Kentucky senate passes bill granting right to collect child support for fetuses
The Republican-led Kentucky senate voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to grant the right to collect child support for fetuses, advancing a bill that garnered bipartisan support despite nationwide fallout from a controversial Alabama decision also advancing “fetal personhood”.
The measure would allow a parent to seek child support up to a year after giving birth to retroactively cover pregnancy expenses. The legislation – Senate Bill 110 – won senate passage on a 36-2 vote with little discussion to advance to the House. Republicans have supermajorities in both chambers.
The Republican state senator Whitney Westerfield said afterward that the broad support reflects a recognition that pregnancy carries with it an obligation for the other parent to help cover the expenses incurred during those nine months. Westerfield is a staunch abortion opponent and sponsor of the bill.
“I believe that life begins at conception,” Westerfield said while presenting the measure to his colleagues. “But even if you don’t, there’s no question that there are obligations and costs involved with having a child before that child is born.”
The measure sets a strict time limit, allowing a parent to retroactively seek child support for pregnancy expenses up to a year after giving birth.
“So if there’s not a child support order until the child’s eight, this isn’t going to apply,” Westerfield said when the bill was reviewed recently in a senate committee. “Even at a year and a day, this doesn’t apply. It’s only for orders that are in place within a year of the child’s birth.”
The debate comes amid the backdrop of a recent Alabama supreme court ruling that frozen embryos are legally protected “extrauterine children”, which spotlighted the anti-abortion movement’s longstanding goal of giving embryos and fetuses legal and constitutional rights that are on par with or even competing against those of the people carrying them. These kinds of protections, if enacted, could rewrite vast swaths of US law, including undermining in vitro fertilization (IVF). In the wake of the Alabama ruling, multiple providers in the state announced that they would suspend their IVF procedures.
More than half of all states have at least some measure on the books that defines a fetus or embryo as a person, or that could be honed into a legal spear to advance fetal personhood, according to an analysis by the pro-abortion rights group Pregnancy Justice. In Tennessee, for example, dozens of women have been charged under the state’s fetal assault law, often for suspected drug use.
Kentucky is among at least six states where lawmakers have proposed measures similar to a Georgia law that allows child support to be sought back to conception. Georgia also allows prospective parents to claim an income tax deduction for dependent children before birth; Utah enacted a pregnancy tax break last year; and variations of those measures are before lawmakers in at least a handful of other states. In the wake of the outcry over Alabama, however, Florida lawmakers paused their push for a fetal personhood bill.
The Kentucky bill underwent a major revision before winning senate passage. The original version would have allowed a child support action at any time following conception, but the measure was amended to have such an action apply only retroactively after the birth within the time limit.
Despite the change, abortion-rights
supporters will watch closely for any attempt by anti-abortion lawmakers to reshape the bill in a way that “sets the stage for personhood” for a fetus, said Tamarra Wieder, the Kentucky state director for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates. The measure still needs to clear a house committee and the full house. Any house change would send the bill back to the senate.