Het doel heiligt de middelen

Het doel heiligt de middelen is the maxim Eva reaches for when a planned sexual encounter becomes difficult to endure: if it leads to the child she longs for, she tells herself, the means may one day seem justified. The phrase captures the dangerous conversion of intimacy into a reproductive strategy, and its later force depends on the consent and parenthood questions the strategy cannot settle.

The phrase and its occasion

Eva’s thought occurs during the partner-swapping encounter arranged with Rebecca and Steef. The scheme has a specific reproductive purpose: Rebecca proposes that Eva calculate her next ovulation, that the four of them swing, and that they try again if the first attempt does not result in pregnancy. When Eva asks about condoms, Rebecca replies that one could leak. The plan therefore depends not just on sex but on a possibility being left open without first discussing it with Peter and Steef.

By the evening itself, Eva is frightened and unable to speak. She drinks two glasses of sangria to calm herself while Steef explains what full swap and soft swap will involve. Her attention is fixed on getting started. The distance between the plan’s practical clarity and her emotional distress gives the maxim its immediate setting: the proposed end is sharply defined, while her willingness to go through the encounter is uncertain.

A body treated as a means

The end Eva invokes is not abstract. She imagines a future in which she and Peter hold their child and look back on the awkwardness as something that led to a happy result. She tries to frame the encounter as a necessary passage toward that future, even as she feels outside herself, tense and ready to flee. The body lotion bought for the evening does not make her feel aroused, and she describes the experience as something she is enduring rather than entering freely.

Steef directs the first part of the encounter toward Peter, which confuses Eva: she wants Steef’s semen and does not want to waste time, but Steef wants Peter to feel at ease. Rebecca reassures Eva that she can signal for her to stop and leave. That offer gives Eva a way to halt the encounter, yet it does not resolve her divided attention. She tries to participate, remains conscious of each action, and cannot lose herself in the sex. Her thought about the end justifying the means thus sits beside evidence of strain, not uncomplicated consent or pleasure.

The difference between the plan and the lived encounter becomes particularly clear when Eva experiences the sexual contact as mechanical and compares it to a medical examination. She wants Steef’s touch, but the sequence begins with Peter; she tries to keep things moving because the planned pregnancy remains in view. The maxim compresses this conflict into a justification, but the scene shows what the justification costs: Eva’s body is made to serve a hoped-for outcome even when her feelings do not follow the plan.

From imagined outcome to disputed parenthood

The hoped-for result does not make the consequences disappear. After a condom accident, Steef brings Eva a box of emergency contraception from the night pharmacy. He apologizes for his response to the accident and describes their encounter as involving a kind of intimacy, while distinguishing it from being in love. He says he does not want another child: Sem was conceived against his will, and he considers himself too unstable and too attached to freedom to be a proper father. His response makes explicit that the same encounter carries radically different stakes for its participants.

Later, Steef confronts Rebecca over the pregnancy plan and calls the use of his semen theft and a crime. He objects that he does not want the child and argues that children need a father, invoking his own experience as a parent. His anger exposes what Eva’s maxim had set aside: a desired end for one person cannot by itself authorize the means for everyone involved. The phrase is therefore more than a moment of self-persuasion. It names the logic by which longing can make another person’s reproductive choice seem like an instrument—and the harm that follows when that logic is rejected by the person whose parenthood it presumed to arrange.