File photo of an ultrasound. (Stock photo from Getty Images.)
Ohio taxpayers could claim “conceived children” as dependents on their taxes under a bill recently introduced in the General Assembly.
The bill began after state Rep. Gary Click, R-Vickery, championed a “personhood” bill that would have created rights for embryos and fetuses at the moment of conception. That bill wasn’t moved by the legislature, but a critic of the bill asked Click if the bill allowed embryos and fetuses to be claimed on taxes.
“Somebody that was trying to nitpick at me actually gave me a good idea,” Click said.
And thus came a bill last year with similar language on creating tax credits for “conceived children,” which has been reintroduced this year as Ohio House Bill 87.
Click said it’s had time for improvements that weren’t available in the short time frame the bill had at the end of last General Assembly.
“We took some input from some folks that we received last year and tried to improve it,” Click told the Capital Journal.
The bill language adds certain items like cribs and pack-and-plays to the list of things that are tax-exempt, in an attempt to give breathing room to expectant families, Click said.
“These seem like little things, but when you’re just a little couple starting off, every cent matters,” he said.
An announcement of the reintroduction of the bill cited a 2022 Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of health costs related to pregnancy, child birth and postpartum care, which found costs averaged $18,865 nationally, with nearly $3,000 in out-of-pocket costs.
But the bill also allows couples, and the pregnant individual if a couple is filing separately, to include “each child conceived, including each child conceived by assisted reproduction that has been placed inside the taxpayer or taxpayer’s spouse’s uterus” as a dependent on their yearly taxes.
Pregnancies lost to “spontaneous miscarriage” are also included in the bill in a change since the last bill was introduced. Click said he “thought that might be a little heartless to exclude them.”
In including pregnancies conceived through “assisted reproduction,” Click said he wanted at least state tax support of a child to “begin at implantation.”
“They don’t become a dependent after they’re born, they become a dependent as soon as you know the child,” Click said.
One exception made in the bill is to any pregnancy terminated through abortion, something critics have said flies in the face of the constitutional amendment passed in November 2023 that established the right to abortion in the Ohio Constitution.
“If you think a tax credit can undo a constitutional amendment, you need to go back to school,” Click said in response.
Currently, in order to claim dependents on state taxes, they have to be included in a “schedule of dependents,” which must include the names of the dependent, their Social Security Numbers, their dates of birth, and the relationship to the tax filer, according to the Ohio Department of Taxation.
It’s not clear how the language in the schedule of dependents would change under the bill to include fetuses who would not yet have a Social Security Number or birth date.
In terms of proving the conception, Click likened that information to business travel mileage, which would only need to be proven in the case of an audit. But he said that a doctor’s official notes or medical diagnosis could possibly be used to prove the time of the conception.
Blaine G. Saito, an assistant professor of law at the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law with expertise in tax law and policy, said there are a fair amount of items on tax forms that “do not always have reporting,” for example, cash transactions.
“People are just supposed to report honestly,” Saito said.
Saito also noted prior to a federal change in 1986 that required Social Security Numbers in dependent filings, “there were a lot of dependents, and they suddenly disappeared.”
“A lot of the tax system then requires people to make estimates in general and report in good faith, and quite a bit may not be subject to third party reporting or easily found,” Saito said.
There may be ways to prove “conceived children,” he said, “though a requirement to ‘document’ it when claiming the dependent may be considered onerous.”
H.B. 87 was referred to the House Ways and Means Committee earlier this month, where it will be subject to hearings before a committee vote can bring it to the House floor.
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