All Same-Sex Couples Are Infertile

Back in my native state of California, ever at the cutting edge of cultural change, the State Assembly has passed a bill, AB-460, which is now being considered by the State Senate. This bill (which Matthew Shadle blogs about cogently over at Catholic Moral Theology) would extend the state of California's currently requirement that medical insurance plans "offer coverage for the treatment of infertility, except in vitro fertilization" and enforce that requirement "without discrimination on the basis of age, ancestry, color, disability, domestic partner status, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, national origin, race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation."

In other words: Insurers would now be required to provide infertility treatments to same sex couples.

Of course, the thing is, no one has ever become pregnant as a result of sexual activity between two people of the same sex. It just can't happen. This is biological reality. Two men engaging in sexual activities together, or two women engaging in sexual activities together, will never result in conception. As a result, it seems like calling this problem "infertility" is more than a little odd. The reason why same sex couples do not conceive children is not that there's something wrong with how their bodies work -- it's that what they'd doing isn't capable of producing children.

As Shadle points out in the above post, classifying the failure of same sex couples to conceive children on their own represents a fascinating philosophical about-face by proponents of same sex relationships. When proponents of traditional marriage have insisted that only people of the opposite sex can get married because only people of the opposite sex can have children together, the response was that having children did not necessarily have a place in modern marriage. Marriage is just about a loving relationship. If some people choose to have children, that's their own affair.

Now, however, the tune has changed, and it's being argued that since people in loving, committed relationships can expect to have children, if they can't conceived children together there is obviously something wrong and insurance should cover medical procedures to solve it.