A Quebec Superior Court judge has ruled that limiting the legal affiliation of children to one or two parents is unconstitutional.

This opens the way to granting legal parental rights to three or more people who decide to have a child together.

It further demotes the importance biological parenthood in favour of adults recognised as the legal parents of a child whether they have a biological relationship with the child or not. Some children may now have up to five ‘parents’, that is, the biological mother and father, who might have provided the egg and the sperm, a surrogate mother, that is, the birth mother, and the people who actually raise the child.

In the Quebec cases it applies where a family has multiple adults involved in a relationship before the child’s conception. There were three families who were part of the case before the judge.

The first constitutes a “throuple,” three adults – a man and two women – in a relationship, with four children among them.

The second involves a lesbian couple and a male donor who wished to be part of the child’s life as a father figure.

The third includes a woman living with infertility who allowed her husband to have a child with a friend, who asked to remain on as a mother.