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The 14-page text of this week’s Ontario Court of Appeals decision to recognise three parents for a twelve-year-old boy is posted here (pdf). The court found that Ontario’s Children’s Law Reform Act (CLRA) of 1990 is already out of date because it does not take into account same-sex or multiple-person parenting arrangements. From page 8 of the ruling:
The CLRA was progressive legislation, but it was a product of its time. It was intended to deal with the specific problem of the incidents of illegitimacy – the need to “remove, as far as the law is capable of doing so, a stigma which has been cast on children who in the nature of things cannot be said to bear responsibility for it” (p. 11). The possibility of legally and socially recognized same-sex unions and the implications of advances in reproductive technology were not on the radar scheme. The Act does not deal with, nor contemplate, the disadvantages that a child born into a relationship of two mothers, two fathers or as in this case two mothers and one father might suffer.
On page 5, the court lists several disadvantages asserted by litigants, but they almost all refer to disadvantages suffered by the third "parent", not by the child. The few that refer to disadvantages of the child are hypothetical and do not apply in the case at hand. The only reference to an alleged disadvantage to this particular child is found in the child’s own statement, cited on page 6:
I just want both my moms recognized as my moms. Most of my friends have not had to think about things like this—they take for granted that their parents are legally recognized as their parents. I would like my family recognized the same way as any other family, not treated differently because both my parents are women.
…
It would help if the government and the law recognized that I have two moms. It would help more people to understand. It would make my life easier. I want my family to be accepted and included, just like everybody else’s family.
Note that the boy does not ask for recognition of three parents, only of two.
So, the court’s ruling that it is in the best interests of the child to have three legally recognised parents is not supported by any specific finding of concrete disadvantage the child suffers from having only two parents. Rather, it is the two biological parents and one same-sex partner who insist that a third "parent" be recognised—and that for the advantage of the three adults, not the child.
This is the crux of the court’s ruling, found on p. 12:
Present social conditions and attitudes have changed. Advances in our appreciation of the value of other types of relationships and in the science of reproductive technology have created gaps in the CLRA’s legislative scheme. Because of these changes the parents of a child can be two women or two men. They are as much the child’s parents as adopting parents or “natural” parents. The CLRA, however, does not recognize these forms of parenting and thus the children of these relationships are deprived of the equality of status that declarations of parentage provide.
Yet no equality of status problems vis-à-vis the child are presented in the decision; nor do any exist, for the CLRA removed the former legal inequality suffered by illegitimate children. If the child has two legal parents, he has equal status with all other children; there is no need for a third “parent” to confer equality of status on the child.
The only one suffering any alleged inequality of status is the third “parent”, not the child. Blather about the child’s best interest notwithstanding, this case hinges on the preference of the three adults involved, not the genuine needs of the child.
h/t: William Dawson at MarriageDebate.com
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