A same-sex male couple from the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn has filed a class-action lawsuit against New York, accusing the city of violating their civil and constitutional rights by denying them in vitro fertilization benefits.

Corey Briskin and Nicholas Maggipinto, who got married in 2016, planned on having children by conceiving via IVF and having their baby delivered through a surrogate.

“We’ve been married for eight years,” Maggipinto said. “So there’s no reason why we wouldn’t have had children immediately if we could have.”

The couple said their plans to have a lab combine an egg with sperm to make an embryo have been stalled because they cannot qualify for IVF insurance coverage under the city’s health care plan.

“The city’s health care plan defines infertility as having had sexual intercourse for 12 months without a resulting pregnancy,” the couple’s attorney, Peter Romer-Friedman, told Spectrum News NY1. “But the way that the city’s health plan has implemented that policy is to require that the sex be between a man and a woman.”

Romer-Friedman, who heads his own law firm based in Washington, D.C., is representing the couple alongside David Lopez, who served as general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 2010 until 2016 and currently serves as a professor at Rutgers Law School.

Romer-Friedman said the city's coverage denial amounts to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. It’s the basis of a class-action lawsuit filed against the city on the couple’s behalf.

“We cannot meet the city’s definition of infertility,” Briskin said.

The two men were both covered by the city’s health care plan when Briskin worked as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan from 2017 until 2022.

Briskin left the job but is still covered under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, a federal law which allows employees to continue to receive a former employer’s health insurance if they pay the full premium.

“The city has been a leader in offering IVF treatments for any city employee or dependent covered by the city’s health plan who has shown proof of infertility, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation,” a city spokesperson said in a statement.

A City Hall source clarified that the city’s infertility requirement does not include surrogates. However, the couple said they only sought IVF coverage, not benefits for a surrogate.

“We begun saving so that we could save for the surrogacy portion,” Briskin said.

The lawsuit comes after the couple filed a charge of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2022. However, the couple’s attorney said the city can simply direct health insurers to cover gay men for IVF without litigation.

“The city can dictate what those standards should be and it ought to,” Romer-Friedman said.

Last year, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, a nonprofit organization advocating for ethical and quality standards in patient care, updated its definition of infertility to include anyone needing medical assistance to become pregnant, which includes members of the LGBTQ+ community.