Are you my mother?

Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey recently signed a law redefining parentage. In addition to legalizing commercial surrogacy, including in instances where the “surrogate” mother is giving birth to and accepting money in exchange for her own genetic child, the law establishes parentage based on “intent” rather than the natural connection between a parent and child or the child-centric institution of adoption. The law also allows the court to determine that a child has more than two parents.

Lest we shake our heads at this as being unique to Massachusetts, Pennsylvania’s legislature is currently considering a bill with almost the same language.

Both the Massachusetts law and the Pennsylvania bill are based on model legislation recommended by the Uniform Law Commission, made up of 350 attorneys appointed by their respective state governments. These commissioners recommend language for laws that can be adopted by all 50 states, thus creating legal consistency. Eight states have enacted some version of the ULC’s 2017 Uniform Parentage Act.

In addition to the provisions in the Massachusetts law listed above, the act establishes that sperm and egg donors do not have parental rights or responsibilities toward the children they helped create.

Once the family has been redefined to deny the natural procreative union between a husband and wife with the children born of that union, it is difficult to maintain a logically consistent case for further prohibitions. If two men or two women can be listed on a child’s birth certificate when only one of them can be biologically related to the child, why limit parentage to two adults? After all, adults are now forming three-, four-, and five-way romantic relationships. In this brave new world, the family is being recreated.

This redefinition places burdens on the kids caught up in the middle. No matter how glowing the reports of parents in these “modern families,” when the child of four “parents” is sitting across from his physician trying to piece together his family medical history, it is important that he knows which of the four people listed on his birth certificate, if any, are his true parents.

Or what happens when the smiling “polycule” splits? For decades, children of divorce have felt the pull of being raised in multiple homes, describing the “split selves” that emerge from having one set of expectations in one home and another on the other side of town. When three, four, or five parents are listed on a child’s birth certificate, will separation mean custody split three, four, or five ways with a child living with the instability of not being in the same home for two weeks in the same month? Or will custody acknowledge the reality that a child’s birth certificate denies—that one or two of those adults are the true parents and thus the ones who should be raising him?

And what about the fact unacknowledged in reality TV shows and shiny magazine spreads lauding the open-mindedness of these arrangements, that children living with an unrelated adult in the home are statistically more likely to experience abuse, maltreatment, and neglect? The parent-child relationship has a natural exclusivity wherein the two adults who are most likely to protect and love a child—his biological parents—serve as a protective barrier vetting which other adults are allowed into their child’s life.

When three or more adults are legally named a child’s “parents,” parentage becomes diluted to the point that its true meaning is lost. If a child’s true mother or father has no more commitment to or claim on that child than any other adult in his or her polycule, the child is functionally being raised an orphan, with no two adults willing to step forward and say, “This child is mine,” claiming full responsibility for raising that child in an environment where he is safe, healthy, loved, and being equipped for adulthood.

Furthermore, not all “throuples” or “polycules” are naturally procreative, meaning that, despite having “more” parents than their peers, children of these relationships may not even have access to one of their biological parents. The three parents listed could be three “fathers” of an infant who was created with the sperm of one of those men, the egg of a donor, and a surrogate mother who relinquished the child who had bonded with her in the womb and immediately after birth. Alternately, the arrangement could be between three “mothers” using a stranger’s sperm. These arrangements treat children as accessories—a means of offering legitimacy to these novel “modern family” arrangements without regard to the loss that the child experiences as a result.

Children are not a means to an end. They are image-bearers, created and loved by the God who takes up the cause of the fatherless. We must never treat them as anything less. Legislation that strips children of their natural rights to their mother and father, whether by the dilution of parenthood or the trading of parental rights, is a profound injustice.