A recent Arkansas Supreme Court opinion, reversed and dismissed a lower court ruling regarding the procedure for issuing birth certificates reflecting the names of both same-sex parents when one parent conceives a child using an anonymous sperm donor.
While the same-sex couples were successful in obtaining their birth certificates (because that part of the lower court decision was apparently not appealed), the Supreme Court of Arkansas reversed and dismissed the lower court’s holding that the Arkansas Statutes were unconstitutional because the Statute allowed a husband of a wife artificially inseminated to be automatically named a father on their child’s birth certificate; however, the statute did not afford the same treatment to same-sex female couples whereby one of the parents is artificially inseminated.