Predictable Insanity: Homosexuals Sue State Over Denial of IVF Benefits
A former New York assistant district attorney and his husband on Thursday filed a class-action lawsuit against New York City, Mayor Eric Adams, former mayor Bill de Blasio and other city leaders in a landmark case for the rights of gay men who want to conceive children in the US.
Corey Briskin, 35, and Nicholas Maggipinto, 38, allege that New York’s definition of infertility discriminates against same-sex male couples, violating federal and state civil rights laws.
The lawsuit follows Briskin and Maggipinto’s 2022 complaint to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). If they succeed, they will set a legal precedent that defines all gay men as infertile regardless of their medical history, and employers across the US will be under pressure to offer the same fertility benefits to gay men as they do to women and heterosexual couples.
Briskin began working for the city of New York in 2017 – a year after his marriage to Maggipinto – and both he and his spouse were entitled to healthcare coverage with EmblemHealth through the city’s comprehensive benefits plan. When they began researching their reproductive options that year and read the wording of the EmblemHealth policy, they discovered that, as gay men, they were the only class of people to be excluded from IVF coverage. They were not seeking for the cost of surrogacy to be covered.
The policy defines infertility as the inability to conceive a child after 12 months of unprotected heterosexual sex, or through intrauterine insemination. Straight people, lesbians and single women employed by New York City’s government are therefore eligible for infertility benefits covering the cost of IVF, but same-sex male couples can never qualify. (Read more from “Predictable Insanity: Homosexuals Sue State Over Denial of IVF Benefits” HERE)
