In what could presage a fight conservatives want to take to the Alito-run Supreme Court, an Oklahoma state judge ruled that a lesbian couple’s child, conceived using a sperm donor, is actually the child of the sperm donor and not the child of the wife who did not carry the pregnancy, KFOR NBC-4 in Oklahoma City reports.
Oklahoma Special District Court Judge Lynne McGuire ruled Kris Williams has no parental rights for the son she and her wife, Rebekah Wilson, have raised since birth. McGuire determined Harlan Vaughn, the sperm donor the couple met using an app called JustABaby which facilitates such arrangements, is the legal parent of the boy.
Vaughn claimed that the arrangement for the sperm donation was done only with Wilson, who did not mention Williams. Williams and Wilson married while Wilson was pregnant. However, McGuire relied on Oklahoma’s Uniform Parentage Act, which lays out the state’s laws regarding parental rights and while it takes into account adoption, something which Williams did not pursue because she was the spouse of the mother, it does not consider same-sex marriages or artificial insemination, allowing a loophole through which Vaughn jumped.