Home affairs minister Hugo de Jonge has said a proposed change in the law which replaces the word “mother” with “the parent who gave birth” in the population register is an “unnecessary mistake” and will not go ahead.

The alarm was raised by the fundamentalist Protestant SGP which spotted the change in a string of amendments to existing laws in a process usually concerned with grammatical mistakes or wording.

SGP MP André Flach said the change is a “very sensitive”  and not a technical or uncontroversial one, as civil servants suggest in the accompanying advisory memo to De Jonge.

The change is a result of the 2022 change in the law, which allows legally transitioned transgender persons who give birth to be registered as “the parent who gave birth”.

Other adjustments to the register were not deemed proportional at the time because, the minister for legal protection Sander Dekker said, “the parent who gives birth is usually a woman” and many parents “value the emotional meaning of the word”.

De Jonge stepped into the dispute on Monday morning, saying on social media that “mother” is a “splendid word which deserves a place in our laws”.