SALT LAKE CITY — A federal judge Wednesday ordered the state of Utah to list the names of a lesbian couple on a birth certificate as the mothers of their new baby in a ruling that lawyers said was the first of its kind since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.
U.S. District Judge Dee Benson said the assisted reproduction case wasn’t hard to decide.
“The state has failed to demonstrate any legitimate reason, actually any reason at all, for not treating a female spouse in a same-sex marriage the same as a male spouse in an opposite-sex marriage,” Benson said in his ruling.
Lawyer Joshua Block with the American Civil Liberties Union said it was the first ruling in an assisted reproduction case since the June decision from the high court, though several similar cases have been filed around the country.
Angie and Kami Roe of West Jordan said in their lawsuit on the issue that the state should treat wedded lesbian couples the same as heterosexual couples who use sperm donors to have children.
State law automatically recognizes a husband who agrees to assisted reproduction as a father, but the Utah attorney general’s office contended that doesn’t extend to same-sex couples because child bearing is legally different from marriage.
“It is a fact that a non-biologically related female spouse can never be the biological father of a child,” state attorneys wrote in court documents. “It is a biological impossibility for a woman who does not give birth to a child to establish paternity of a child through the act of birth.”
Parker Douglas with the Utah attorney general’s office said Wednesday that listing non-biological parents on a birth certificate could throw off record-keeping and disrupt the ability of authorities to identify public health trends.
The judge, however, pointed out that the same problem could apply when married heterosexual couples use sperm donors.
