The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled unmarried same-sex partners who broke up before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015 can’t claim parental rights through the state’s artificial insemination laws.
The ruling came from a complicated custody case from Cincinnati. Priya Shahani and Carmen Edmonds were together for 12 years, during which time Shahani gave birth to three kids via artificial insemination. The couple got engaged but never married and separated in 2015, not long before the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its landmark ruling on same-sex marriage with Obergefell v. Hodges that same year. Edmonds claimed through the state’s artificial insemination laws she had the same parental rights as if they had been married. The First District Court of Appeals agreed with Edmonds, overturning the Hamilton County Juvenile Court’s decision denying her request to be named a legal parent. Shahani appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court.
"What we're kind of getting is one person saying, 'well, I want a marriage to be retroactively created' and another person saying, 'well, I don't want a marriage to be retroactively created because I never wanted to enter into one in the first place," Shahani’s lawyer Paul Kerridge told the Ohio Supreme Court last April. “The First District's decision is basically a way to shoehorn into a relationship a marriage so that we can apply marriage based statutes.”
"My client has been there since the very beginning. She planned to raise and conceive the children with Miss Shahani," Edmond's lawyer Jonathan Hilton told the justices. "My client wants to be a mom. She's not an activist and she's not a protester."
The justices ruled that courts cannot retroactively decide whether a couple would have married, and held that Ohio’s artificial-insemination law does not cover unmarried partners.
"The First District’s mandate would put trial courts in the position of trying to guess what the parties would have done had same-sex marriage been legal," wrote Justice Pat DeWine in the majority opinion. "The “would have been married” inquiry therefore sets trial courts out on an impossible mission to retroactively determine whether a different reality would have produced different events. That’s a tough ask of trial courts."
The case was sent back to the appeals court to determine custody based on other issues.
