Mandated Infertility “Treatment” for Homosexual Couples

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I have to admit that even I didn’t see this coming.  As you read this, try to remember that homosexual couples aren’t infertile.  It is simply physically impossible for them to procreate.  But if gay marriage is, in fact, equal to marriage, then this is the kind of thing that no one will be able to stop.

Should health insurers be legally required to offer infertility treatment for gay couples? Yes, according to a bill (AB 460) filed in the California legislature by assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco). In fact, refusing to do so should be a crime.

Current California law requires group health plans to offer coverage for infertility treatments with the exception of in vitro fertilization (IVF). If such coverage is purchased, benefits must be paid whenever “a demonstrated condition recognized by a licensed physician and surgeon as a cause for infertility” has been diagnosed—or upon “the inability to conceive a pregnancy or to carry a pregnancy to a live birth after a year of regular sexual relations without contraception.” Thus, under current law, diagnosis of a physical reason for the inability to conceive or sire a child is not required. It is enough that a couple tried to get pregnant for a year and failed.

According to the fact sheet supporting AB 460, the trouble is that some insurance companies “are not complying with current law that prohibits discrimination” based on sexual orientation. Instead, they are denying infertility treatment benefits “based on [the policy holder’s] not having an opposite sex married partner in which to have one year of regular sexual relations without conception.” AB 460 would amend the law to add the following language:

Coverage for the treatment of infertility shall be offered and provided without discrimination on the basis of age, ancestry, color, disability, domestic partner status, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, national origin, race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation.    MORE

So, the next time someone asks you how gay marriage will actually change anything, show them this.

When Your Sister is Also Your Wife… (aka Humanae Vitae was Right.)

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You can’t make stuff like this up.  From the Dear Prudence column at Slate.

Q. Nasty Surprise: My wife and I…were both born to lesbians, she to a couple, and me to a single woman. She had sought out her biological father as soon as she turned 18,…I never was interested in learning about that for myself, but she felt we were cheating our future children by not learning everything we could about my past, too….  I decided to…see if my biological father was interested in contact as well. He was, and even though our parents had used different sperm banks, it appears so did our father, as he is the same person. On the one hand, I love my wife more than I can say….But, I can’t help but think “This is my sister” every time I look at her now. I haven’t said anything to her yet, and I don’t know if I should or not. Where do I go from here?

It’s hard to know what to say in the face of something like this.  It’s the sort of thing that if Catholics had pointed out could happen back in 1978 when Louise Brown was conceived as the first test tube baby would have gotten us laughed out of the room.  Yesterday’s laughingstock is today’s prophetic voice.

Of course, donor-conception was the next step after Louise Brown, and now, the first generation of donor conceived children is coming of age and sharing their pain of feeling all their lives like they were more products than persons, and that their right to know their biological roots have been trampled.

It would be easy to play a story like this for laughs.  Songs like “I’m my own grandpa” come to mind.  But it’s hard to imagine the horror of discovering that your wife is your sister and that your own children are  your nieces and nephews.  What do you do with information like that? What do you tell your children about the genetic lottery you’ve enrolled them in?   Should all of these questions be just one more challenge of modern life?  Or is this the easily avoidable, rotten fruit of seeing life as a product that we can produce how we want, when we want it, and damn the consequences to the product we produce?

Here’s what Humanae Vitae said.

…unless we are willing that the responsibility of procreating life should be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions—limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. (#17.)