When One Door Opens, Another Closes: Parentage Law After Obergefell v. Hodges

There is no question that the Supreme Court’s June 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges in which it declared a constitutional right to marry a person of the same sex, changed the legal landscape dramatically. The patchwork of laws either embracing or prohibiting such marriages had become increasingly hard to reconcile as couples moved or traveled from one state to the next and faced uncertainty about their marital status. With a single wave of its constitutional wand, the Supreme Court ended those conflicts. Same-sex married couples can marry anywhere—and, importantly, divorce anywhere. And wherever they go, they are just as married as any other married couple. But what about the status of children of same-sex couples? Obergefell resolved some thorny parentage law issues, but left untouched or even created others. In this column, I will begin to sort through those issues—what has been resolved, what is likely to be resolved in the near future, and what is likely to linger unresolved