The Conservative Cat

I got the idea from this one while reading this article by Wind Rider of Silent Running. I like Silent Running, but in this case they got royally snookered.

WInd Rider was reacting to this article from the Booman Tribune. Essentially, the article states that Indiana State Senator Patricia Miller is attempting to author legislation that would deny fertility treatments to unmarried women.

The bulk of the article appears to be taken verbatim from an article by Laura McPhee of the free Indianapolis newspaper Nuvo. A PDF of the draft document discussed by the article can be found here. If you read the document thoroughly, the first thing you'll notice is that there's a lot of stuff devoted to establishing the definitions of certain terms. These definitions are a necessary recognition of the fact that in certain situations, the biological mother of the child may not be the person who carries the pregnancy and the biological father of the child may not be the intended father.

The part that scared Laura McPhee is probably Section 12 IC 31-20-02, which only applies to assisted reproduction where the intended parents are not both biological parents of the child. In other words, if Bruce were to buy some sperm from a donor bank and use it to get his wife pregnant, he would be able to demand legal custody of the child in case of divorce. If, however, if he were to buy sperm to get some other woman pregnant, the state of Indiana would not consider him the legal father of the child.

There are also rules for commencing assisted reproduction. Again, the rules only apply if the intended parents are not both biological parents of the child and there is no contract with the woman carrying the child to term. In other words, if Bruce left his wife to shack up with a young hippie chick in Indiana, they could avail themselves of an in vitro fertilization procedure with Bruce's sperm and the hippie chick's eggs; however, they could not do it with Bruce's sperm and his wife's eggs, or the hippie chick's eggs and sperm from a sperm bank.

In other words, the rules for assisted reproductive procedures where the biological parents are not the intended parents of the child fall under the same rules that currently apply for adoptions in the State of Indiana.

In the case of a gestational contract, that is, a situation where the child is not carried to term by the intended mother, then the intended parents operate under the same rules as above, except the gestational mother's husband (if any) must also sign a bunch of paperwork releasing any claim on the child.

Now, in the above two paragraphs I have made an assumption which is not necessarily valid. That assumption is that the actual law will be very close to what's in the preliminary draft. The preliminary draft contains some highlight marks as well as a question about the wording of one section. In addition, the preliminary draft is vague about the difference between a petition to establish parentage and an assessment to begin assisted reproduction. I've assumed the most restrictive interpretation in order to be fair to the people spreading this story, but it's entirely possible I'm wrong and Bruce could do the thing with the donor sperm and the hippie chick so long as he filled out a whole bunch of papers first.

Assuming that the Boomer Tribune article is a correct reproduction of a real newspaper article by the real Laura McPhee, then there are several damning statements made by Senator Miller that would seem to fly in the face of what I've said here; however, we do not really know whether the questions Miller was answering were the same ones implied by the article. Any credibility the article might have on that score is destroyed by the very first paragraph.

Republican lawmakers are drafting new legislation that will make marriage a requirement for motherhood in the state of Indiana, including specific criminal penalties for unmarried women who do become pregnant "by means other than sexual intercourse."

When compared against the actual language of the bill, the first sentence is completely false, and the second takes text out of context in order to change its meaning.

That's really all you need to know.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat