Nurses rushed around Chloe, preparing the Oakland mother for surgery. One minute, she was in the bathroom, struggling with contractions. Next, she was rushed into emergency surgery, her daughter’s heart rate dropping rapidly on the fetal monitor.
The new mother, who asked that she and her family be identified by their first names only for fear of being targeted for the unusual way they are raising their daughter, said her doctors had known for weeks that she would likely give birth by caesarean section.
However, due to their unusual family structure, it was only a few minutes before the obstetrician made an incision in the abdomen that the father of her child received permission to take her to the operating room.
“They were changing shifts so we couldn’t find the right doctor,” said Chloe. “They said it was up to the anesthetist on the day of the operation to agree that there were two people there.”
Chloe is an excellent host. When she gave birth last year, she and her partners Silvia and Fausto had endured a medical and legal odyssey in their quest to expand their family.
Polyamory is not new in California, and certainly not in Oakland, which in 2024 became the first city in the state to prohibit discrimination based on family structure – a move intended to protect the rights of polygamists to manage medical emergencies at the hospital.
Last month, West Hollywood passed legislation that it wants to become the first city in California and one of a handful across the country to offer home partnerships to multiple teams. But for now, many families still face legal obstacles even in places where polyamory is widely accepted.
In Chloe’s case, she began the pregnancy process by contracting with a fertility clinic to implant an embryo conceived with Silvia’s egg and Fausto’s sperm. When it was time to give birth, the crowd had to find special time to visit their daughter in the NICU.
“You can only have two parents on the birth certificate at the time of birth, so they have to think about who is going to provide the health insurance for the child,” said family attorney Amira Hasenbush, a partner at the Glendale law firm All Family Legal.
For Chloe, Silvia and Fausto, that decision also meant weighing which of them would get paid family leave — something California law only guarantees to workers with written proof of paternity.
Experts say multi-partner families are becoming more and more common in the Bay Area – Chloe noted that recently one in three with a child have lost out on housing. Yet without laws allowing domestic partnerships of three or more people, they are left spending thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees to create legal agreements that offer only a fraction of the contractual protections offered to married couples by default.
“Families are becoming more and more complex,” said Alana Chazan, Hasenbush’s partner at All Family Legal. “There are polyamorous families that will form an LLC to protect their rights, because corporations have more rights under these laws than individuals.”
Poly families that end up hiring lawyers are often a group or four people who want to protect jointly held property, parents and children alike and make sure they can take care of each other in life or death situations.
Some, like Chloe’s triad, are all lovers. In many others, two may have partners in common but not directly involved.
“Having multiple partners is a more difficult legal administrative problem to solve than making marriage neutral and connecting two people there,” said Kaiponganea Matsumura, a professor at Loyola Law School and an expert on family law management. “That’s really easy, legally.”
The statistics alone make opening a domestic partnership in a polyamorous relationship a challenge. But the law itself is a loophole, he and other experts say.
“Domestic partnerships are added to California’s main law, criminal law, so there is no way to extend California’s registered domestic partnership to more than two people,” said Toby Adams, a polyamory legal expert who is currently seeking a parental order for his first four clients.
The state’s bigamy law won’t prevent West Hollywood from registering relationships within its square-mile boundaries. But it significantly reduces enrollment potential, experts say.
“Many important rights and benefits associated with marriage or domestic partnership are created by federal law,” Matsumura explains. “Municipalities cannot create that, because it is a creature of government law.”
Some marriage rights are coming from the federal government, leaving little hope that they will be extended soon.
“Marriage conveys more than a thousand different rights and obligations under federal law, and you can’t include that with a city ordinance,” said attorney Diane Adams, whose non-profit Select Family Law Center has helped author many laws across the country. I call this situation the situation of welfare of two people.
But the expansion of the rights section is creating a nightmare for divorce lawyers, who found themselves building an airplane for gay divorce in the hard times and early 2010s.
“People don’t live their lives thinking about their divorce,” says Steven J. Mandel, a New York City divorce attorney and same-sex legal pioneer. “One hundred percent of people who get married think they will be married forever, and 50% of people are wrong.”
California’s first-in-the-nation multiple-parenting law arose out of exactly the kind of gay segregation that Mandel made his name by suing.
In June 2008, an Inland Empire woman named Melissa began a stormy relationship with a woman named Irene, according to appeals court records. The two registered almost immediately as housemates despite frequent arguments, the court heard, and during their separation Melissa began dating Jesus, the man she impregnated.
Their love did not last. Melissa got back together with her ex, marrying Irene just weeks before Proposition 8 legalized such unions. The two women were together in the delivery room when the baby was born the following spring.
That union fell apart a few months later and in September 2009, according to appeals court records, Melissa’s new boyfriend stabbed Irene in the neck while they were drinking beer at a park, putting the baby in federal custody.
Melissa, Jesus and Irene want individual visits with their daughter and reunion services to help them find a way to co-parent. But the law would recognize only two as parents.
After the appeals court ruling, then-state Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) introduced legislation to expand California’s definition of parentage to include more than two adults when excluding a third would be “harmful” to the child’s welfare.
“Gay rights were developed because of a lot of separation,” said Matthew Goodwin, a family lawyer in West Hollywood. “That’s how a lot of law is written, because different questions were tried.”
Current state law allows parents like Chloe, Silvia and Fausto to easily apply for paternity. A registry like the one proposed in West Hollywood would provide more recognition, even if it didn’t end up earning them more rights.
“It was almost unthinkable in the 1980s that two men or two women could be legally married under California law,” said Matsumura, the Loyola professor. “What [early domestic partnership] The laws did it, they stopped this idea, they made it impossible for the government to recognize some kind of relationship and say it is important.”
And it will likely expand access to health benefits — a quirk of American marriage that experts say is at the heart of the legal battle for most unions.
“If tax benefits, if health insurance, if parental rights weren’t based on marital status, we wouldn’t have the problems we have,” said Chazan, a Glendale attorney. “With universal health care, we won’t have to be married to get health benefits.”
