IN Montreal a ‘throuple’ of three polyamorous men has adopted a three-year-old girl.
The men are seeking to have all three of them recognised as her legal parents. Their bid comes hard on the heels of a bizarre ruling in Quebec last April ordering the Civil Code to allow more than two legal parents.
For what possible reason? You might well ask. It is this: capping ‘filiation’ at two parents sends the message that only ‘so-called “normal” families, with a maximum of two parents, represent family structures that are valid and worthy of legal recognition’.
Britain is not quite there yet, but it’s heading that way fast. UK law has not yet lost its final vestiges of sanity and moral sense; it still limits legal parenthood to two. However it already allows more than two adults to share parental responsibility, the decision-making power over a child’s life.
Our courts are edging towards the boundary. In X & Anor v B & Anor (2022) a High Court judge granted a parental order to two male co-parents, even though one remained married and living with his wife, holding that an ‘enduring family relationship’ need not be romantic or exclusive.
Some legal commentators are now openly asking whether the UK should allow more than two legal parents.
Recent history shows that practice is shaped by such policy signals and activist promotion. For example the LGBTQ+ Adoption and Fostering Week, led by the charity New Family Social, plays a key role in encouraging LGBTQ+ people to consider adoption. By 2023-24 in England, one in five adoptions were to same-sex couples.
Official surrogacy reform proposals would put intended parents on the birth certificate from birth under a new pre-conception pathway, a move cheered by lobbyists but not yet enacted by government.
At the same time, there is a parallel squeeze on Christians who hold that marriage is man-woman and exclusive. In Cornerstone v Ofsted, the Court of Appeal held that the evangelical agency could not recruit only carers who adhered to traditional sexual ethics. In Johns v Derby, the High Court accepted that officials could treat the couple’s views on homosexual behaviour as relevant in a fostering assessment.
Culture is doing its work too. Polyamory is now explicitly explained to teens by mainstream UK sexual-health providers. UK tracking finds a significant minority open to polyamory. Teachers can even buy lesson plans featuring polyamory on TES’s marketplace. This is how norms shift: soft power first, statute later.
Yet evidence-based outcomes for children demand an outcry at this approach. The strongest aggregate evidence still points to the gold standard as being raised by one’s married mother and father.
Economist Melissa Kearney’s recent synthesis is unambiguous about the two-parent advantage even after controls. That accords with long-standing UK findings on marriage, stability and child behaviour.
Focusing on the UK debate misses another uncomfortable datapoint: using large, representative US data, sociologist D. Paul Sullins reported that at age 28 adults raised by same-sex parents were ‘at over twice the risk of depression . . . as persons raised by man-woman parents’. His broader work finds higher risks of emotional and developmental problems relative to married, joint-biological parents.
Where agendas driven by gender and identity politics are pursued (for the benefit of the adults involved), the welfare of adopted children is likely to become of secondary importance and suffer as a result.
Those who argue that same-sex couples and LGBTQI single people, on average, make equally effective parents and create healthy ‘families’ are likely to do so for political and self-interested reasons.
Research often cited as proving equal outcomes of same-sex parenting however is based on weak and flawed studies. For example in a meta review of some 34 essentially non-comparable studies only three find that that children of sexual minority parents were as likely as children of heterosexual parents to grow up healthy and well adjusted, while two reported more emotional problems for children with sexual minority parents than for children with heterosexual parents. Debate continues, but child-protection systems cannot simply wave this away.
The child’s perspective is the compass. As Katy Faust frames it: ‘Children have a natural right to their mother and father.’ In adoption we rightly prioritise the child’s needs over adult desires. The same moral logic should govern surrogacy and new family-law experiments.
Sadly, not every child can be raised by his or her married mum and dad. Many single adopters, kinship carers and foster carers do heroic work. The point is different here. The state should not be encouraging family forms that, on average, deliver poorer outcomes, or normalise multi-partner parenting by design. The whole point of these services is child protection, not adult fulfilment. Stop sacrificing the needs of children on the altar of adult desires.
There is a direct line of degradation from redefining marriage so as to include same-sex couples, and the travesty that has taken place in Quebec. Once the law says mothers or fathers are optional in marriage, children become assignable across any consenting arrangement, and monogamy loses all meaning. Multi-parent recognition then presents itself as merely the next ‘inclusive’ step. Quebec shows how quickly law follows that logic.
These are the child-centric policy initiatives we must push for if the UK is to stop this madness going any further:
· keep the two-parent limit on legal parenthood, while recognising that other adults can still love and help raise a child;
· register actual biological parents for all children;
· re-centre adoption and fostering on the child’s right, wherever possible, to a married mum-and-dad home, measured by outcomes not ideology;
· treat surrogacy reforms with caution: any pathway must start from the child’s interests, not adult commissioning convenience;
· ensure RSHE resources do not normalise polyamory for minors as just another lifestyle option.
Marriage is not a lifestyle preference. It is the social technology that best secures, at scale, a child’s need for a mum and a dad bound to each other. Rebuild that, and the rest will follow. If a tiny minority are offended by this then, for the sake of the children, so be it.
