Dutch Mothers Can Register Aborted Babies to Help Grieving Process

02.05.2019

In response to a petition signed by 82,000 people, the law in the Netherlands was changed in February to allow people to register their stillborn children as legal persons in the Personal Records Database, something that had not previously been permitted. The push for this change had been led by mothers who wished their sons and daughters who died before birth to be recognised as people of value.

Under the provisions of the new law, a young woman who deeply regretted her abortion was able to register her aborted child as a legal person. Any parent can report a child who died prior to birth regardless of the time frame, and the deceased child is then added to the Dutch “persons list” next to the information of the parent(s). This means the child’s name also appears on the official government website, as well as on the populations register for persons.

Yara, who had an abortion at fourteen weeks at an Amsterdam abortion facility, approached lawyer Don Ceder when she heard that the law had changed, feeling that perhaps if she could register her baby as a legal person, this powerfully symbolic act would be a significant step forward in her grieving process. After Ceder examined the law, he discovered that there was no reason why an aborted child could not be registered. The new regulations do not specify the cause of death or the duration of the pregnancy as factors in which children may be registered.

The officials at Amsterdam’s City Hall, for their part, “received [Yara’s] request with sympathy,” according to Ceder, and they even “condoled Yara for her loss” before providing her with a birth certificate for her child and adding her aborted child’s name to Yara’s personal records. “For all the mothers who will make use of this new law, it is obviously more than a mere formality,” Ceder told the Reformatorisch Dagblad. “This is all about recognition and value, for their grief and for the child they’ve carried with them. For me personally it also raised the question: But what does this mean for the way we look at unborn life, including those who were aborted?”

LifeSiteNews. April 26.