Medical, dental, and a fertilized egg
The NY Times offers a tale of discrimination:
A same-sex married couple said in a complaint filed Tuesday that the City of New York discriminated against them in denying them in vitro fertilization coverage under the city’s insurance plan for employees.
But wait! There’s a catch. The same sex they are is the male one. In vitro fertilization don’t do you no good if you ain’t got no egg. They ain’t got no egg, on account of how they’re men.
The couple, Nicholas Maggipinto, 36, and Corey Briskin, 33, claim the policy discriminates against them based on their sex and sexual orientation and that if they were female or in a heterosexual relationship they would have access to the I.V.F. benefits that city employees are entitled to. Mr. Briskin was, until recently, an assistant district attorney.
Yes, but that’s because of the non-negotiable requirement for an egg, not because the policy “discriminates against” them. Nature discriminates against them, if you want to put it that way, but the City of New York doesn’t.
Under the city’s insurance benefits policy, a covered person is only eligible for such services when they are deemed infertile. The policy defines infertility as the inability to conceive after “12 months of unprotected intercourse,” or intrauterine insemination — a procedure that inserts sperm directly inside a uterus — for a period of time.
Intercourse is not defined in the policy, but the complaint claims New York City and its insurers “have interpreted it to mean intercourse between a man and a female.”
A man and a female. Interesting. They really don’t see women as human, do they. Egg-havers, and cruel withholding Kareny egg havers at that.
That language, the complaint said, made it impossible for Mr. Briskin and Mr. Maggipinto, who will need to use a surrogate, to ever be deemed infertile, effectively blocking them from receiving any I.V.F. insurance coverage.
They’ll “need” to “use” a “surrogate”? You’d think they were talking about a food processor here. What the Times means is that these two men intend to use a woman like an appliance to cook a fetus for them, and they think their city insurance should pay for them to rent the appliance. Meanwhile, what about those terfs, eh?
Mr. Briskin said after gay marriage became legal across the country he never would have imagined that fighting for I.V.F. benefits would be a new obstacle gay men would have to overcome.
“It’s mind blowing that in 2022 we’re still having this conversation about a policy that so clearly excludes gay men because of horribly antiquated views of homosexuality,” he said. “We got the ability to get married and the rest would have been kind of smooth sailing, but we were sorely mistaken.”
Hello? It’s not “views” of homosexuality at all, it’s reality. Gay men can’t make a baby because they don’t have the egg. That has nothing whatever to do with any views of homosexuality, antiquated or sparkling new. Getting married doesn’t cause the egg to show up and hover in the air waiting to be fertilized.
The couple claims the policy reinforces the idea that gay men are not fit to be parents.
Again – not about an idea – about a reality. Men don’t have eggs.
And another thing. Women don’t owe men eggs. There is no law or rule that says some woman somewhere has to be that couple’s surrogate, or else. No woman anywhere has to be that couple’s surrogate.
Mr. Romer-Friedman said that along with hopes the city will change the policy to be inclusive of gay men, the couple is also seeking monetary compensation for themselves and other gay male employees who have been denied benefits in the past.
Mr. Maggipinto said: “The other thing that we don’t want to lose sight of is that we want to bring home a baby, and short of getting the benefit, we can’t do that from a financial perspective. We just don’t have the money.”
How about somebody to clean the place? The city should be paying some bitch to do that too, right? Maybe at the same time as hatching the egg?
And what about cooking? They don’t want to eat out every night, unless the baby is being super annoying. Another bitch the city should pay for. Yes that will be one egg, one cleaner, and one cook with deep knowledge of Indian, Thai, and Japanese cooking.
Surely there’s an IVF clinic that has some spare embryos — just implant one in one of these guys — or in both of them, why not — and then they should be satisfied.
Lesbian couples use IVF all the time. They don’t have sperm, but that isn’t a barrier for them to undergo IVF. I know lesbians that did the embryo swap where one mother provided the egg, and the embryo was implanted in the other mother. The lack of the gamete isn’t the issue, the lack of a uterus is.
I’m not so sure about this one. If the insurance benefits cover the costs of surrogacy in some cases, shouldn’t they cover the costs for everybody? Is the surrogacy arrangement any less exploitative when entered into by a heterosexual couple where the woman has uterine abnormalities that preclude pregnancy? Surrogacy in general seems to me to be the fundamental issue, more than the fact that the couple consists of two men. Of course, if such benefits were extended to gay male couples, it would end up increasing the cost of insurance coverage for everybody.
The insurance Q&A is here: https://www.dfs.ny.gov/consumers/health_insurance/infertility_consumer_faq_052621
Roughly, it appears that a woman acting as a surrogate is covered under her own insurance, not that of the intended parents. A woman seeking IVF of her own eggs is covered; a man or woman seeking IVF of someone else’s eggs is not. If the insured party is the one acting as a surrogate, I think she is covered for IVF.
The policy shouldn’t include anyone; period. No one’s entitled to breed.
@Eava: I think “occasionally” would be an apter modifier here than “all the time.” I don’t have hard stats on this, but my strong hunch is that most lesbian couples looking to have a baby either buy sperm from a sperm bank or buy a turkey baster and find a male friend willing to ejaculate into a cup. So-called reciprocal IVF is, in my humble opinion, absolutely moronic, and the only reason fertility clinics offer this service is because they are amoral profit-generating enterprises.
While lesbian couples who want children are in an easier situation than gay couples, the fact is that the each individual child can only be the genetic offspring of one or the other of the two mothers. Passing the blastocyst around like a bag of chips won’t change this fact, but it will create totally unnecessary health risks for both of the women involved and the future child. (IVF significantly raises the baseline risk of premature delivery, and there are some other concerns as well.)
Also @Eava: the lack of the gamete and the lack of the uterus are both issues. Men can donate sperm quickly and painlessly—I am given to understand that they generally enjoy the process, and in fact engage in basically the same activity recreationally—with zero risk to their health. Egg donation, on the other hand, is physically very uncomfortable in the short term, and in the long term it’s linked to premature ovarian failure, several kinds of cancer, and other Very Bad Shit. (This is anecdotal, but I know someone who hired an egg donor, and the egg donor—a healthy young woman—appatently had a stroke a few months later. Could it be coincidence? Sure. But ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome is a known complication of egg donation, and stroke is a known effect of OHS, so . . .)
Harvesting eggs and renting wombs are both ethically fraught endeavors because at baseline they exact a heavy physical toll from the woman performing the “service,” and carry major health risks on top of that. This sucks for gay men and infertile heterosexual couples—but things suck even harder for people with, say, kidney disease, and we still don’t regard that as a justification for creating a legal market for human organs.
Maybe because I have zero paternal instinct, but this insane biological urge to reproduce seems fraught…and always has been. I 100% agree with Blood Knight. There are eight billion of us. We don’t desperately need another upper middle class consuming unit
I have qualms about assisted reproduction as well. However, as things currently stand, and the way health insurance works in the US, it seems reasonable to me that insurance for IVF and for surrogacy focus on the women. The women endure risks during the procedure and in the future.
The two men in the OP are looking at the problem backwards. If this woman they’ve hired as a surrogate has no insurance, why? If her insurance won’t cover the IVF treatments, why? Why do the men assume it’s the burden of their own insurance plan, and that it has something to do with them being gay, as opposed to them not being the woman bearing the child?
4W has a good piece on this case: Is Being Born Male a Disability? Womb-less Gay Men Think So.