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Posts Tagged ‘Indiana birth certificates’

Supreme Court Lets Stand 7th Circuit Decision on Lesbian Spouses and Birth Certificates

Posted on: December 14th, 2020 by Art Leonard No Comments

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review a ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Henderson v. Box, 947 F.3d 482 (2020), that the state of Indiana must extend to married lesbian couples the same parentage presumption it applies to married different sex couples: that a birth mother’s spouse is presumed to be a parent of her child, that  the child be deemed born “in wedlock,” and that both mothers be named as parents on the birth certificat.  On December 14, the Supreme Court denied the State of Indiana’s petition to review that ruling without explanation or any dissent.  Box v. Henderson, 2020 WL 7327836 (Dec. 14, 2020).

On one hand, this action might be seen as routinely expected, because the Supreme Court decided a similar case from Arkansas exactly this way in 2017.  In Pavan v. Smith, 137 S. Ct. 2075, the Court voted 6-3 to reverse a decision by the Arkansas Supreme Court.  That opinion was issued per curiam, although a close reading would identify the hand of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Jr., author of the Court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling, Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, in which the Court not only said that same-sex couples have a constitutional right under the 14th Amendment to marry, but also that such marriages must be treated by the states as equal in every respect to the marriages of different sex couples.  In Obergefell, Justice Kennedy specifically mentioned listing on birth certificates as one of the incidents of legal marriage from which same-sex couples had previously been excluded.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a dissenting opinion in Pavan, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, arguing that the Obergefell ruling did not necessarily compel the conclusion stated by the Court and that the Court should have scheduled briefing and a full hearing on the question rather than issue a summary per curiam ruling.

Since Pavan was decided, Justice Kennedy has retired and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died, being replaced respectively by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, both religious conservatives.  When Indiana filed its petition for review in the Henderson case last spring, Justice Ginsburg was still on the Court and the Pavan v. Smith majority was intact.  The same-sex couples who had filed the lawsuit, represented by the National Center for Lesbian Rights, did not even file an opposition, assuming the Court would dismiss the petition.  But with Justice Ginsburg’s death and replacement, the calculus had changed, as the Pavan 6-member majority had been reduced to a 4-member minority of the Court.  The Supreme Court then requested the plaintiffs to file a reply to Indiana’s petition for review, and the possibility appeared that the Supreme Court might take up the issue anew.

At the heart of Indiana’s case was the contention that the presumption that a husband is the father is reality-based in biology, and there is no such basis for a reality-based presumption for the wife of a woman who gives birth, although the 7th Circuit had observed that one of the lesbian couples in the case comprised two biological mothers, as the second mother had donated the egg that was gestated by the birth mother.

Be that as it may, Indiana, in common with other states, has never treated the father’s parental status as conclusive, since it could be rebutted by evidence that a different man was the biological father, and ultimately a birth certificate records legal parentage, not biological parentage, as in the new birth certificates that are issued upon a child’s adoption.  The trial court, and ultimately the 7th Circuit, related that Indiana relied on self-reporting by the mother in determining a man’s name to record on a birth certificate, and the form the birth mother is given asks for the name of the father, not explicitly the name of the biological father, making it likely that many men are named as fathers on birth certificates despite the lack of a biological tie to the child.

Ultimately, wrote the 7th Circuit, “The district court’s order requiring Indiana to recognize the children of these plaintiffs as legitimate children, born in wedlock, and to identify both wives in each union as parents, is affirmed.”

By refusing to review this ruling, without any explanation or dissent by the conservative justices, the Supreme Court seems to have put the seal on this issue.  This is particularly reassuring in light of gratuituous comments by Justice Alito (joined by Justice Thomas) in a statement he issued when the Court refused to review former Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis’s petition to review an award of damages against her for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Obergefell decision was announced.  Davis v. Ermold, 2020 U.S. LEXIS 3709, 2020 WL 588157 (October 5). In Alito’s statement, and remarks he later delivered to a conservative public forum, Alito sharply criticized the Obergefell decision and suggested that the Court needed to “fix” the problems that ruling created for those with religious objections to same-sex marriage.  This focused renewed attention on the Henderson case and the possibility that the Court would take it and rule in a way that would detract from the equal legal status of same-sex marriages.  The decision not to take this case may represent an important bullet dodged for now.

