Nurses raced around Chloe, prepping the Oakland mother-to-be for a caesarean. One minute, she\u2019d been in the bathroom, laboring through a contraction. The next, she was being rushed into emergency surgery, her daughter\u2019s heart rate dropping precipitously on the fetal monitor. <\/p>\n
The new mom, who asked that she and her family be identified only by their first names out of fear they could be targeted for the unconventional way they\u2019re raising their daughter, said her doctors had known for weeks that she would probably end up with a surgical birth. <\/p>\n
Yet because of their uncommon family structure, it wasn\u2019t until just minutes before the obstetrician cut into her belly that the father of her child got permission to go with her into the operating room. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey were changing shifts so we couldn\u2019t get the right doctor,\u201d Chloe said. \u201cThey said it was up to the anesthesiologist on the day of the surgery to agree to having two people there.\u201d <\/p>\n
Chloe is polyamorous. By the time of her delivery last year, she and her partners Silvia and Fausto had already endured a medical and legal odyssey in their quest to expand their family. <\/p>\n
Polyamory is nothing new in California, and certainly not in Oakland, which in 2024 became the first city in the state to outlaw discrimination based on family structure \u2014 a move meant in part to protect multiple partners\u2019 rights to manage a medical emergency in the hospital. <\/p>\n
Last month, West Hollywood passed an ordinance seeking to become the first city in California and one of just a handful across the country to offer domestic partnerships to poly groups. But for now, many families still face legal hurdles even in places where polyamory is becoming widely accepted. <\/p>\n
In Chloe\u2019s case, she began the pregnancy process by contracting with a fertility clinic to implant an embryo conceived with Silvia\u2019s egg and Fausto\u2019s sperm. When it came time to give birth, the throuple had to get special dispensation to visit their daughter in the NICU. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou can only get two parents on the birth certificate at the time of the birth, so they have to think about who is going to be the one giving the child health insurance,\u201d said the family\u2019s attorney, Amira Hasenbush, a partner at the boutique Glendale firm All Family Legal<\/a>.<\/p>\n For Chloe, Silvia and Fausto, that decision also meant weighing which of them would get access to paid family leave \u2014 something California law guarantees only to workers with documented proof of parentage. <\/p>\n Experts say multi-partner families are increasingly common in the Bay Area \u2014 Chloe noted they were recently outbid for a house by another triad with a child. Yet without laws allowing for domestic partnerships of three or more people, they are left spending thousands of dollars on attorney\u2019s fees to craft a patchwork of legal agreements that afford just small fraction of the contractual protection conferred to married couples by default. <\/p>\n \u201cFamilies are becoming more and more complex,\u201d said Alana Chazan, Hasenbush\u2019s partner at All Family Legal. \u201cThere are polyamorous families that will essentially form an LLC in order to protect their rights, because corporations have more rights under these laws than people do.\u201d <\/p>\n Poly households who end up hiring lawyers are most often throuples or foursomes seeking to protect jointly held assets, parent children in common and ensure they can care for one another in life-or-death crises. <\/p>\n Some, like Chloe\u2019s triad, are all lovers. In many others, two may share a partner in common but aren\u2019t directly involved with each other.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving multiple partners is a more difficult legal administrative problem to solve than just making marriage gender neutral and plugging two people in there,\u201d said Kaiponanea Matsumura, a professor at Loyola Law School and an expert on the legal regulation of families. \u201cThat is truly easier, legally.\u201d <\/p>\n Math alone makes opening domestic partnership to polyamorous relationships challenging. But the law itself is also a hurdle, he and other experts said. <\/p>\n \u201cDomestic partnership was added to the bigamy law in California, the criminal statute, so there\u2019s currently no way to extend California registered domestic partnership to more than two people,\u201d said Toby Adams<\/a> a polyamory legal expert who is currently seeking a parentage judgment for her first foursome of clients. <\/p>\n The state bigamy law won\u2019t necessarily bar West Hollywood from registering relationships inside its two-mile-square borders. But it does sharply limit that registry\u2019s power, experts said. <\/p>\n \u201cMany of the valuable rights and benefits that accompany marriage or domestic partnership are state law-created,\u201d Matsumura explained. \u201cMunicipalities can\u2019t create that, because it\u2019s a creature of state law.\u201d <\/p>\n Other marriage rights flow from the federal government, leaving little hope they could be expanded soon. <\/p>\n