and designing clothes. She even had to sell half of her household effects to cover the legal costs. The Foundation for Pedigree and Donor Insemination, of which Monteyne is chairman, has never received a cent subsidy. She actually thinks that the Child Protection Board and the Fiomhuizen should have thrown the bat in the henhouse. Why didn't that happen? "That's because nobody believed that the right to know your identity is a fundamental right and people like us were looked down upon," Monteyne says. 'Illegal children used to not even qualify for a government job. We've always been labeled the "labile bastard". That will now change. We have taken the chestnuts out of the fire for 60,000 children of unmarried mothers who are looking for or are going to look for parentage data.'

Monteyne would like to emphasize that the biological fathers do not have to be afraid for their money the day the children show up on their doorstep. 'Officially, a child that has not been recognized only has family-law ties with the mother. Such a child has no further right of inheritance, which is excluded in the civil code. The child can only hope for understanding, for some more information, but has no claim to anything.'

As can be seen from the name, the Pedigree and Donor Insemination Foundation does not only intervene in the breach for children of unmarried mothers, but also for children who do not know their ancestry for other reasons. A large group of these children was conceived by means of artificial donor insemination, the so-called 'KID children'. They simply cannot search for their fathers because the donors' records are destroyed when the child turns seven. In the Netherlands, sperm donors have been used since 1947. To date, approximately 20,000 children have been conceived in this way. Seven of them, all girls, have now started looking for the biological father, according to research last year. However, the decision of the Supreme Court did not concern these KID children. For them, there is a law before the House of Representatives that will be discussed in the weeks after the cabinet formation and which provides that a foundation that has yet to be established collects and manages all donor data. A child in search of his biological background can then at least find out medical data, physical characteristics and a few other details about the identity of the donor. Only children born after the law has come into effect will be allowed to exercise the right of access. The new law also does not mean that every child can call the foundation with questions. KID children will only receive an answer to their questions if the donor has given permission for this. If a donor wishes to remain anonymous, a child - now perhaps an adult - will only receive the information he asks for if he has serious psychological problems about his background.

According to Monteyne and her foundation, these measures do not go far enough. Her foundation advised the ministers Hirsch Ballin (Justice) and Simons (Public Health) to introduce a donor passport for every donor in which the name of the donor is not mentioned, but in which extensive social, cultural and medical data are included. 'It's about a change of mentality,' says Monteyne about the advice. 'The best interests of the child must come first. It is of course very right that a donor should not interfere with the upbringing, but it can be important for the child to be able to view the data of his natural father later on. We have the cooperation of a large group of gynecologists, they have promised in any case not to destroy the data of the donors until the law is passed.'

OPINIONS ABOUT the role of the biological parent(s) have changed greatly since the war. Whereas in the past unmarried mothers secretly entrusted the name of the father to the files with the shame red on their jaws, it is now believed that the children of these mothers have the right to inspect the previously completely inaccessible files. Where until recently the anonymous sperm donor only deposited his sperm and then quietly ran away, more and more voices are now being called for to lift this anonymity. There has also always been a lot of opposition to adoption legislation in the Netherlands; it was only in 1956 that our country was the last country in Europe to introduce such a law. The Dutch charitable institutions in particular have stubbornly resisted the legalization of adoption, because it was believed that mother and child belonged together at all times.

Between 1950 and 1965 there was a strong urge, especially from the confessional angle, to criminalize artificial insemination in its entirety because it obscured the parentage for the child. After 1975, the debate flared up again, when the Conscious Unmarried Mothers came on the scene and lesbian couples wanted children without the involvement of a father. They were told that the role of the biological father was indispensable for the upbringing and the establishment of a gender identity of the child. In the 1950s, the influential psychoanalyst EH Erikson (who died last week) pointed out that the absence of a father in parenting affects the 'separation-individuation process'. If the father is missing, the child would remain all too symbiotically connected with the mother. A father would be needed especially in adolescence to enable the child to emotionally distance himself from his mother.

The women who wished to raise their child without the progenitor rightly objected that the child should grow up 'lovingly'. Still, they missed something. They forgot that children grow up and wonder where they come from. Not because they had such a bad childhood or lacked everything, but because the need to know where you come from is quite persistent. In the Netherlands, recent research has been conducted into Erikson's identification model. For some single-parent children, the lack of parentage knowledge was more problematic than for others. In any case, on the basis of current research it cannot be maintained that unfamiliarity with the biological roots makes the formation of identity disastrously difficult. In practice, people seem to be able to identify themselves sufficiently with housemates, relatives or friends.

OF COURSE YOU CANNOT lump them all together: the children conceived in the intoxication of the liberation in 1945 by an American or Canadian soldier who then left with the northern sun, the KID children born to a parent whose father was not fertile, the children who lost all contact with their father or mother due to an early divorce, the children who were adopted from Greece by parents who thought they could give them a better life here. They all have their own story. Yet there is a binding factor: the curiosity about biological identity, the desire to know from whom you descend.

Maarten Vervaat (24) is an adopted child. He has been searching for his biological origin for years, initially with the help of his now deceased adoptive father. Vervaat was part of a group of Greek children who had been brought to the Netherlands in the 1970s. The adoption came about through the Metera Foundation in Athens, which at the time took in the unmarried mothers. At Vervaat's request, Metera contacted his mother and arranged a meeting with the intervention of a social worker. The contact between mother and son is fairly good these days, although Maarten occasionally still feels like a neglected child; his Greek mother got married some time after his birth and her husband is not allowed to know anything about Maarten's existence.

Still, it does him good to have met his biological mother. He has become calmer and says that he has the feeling that he has found a part of himself. 'If a child does not want to search for biological identity, that is a choice he makes himself. But it's a bad thing if they just close the road for you. It seems unacceptable to me to continue to look at these kinds of important things from a parental perspective. The right of a child comes first and that is why it is good that things are becoming more and more open.'

SEVEN YEARS AFTER I first met, I had another compelling need to see my father. I had lost the high expectations I had before the first meeting, but in my adult life I struggled with a good dose of commitment and separation anxiety. Moreover, the desire to get to know him - and with him a part of myself - was greater than the fear of another disappointment. And it was indeed much better than the first time. Only now did I dare to ask him real questions and heard him say that he had not left for me. Even though the contact is still very fragile, I have just gained someone who cares about me, someone who also happens to look a lot like me.

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