Ohio Court Orders Man To Stop Reproducing

An Ohio appeals court this week upheld a ruling
prohibiting a man from reproducing until he pays $100,000 in child
support for his already-existing offspring.

The Chronicle-Telegram
reports:

The decision, released Monday by the 9th District Court of
Appeals, did not provide a legal explanation on whether Walther’s
order was appropriate. Instead, two of the three judges on the
panel wrote that without a copy of a pre-sentence report on [Asim]
Taylor completed by the county Adult Probation Department, they
didn’t have enough information to examine the virtues of Walther’s
order.

“Indeed, we have little to go on other than what the trial court
said in its journal entries, which is itself limited,” Judge Carla
Moore wrote in the majority decision. “We therefore have no choice
in this case but to presume the regularity of the community control
sanctions and to affirm.”

In 2013 Lorain County Probate Judge James Walther ordered Taylor
to stop making babies or else face prison time. Walther seems
pleased with the high court’s ruling, because the “appeals decision
gives him the authority to impose similar restrictions on other
defendants in similar cases,” according to the
Chronicle-Telegram, though “he said he would have liked to
have seen a more detailed analysis of the legality.”

Taylor’s attorney, Doug Merrill, filed an appeal
contending that Walther’s condition that Taylor not reproduce
is “overbroad” and that it violates his due process and equal
protection guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and right to
privacy under the Ninth Amendment.

When Walther first made the decision, Merrill
suggested that “the court is now stepping into [Taylor’s]
bedroom” and essentially preventing him from having sex, a
punishment that is unrelated to Taylor’s crime of not paying child
support.

Taylor plans on taking his case to the Ohio Supreme Court, which
has previously struck down similar orders against
reproduction.