Unanimous Federal Appeals Court Rules Indiana Must List Lesbian Mothers on Birth Certificates

Posted on: January 20th, 2020 by Art Leonard No Comments

A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled on January 17, 2020, in Henderson v. Box, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 1559, 2019 WL 255305, that the state of Indiana must recognize the same-sex spouses of women who give birth as mothers, who should be listed on the birth certificates for their children.  Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote the opinion for the court.

The timing of this appeal made the outcome unsurprising.  In June and December 2016, District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt issued rulings in this case, ultimately holding unconstitutional various Indiana statutes upon which the state relied in refusing to list the same-sex spouses on their children’s birth certificates.  See Henderson v. Adams, 209 F. Supp. 3d 1059 (S.D. Ind., June 30, 2016); Henderson v. Adams, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 180330, 2016 WL 7492478 (S.D. Ind., Dec. 30, 2016).  Judge Pratt relied on her reading of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (2015), which ruled that same-sex couples have a right to marry and their marriages must be treated the same for all purposes as the marriages of different-sex couples.  Just six months after Judge Pratt’s last ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court stated the same conclusion in Pavan v. Smith, 137 S. Ct. 2075 (2017), ruling that Arkansas could not refuse to list such parents on birth certificates.

In light of the Pavan ruling, one would have thought that Indiana would desist from appealing Judge Pratt’s ruling to the 7th Circuit.  But the state’s lawyers insisted that the state had a right to make the initial birth certificate of a child a record solely of the biological parents of the child, so long as they would allow same-sex spouses to seek an amended birth certificate at a later date.  Judge Pratt had rejected this argument, and the Supreme Court’s Pavan ruling vindicated her reading of the Obergefell decision’s implications for birth certificates.

Describing Judge Pratt’s first ruling, issued on June 30, 2016, Judge Easterbrook wrote, “The district court issued an injunction requiring Indiana to treat children born into female-female marriages as having two female parents, who under the injunction must be listed on the birth certificate.  Because Indiana lists only two parents on a birth certificate, this effectively prevents the state from treating as a parent a man who provided the sperm, while it requires the identification as parent of one spouse who provided neither sperm nor egg.”  Pratt concluded that this was required by Obergefell, which, Easterbrook noted, was confirmed by the Supreme Court in Pavan.

Indiana argued on this appeal that “Obergefell and Pavan do not control,” explained Easterbrook.  “In its view, birth certificates in Indiana follow biology rather than marital status.  The state insists that a wife in an opposite-sex marriage who conceives a child through artificial insemination must identify, as the father, not her husband but the sperm donor.”

By contrast, the plaintiffs argued that Indiana’s statute is status-based, not based on biology, and in fact heterosexually-married women who give birth to children conceived through donor insemination routinely designate their husbands, contrary to Indiana’s rather strange argument that the worksheet the women are given to complete in order to get the birth certificate is intended to elicit the identity of the child’s biological father – in that case, the sperm donor.  Mothers are asked to name the “father” of their child, and the state contended that this means they should be listing the sperm donor if the child was conceived through donor insemination.

