A new California law signed by Governor Jerry Brown and set to go into effect in January 2014 gives homosexual and unmarried couples the right to have their fertility treatments covered by insurance. Heterosexual married couples were already covered.
Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), who authored the bill, said, “Reproductive medicine is for everybody’s benefit. To restrict fertility coverage solely to heterosexual married couples violates California’s non-discrimination laws. I wrote this bill to correct that.”
Judy Appel, the executive director of Our Family Coalition, a same-sex advocacy group based in San Francisco, said, “We have the right to marry now and this is further support for us to be able to create families.”
Most often, fertility treatment is covered by insurance after the couple has tried unsuccessfully for a year to bear children through natural conception.
The law states that insurance companies cannot discriminate vis-à-vis fertility treatments because of “domestic partner status, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, marital status… sex or sexual orientation.”
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