In 2007, The Washington State Board of Pharmacy began requiring that pharmacists provide patients with prescribed medications if those medications are in stock. Additionally, pursuant to a long-standing rule governing which medications a pharmacy should have on its shelves, pharmacies would have to begin stocking Plan B, a prescription contraceptive. A pharmacy and two pharmacists sued the Washington State Board of Pharmacy alleging that its rules violated their religious liberty.

Marci Frazier and Kelly Goudschaal were in a same-sex relationship and decided to have children together through insemination. Kelly was the birth mother for their two children, who they then raised for many years as co-parents. They co-parented the children for a period of time after separation, but then Kelly cut off contact between Marci and the children.

California fertility service providers are permitted to offer people seeking to conceive using a known sperm donor access to certain fertility services on the same terms as different-sex couples under Assembly Bill 2356 (2012), which went into effect January 1, 2013. This bill was authored by Assemblymember Nancy Skinner and co-sponsored by Equality California and the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Increasingly, women in same-sex couples, transgender people, and single women are asking trusted friends to act as sperm donors in order to conceive a child. California was the first state to legally recognize that people may use known donors (not just anonymous sperm donors) to conceive a child.

However, people using known donors could not access the same fertility services as women in different-sex relationships. Different-sex couples can have insemination services using fresh sperm. Known donors’ sperm must typically be frozen and quarantined for six months. Insemination using fresh sperm is more effective and less costly.

AB 2356 allows providers to provide insemination services using fresh (unfrozen) sperm to people using known donors. Providers are not required to offer this service, but this law clarifies that they may offer it.

On May 31, 2004, a Chilean Court ordered Karen Atala Riffo, herself a judge in Chile, to relinquish custody of her three children to her estranged husband because she is a lesbian and living with her female partner. The Supreme Court of Chile based its decision on the long-discredited and unsupportable notion that being raised by lesbian parents is harmful for children. With no legal recourse left in Chile, Ms. Atala took her case to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IAHCHR) in Washington, D.C.

AB 1349 (2011) ensured that California courts would be able to determine who a child’s parents are in cases where a child has both a non-biological parent and a biological father who has signed a voluntary declaration of paternity.

This law fixed a problem caused by an earlier case ruling that courts could not recognize a non-biological parent who had raised the child if another man signed a voluntary declaration of paternity, even if the man who signed the declaration had no relationship with the child and no intention of raising the child.

Before AB 1349, children with non-biological parents were vulnerable to losing the parent they had always known. For example, when a same-sex or different-sex couple used a sperm donor to conceive a child, if the couple later broke up and the sperm donor and the biological mother signed a declaration of paternity, the non-biological parent could not be legally recognized as a parent.

Under this new California law, a man cannot cut off the rights of a non-biological parent by signing a voluntary declaration of paternity. This declaration is only valid if it is also signed by anyone who is presumed to be a parent under California law.

V.A., a lesbian who lives in Florida with her partner, has been raising a baby boy, E.L.A., since nine days after he was born. After Florida’s Department of Children and Families (“DCF”) terminated the parental rights of E.L.A.’s birth mother, V.A. applied to adopt E.L.A. DCF withheld its consent to the adoption solely on the grounds that V.A. is a lesbian, because Florida law prohibits “homosexuals” from adopting.

Debra H. and Janice R. were a same-sex couple living in New York who entered a Vermont civil union. After Janice gave birth to a child conceived through alternative insemination and the couple separated, Debra continued to visit the child regularly until Janice cut off contact when the child was four-and-a-half years old.