That the argument is complete nonsense certainly did not help the state’s case.  Indeed, the semantic games that attorneys from the Office of the Attorney General were playing makes for a curious opinion by Easterbrook, whose tone projects some bemusement.  “The district judge thought the state’s account of mothers’ behavior to be implausible,” he wrote.  “Some mothers filling in the form may think that ‘husband’ and ‘father’ mean the same thing.  Others may name their husbands for social reasons, no matter what the form tells them to do.  Indiana contends that it is not responsible for private decisions, and that may well be so – but it is responsible for the text of Indiana Code Section 31-14-7-1(1), which establishes a presumption that applies to opposite-sex marriages but not same-sex marriages.”  This is the presumption that the husband of a married woman who gives birth is the father of her child.  “Opposite-sex couples can have their names on children’s birth certificates without going through adoption; same-sex couples cannot.  Nothing about the birth worksheet changes that rule.”

The state argued that of course the same-sex spouse can then adopt the child and be listed on an amended birth certificate.  Thus, the same-sex couple will have a birth certificate naming both of them, and the state will retain on file the original birth certificate documenting the child’s biological parentage.  But why should a married same-sex couple, entitled under the Constitution to have their marriage treated the same as a different-sex marriage, have to go through an adoption to get a proper birth certificate?

The lawsuit also sought the trial court’s declaration that the children of the two couples who brought the suit were born “in wedlock,” not “out of wedlock” as a literal interpretation of the state’s statutes would hold.  Yet again, the state’s insistence on perpetuating the former legal regime was rejected.

Judge Easterbrook identified another way that the statutes on the books fail to account for reality. What if the child of a same-sex female couple has two “biological” mothers?  Easterbrook observed that “Indiana’s current statutory system fails to acknowledge the possibility that the wife of a birth mother also is a biological mother.  One set of plaintiffs in this suit shows this.  Lisa Philips-Stackman is the birth mother of L.J.P.-S., but Jackie Philips-Stackman, Lisa’s wife, was the egg donor.  Thus Jackie is both L.J.P.-S.’s biological mother and the spouse of L.J.P.-S.’s birth mother.  There is also a third biological parent (the sperm donor), but Indiana limits to two the number of parents it will record.”

“We agree with the district court,” wrote Easterbrook, “that, after Obergefell and Pavan, a state cannot presume that a husband is the father of a child born in wedlock, while denying an equivalent presumption to parents in same-sex marriages.”  Because the current statute does that, he continued, “its operation was properly enjoined.”

However, the court of appeals found that Judge Pratt went too far when she declared that all the relevant statutory provisions are invalid in their entirety and forbade their operation “across the board,” because “some parts of these statutes have a proper application.”  For example, the provision that allows for somebody who is not a husband to the birth mother to be identified as the biological father as a result of genetic testing, and, for another example, the provision that “provides that a child is born in wedlock if the parents attempted to marry each other but a technical defect prevented the marriage from being valid.”  Easterbrook asserted that neither of these provisions violated the constitution.  “A remedy must not be broader than the legal justification for its entry, so the order in this suit must be revised,” he wrote.

“The district court’s order requiring Indiana to recognize the children of these plaintiffs as legitimate children, born in wedlock, and to identify both wives in each union as parents, is affirmed,” the court concluded.  “The injunction and declaratory judgment are affirmed to the extent they provide that the presumption in Indiana Code Sec. 31-14-7-1(1) violates the Constitution.”

Circuit Judge Easterbrook was appointed by Ronald Reagan, as was Judge Joel Flaum.  The third judge on the panel, Diane Sykes, was appointed by George W. Bush.  Thus, the ruling is the work of a panel consisting entirely of judicial conservatives appointed by Republican presidents.  The clear holding of Pavan v. Smith was such that they could not honestly rule otherwise, regardless of their personal views about same-sex marriage and parentage.  After all, in Pavan the Supreme Court rejected exactly the same arguments that Indiana was making in this case.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs include Karen Celestino-Horseman, Raymond L. Faust, Megan L. Gehring, Richard Andrew Mann, and William R. Groth, all practicing in Indianapolis in several different law firms.  Amicus briefs were filed for a variety of groups by pro bono attorneys from Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., representing the Family Equality Council, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and 49 Professors of Family Law.