From the Washington Post opinion section:

The next normal: States will recognize multiparent families

This legal change will make children’s lives more stable, not less.

By Courtney G. Joslin and Douglas NeJaime
Yesterday at 9:12 a.m. EST

Courtney G. Joslin is a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law, where she teaches and writes about family law, constitutional law and antidiscrimination law.

Douglas NeJaime is the Anne Urowsky Professor at Yale Law School, where he teaches and writes about family law and constitutional law.

Let’s dream up more work for lawyers. Why should child custody cases be limited to only two angry clients? Think of the billing hours when there are three or five?

We’ve all spent the past year thinking about the “return to normalcy” in the wake of the pandemic. But our world’s always changing, even outside of the moments that seem obviously exceptional. Sometimes that change takes the form of a dramatic, unforeseen rupture; often, it happens more subtly. What aspects of the imagined, far-off future might soon become part of our ordinary present? We’re asking policy experts, historians, scientists, economists and creators about the ways they think society will shift next — transformations that once may have seemed inconceivable but now seem possible.

The Pathetic Reset.

It soon could be unremarkable for a child to have three or more legal parents. After months of political wrangling over how to support families, this may sound fantastical, but it’s fast becoming reality: Six states — California, Delaware, Maine, Vermont, Washington and most recently Connecticut — have enacted laws over the past decade expressly allowing a court to recognize more than two parents for a child. Many others, including Massachusetts, are considering similar proposals.

These new laws have been spurred, in part, by the rising numbers and public profile of LGBTQ families and others with children conceived through assisted reproduction. In many of these families, one or more parents are not genetically related to their children, and many states now legally recognize these “intended parents.” When we realize that genetic connection isn’t required for a legal parent-child relationship, and that social criteria are relevant, limiting the number of parents to two no longer seems necessary or logical.

These multiparent laws enable courts to protect parent-child relationships as they exist in the world. This is important. Legal recognition is more than a bureaucratic formality: When parent-child bonds lack legal protection, children suffer. They may be denied crucial benefits — unable to access health insurance through their parent or receive government aid.

One of the better arguments for universal government health insurance is that the urge to get some random employer on the hook to pay for some gay man’s bisexual lover’s kid’s health care is driving all sorts of socially corrosive legal arguments.

Some commentators have expressed fear that recognizing multiparent families will exacerbate instability and conflict in children’s lives, because they will be torn between multiple authority figures and multiple households.

Well, yeah.

[Comment at Unz.com]