Friday, September 16, 2016

Same-sex families gain a major victory in Wisconsin


While everyone ruminates over the election, let's not forget that the fight for full lgbt equality goes on. And on that front, same-sex couples and their children just won a major victory in Wisconsin:

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Wisconsin officials discriminated against a married lesbian couple by refusing to list the name of the non-biological mother on their child’s birth certificate.

The couple, Chelsea Torres and Jessamy Torres, had married in New York in 2013 and conceived through artificial insemination in 2014 ― the same year same-sex marriage became legal in Wisconsin.

But when their son was born in 2015, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services denied them a birth certificate listing both of their names ― as the birth mother, only Chelsea was listed in the document.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb said on Wednesday that this practice ― which Wisconsin enforced by law against same-sex couples but not different-sex couples ― is unconstitutional, and ordered the state to read its artificial insemination rules in “gender-neutral terms.”

Full story in The Huffington Post