(Staff) The Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled that a five-year-old Ontario boy can have three legal parents. On Jan. 2 the Appeals Court overturned a lower court ruling and granted the boy’s biological father (by sperm donation), the biological mother and the mother’s lesbian partner equal rights and responsibilities under the law.

The boy lives with the two women while his father visits him twice a week. The partner of the biological mother argued that making her a parent was the only way she could fully participate in the child’s life. She also argued that had she adopted the boy, his biological father would have lost his parental status.

A lower court ruling on the case in 2003 said that the Ontario Children’s Law Reform Act could not be interpreted as recognizing more than two persons as parents by birth or adoption. In that ruling, Justice David Aston said that allowing more than two parents “might open the floodgates to similar claims from step-parents or members of the child’s extended family.”

“If a child can have three parents,” Aston wrote, “why not four or six or a dozen? What about all the adults in a commune or a religious organization or sect? Quite apart from social policy implications,

the potential to create or exacerbate custody and access litigation

should not be ignored.”

While the Appeal Court agreed, it also found that the existing law did not take into account changes to Canadian society which affected parenting, leaving a sufficiently serious “gap” to require the

intervention of the court. The lower court ruling was overturned and all three persons in question were granted parental rights. The landmark case rewrites the definition of a family.