Nurses raced around Chloe, preparing the mum-to-be from Auckland for a cesarean. One minute, she was in the bathroom, going into labor with contractions. Next, she was being rushed to emergency surgery, her daughter’s heart rate dropping rapidly on the fetal monitor.
The new mother, who requested that she and her family be identified only by their first names out of fear they could be targeted for the way they are raising their daughter, said her doctors had known for weeks that she would likely be born by surgery.
Yet because of their unusual family structure, the father of her child was not allowed to accompany her into the operating room until just minutes before the obstetrician made an incision in her abdomen.
“They were changing shifts so we couldn’t get the right doctor,” Chloe said. “He said that on the day of the surgery it was up to the anesthesiologist to agree to have two people there.”
Chloe is polygamous. By the time of her delivery last year, she and her partners Silvia and Fausto had already gone through a medical and legal ordeal in their quest to expand their family.
Polyamory is nothing new in California, and certainly not in Oakland, which became the first city in the state to outlaw discrimination based on family structure in 2024 — a move intended to protect the rights of multiple partners to manage medical emergencies in the hospital.
Last month, West Hollywood passed an ordinance to become the first in California and one of a handful of cities nationwide to offer domestic partnerships to poly groups. But right now, many families still face legal hurdles, even in places where polygamy is becoming widely accepted.
In Chloe’s case, she initiated the pregnancy process by contracting with a fertility clinic to implant an embryo conceived from Silvia’s egg and Fausto’s sperm. When the time came to deliver the baby, the couple had to get special dispensation to meet their daughter in the NICU.
“You may only have two parents on the birth certificate at the time of birth, so they have to think about who is going to provide health insurance for the child,” said family attorney Amira Hasenbush, partner at a boutique Glendale firm. all family legal.
For Chloe, Silvia and Fausto, that decision also meant deciding which of them would get paid family leave — California law only guarantees it to workers with documented proof of parenthood.
Experts say multi-partner families are on the rise in the Bay Area — Clough said another trio with a child recently outbid her for a home. Yet without laws allowing domestic partnerships of three or more people, they are left to spend thousands of dollars on attorney fees crafting a patchwork of legal agreements that by default provide only a fraction of the contractual protections provided to married couples.
“Families are becoming more and more complex,” said Alana Chazan, Hasenbush’s partner at All Family Legal. “There are polygamous families that will inevitably form LLCs to protect their rights, because corporations have more rights than individuals under these laws.”
Poly families that ultimately hire attorneys are often a group or four of people who want to protect jointly held assets, parent children, and make sure they can take care of each other in a life-or-death crisis.
Some, like Chloe’s Triad, are all lovers. In many others, two people may share a common partner but are not directly involved with each other.
“Having multiple partners is a more difficult legal administrative problem than making marriage gender neutral and involving two people,” said Kaiponaniya Matsumura, a professor at Loyola Law School and an expert on the legal regulation of families. “Legally it’s really simple.”
The math alone makes domestic partnerships as challenging as polyamorous relationships. But the law itself is also a hurdle, he and other experts said.
“In California, the bigamy law, domestic partnership, was added to the criminal statute, so there is currently no way to expand a registered domestic partnership in California to more than two people,” she said. toby adams A polygamous legal expert who is currently seeking parentage decisions for her first four clients.
The state’s bigamy law wouldn’t necessarily prevent West Hollywood from registering relationships within its two-mile-square boundaries. But experts said this sharply limits the power of the registry.
“Many of the valuable rights and benefits that come with a marriage or domestic partnership are created by state law,” explained Matsumura. “Municipalities can’t make it, because it’s a creature of state law.”
Other marriage rights come from the federal government, with little hope that they will be expanded any time soon.
“Marriage confers over a thousand different rights and responsibilities under federal law, and you can’t stuff yourself into it with a city ordinance,” said attorney Dianne Adams, whose nonprofit Chosen Family Law Center Has helped author poly ordinances across the country. “I call it a two-person social welfare state. We’ve privatized dependency within marriage.”
But expanding rights piecemeal creates a nightmare for divorce lawyers, who found themselves building planes out of thin air in gay breakup cases in the aughts and early 2010s.
New York City divorce attorney and legal pioneer in the gay division Steven J. “People don’t live their lives thinking about their divorce,” Mandel said. “One hundred percent of people who get married think they’ll stay married forever, and 50% of people are wrong.”
California, the nation’s first multiple-parenting law, arose out of exactly the kind of gay breakup that Mandel made his name in litigation.
According to state appellate court records, in June of 2008, an Inland Empire woman named Melissa began a tense relationship with a woman named Irene. The court heard that despite constantly feuding the two registered as domestic partners almost immediately and during one of their breakups Melissa began an affair with Jesus, which led to her becoming pregnant.
Their love did not last. Melissa got back together with her ex-husband, and married Irene just weeks before Proposition 8 outlawed such unions. When the baby was born the following spring, both women were in the delivery room together.
That union disintegrated a few months later and then, in September of 2009, according to appellate court records, Melissa’s new boyfriend stabbed Irene in the neck while they were drinking beer in a park, sending the child into state custody.
Melissa, Jesus, and Irene sought visitation and reunification services with their daughter to help them find a way to co-parent. But the law will recognize only two of them as parents.
Following the appellate court’s decision, then-State Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) introduced legislation to expand California’s definition of parent to include more than two adults, where excluding a third would be “detrimental” to the child’s well-being.
“Gay rights were pushed through a lot of breakups,” said Matthew GoodwinA family lawyer in West Hollywood. “That’s the way so much law is drafted, because of the unique questions that were litigated.”
Current state law allows parents like Chloe, Sylvia and Fausto to petition for parenthood with relative ease. A registry like the one proposed in West Hollywood would provide further recognition, even if it might not ultimately give them more rights.
“It was almost unimaginable in the 1980s that two men or two women could legally marry under California law,” said Matsumura, the Loyola professor. “What the (early domestic partnership) ordinances did was it institutionalized the idea, it didn’t assume that a government would recognize a type of relationship and say it has value.”
It would almost certainly expand access to health benefits — a quirk of American marriage that experts say is at the center of the legal fight over poly partnerships.
“If tax benefits, if health insurance, if parental rights were not all based on marital status, we would not have the issues that we do,” said Chazan, the Glendale attorney. “Pass universal health care, then we won’t have to marry each other for health benefits.”
