Can I Adopt my Step-Child if the Ex has Joint Custody?

Relatively common scenario: two people are married, but one has a kid by an ex-spouse. The new spouse loves the kid and wants to show their dedication to the kid, so they decide to attempt to adopt the kid. The old spouse has joint custody of the kid, but doesn’t particularly object as the adoption wouldn’t affect the custody agreement.

You would think that the outcome is obvious — three dedicated, loving legal parents are better than two, right? So the court should be pretty swift to grant the adoption since it causes no obvious problems and seems to be in the child’s best interests.

Well..no. There are some places that have allowed three-parent children for various reasons. The Canadian province of Ontario, and the state of California both have laws specifically allowing three-parent children, and the states of Louisiana, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York, Alaska, and the District of Columbia have all recognized ‘third parents’ in specific cases without having a law that technically allows that situation to exist in general. Michigan — and most other states — specifically limit a child to two legal parents.

When Three Parents Might be Appropriate
There are several circumstances in which it might be a good option to have a child with three parents. The most common is when a couple have a child using a sperm donor or surrogate mother — in cases where the three relate and work together, having all three legally allowed to parent the child can be beneficial in a number of ways. But there are other circumstances that have nothing to do with donors or surrogates, including:

• The very first time in the US that a child was recognized with three parents was in Louisiana, in a classic “My wife cheated on me but I want to raise the kid as my own” case, where the judge ruled that both the biological father and the father-by-marriage were legal parents. This circumstance has been repeated hundreds of thousands of times across the US with almost no consistency from state to state or even individual case to case.
• When a person, biologically related or not, has been acting at a parent, supporting a child financially and emotionally for years, many states recognize that person as a ‘de facto parent’ or equitable parent’ and grant that person both visitation rights and child-support responsibilities. Only Delaware, Kansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma will grant a de factor parent full custody. The states that strictly do not recognize de facto parenting are Iowa, Illinois, Tennessee, Utah, New York, and Vermont. Michigan only recently recognized its first equitable parent, a homosexual woman with no legal right to the child she rose, but in that ruling the court specifically mentioned that it in no way applied to third-party parents, so it won’t help you adopt your stepchild.
• The UK has successfully used mitochondrial DNA transfer to produce a child with literally three biological parents. (One mother had a genetic defect that was corrected using DNA from a second woman along with the usual sperm.) A panel of experts has issued a report advising the US government to allow the technique here, as well.

But despite all this, the Michigan law insists that a child have no more than two parents. Why? What can you do about it? Check back later this week to learn.