Conference committee questions amendment to HB 2062 to tie stillbirth certificates to tax exemption

Members of the Committee on Judiciary’s conference committee spent more than an hour questioning an amendment to House Bill 2062 that would allow taxpayers to use a stillbirth certificate to claim a short-term personal tax exemption.

The committee’s reviser, Jason Thompson, told members the stillbirth definition in state law requires a gestational age of at least 20 completed weeks and that a medical professional must issue and file the certificate with the state registrar. “So that the main thing is that this definition has to be met, and then there's a certificate that has to be issued by a medical professional,” Thompson said, then read the statutory definition: “stillbirth means any complete expulsion or extraction from its mother of a human child, the gestational age of which is not less than 20 completed weeks, resulting in other than a live birth as defined in this section, and which is not an induced termination of pregnancy.”

Why it matters: the amendment links that certificate to a temporary tax exemption that some members described as…