Albany, NY – Today, Senate Bill S.8866: Equity in Fertility Treatment Act, passed the New York State Senate as part of the Reproductive Freedom legislative package. Sponsored by State Senator Julia Salazar, the bill ensures LGBTQ+ New Yorkers are not unfairly excluded from insurance coverage of IVF.  

State Senator Julia Salazar released the following statement: 

“LGBTQ+ New Yorkers deserve the same reproductive insurance coverage as all New Yorkers, yet they are being unfairly excluded due to an unintended loophole in State law. The Equity in Fertility Treatment Act will ensure that all New Yorkers who wish to become parents through IVF, and have the insurance coverage afforded by New York's 2019 legislation, will be able to do so.  

There are many instances in our state's history of denying LGBTQ+ people equal protection under the law. This does not need to continue being one of those instances.” 

In 2019, New York passed a law that required insurance companies to cover three cycles of IVF for eligible New Yorkers, but this law does not define what a cycle of IVF entails. Due to the lack of explicit definition in the 2019 law, some insurance companies began defining various steps as individual “cycles,” instead of covering all the steps required to actually complete a single cycle of IVF. The result of this is that many couples are currently being denied fair insurance coverage for IVF. Since LGBTQ+ parents naturally require more steps than a heterosexual couple to complete a full IVF cycle, they are being disproportionately impacted by the law's current loophole.