Does a Wisconsin bill propose to exclude the term "mother" from all state laws, replacing it with "inseminated person" instead? No, that's not true: The existing text of the bill mentions "inseminated person" twice, specifically in cases of in-vitro fertilization, or IVF. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, who backs the bill, made the same point: the phrase only refers to IVF. While the same document also suggests using gender-neutral terms such as "spouse" and "parent" in some other contexts, Lead Stories found that the term "mother" was kept or added 37 times in the statutes addressed in the bill.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on February 21, 2025. It opened:
JUST IN: Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers (D-WI) is backing a proposed law to replace the word "mother" with "inseminated person" in a state statute.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Feb 25 17:22:41 2025 UTC)
The X post implied that the proposal legally changes the term "mother" to "inseminated person" across all existing statutes and contexts, taking a single screenshot from the 1,700-page bill.
The screenshot showed a fragment of a single page of Bill 45 (archived here), which was read in the Wisconsin state Senate for the first time on February 18, 2025 (archived here).
As the Legislative Reference Bureau's analysis that opens the document specified, the bill "contains the governor's recommendations for appropriations for the 2025-27 fiscal biennium" and concerns a broad range of issues. One of the proposed changes was amendments to the language of Wisconsin statutes concerning various aspects of parenthood, but the bill does not replace the word "mother" with "inseminated person" throughout all existing state laws.
The term "inseminated person" only appears in the current version of the bill twice, and both mentions are seen within the same section addressing a very specific context referred to as "artificial insemination" on page 1767 (out of 1917 pages in the document):
(Source: Legis.wisconsin.gov screenshot taken on Tue Feb 25 17:26:53 2025 UTC)
In other contexts, the bill suggests using such words as "parent" or "spouse".
Legislative Reference Bureau analysis on page 86 summarizes:
In addition to making statutory references to spouses gender-neutral, the bill specifies ways in which married couples of the same sex may be the legal parents of a child and, with some exceptions, makes current references in the statutes to "mother" and "father" and related terms, gender-neutral.
That said, Lead Stories found 37 instances when the word "mother" was not crossed out from the statutes reviewed under the bill's provisions.
Commenting on the language-related proposals on camera, Wisconsin Gov. Evers (archived here) said on February 24, 2025:
All this does -- it gives people a chance that are using IVF (I think Republicans are kind of okay with that) have certainty, legal certainty about a mom being able to have a year worth of care.
He continued:
Moms are moms, dads are dads.
The bill was introduced by the bipartisan Joint Committee on Finance (archived here) and referred to the same committee after the first read, as seen on the bill's history page (archived here).
Lead Stories contacted the Joint Committee on Finance and the Governor's Office for additional comments but did not receive an immediate reply.
Other Lead Stories fact checks concerning claims about current events are here.
Stories about the United States are here.
