Kentucky lawmakers advance bill allowing child support during pregnancy

Kentucky lawmakers in the Senate Families and Children Committee have advanced a bill that would allow a mother to collect child support dating back to the start of pregnancy — so long as she applies after the child is born.

The bill is, SB 110, being sponsored by state Sen. Whitney Westerfield. “That child is a human life,” Westerfield told the committee. “And the support obligation begins as soon as that life begins. And I think we ought to be able to go after that.”

Per the legislation, the mother would have up to a year after the child’s birth to seek the support dating back to the time of conception.

“So if there’s not a child support order until the child’s eight, this isn’t going to apply,” Westerfield explained. “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 original bill did not have the stipulation that mothers could only apply after birth, an omission which faced strong opposition from abortion supporters, who didn’t like that it conferred “personhood” on preborn children. “We do not have (fetal) personhood currently in Kentucky,” Tamarra Wieder of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates told LPM News. “But if we move that way, we could see a lot of really terrifying legislation that would seek to criminalize, surveil and take away rights of the pregnant person during a pregnancy.”

Faced with this pressure, the bill was amended to say that mothers could only apply for and receive the payments retroactively, after the child is born. This concession appeared to appease some of the initial naysayers. “As long as the bill stays as the committee substitute, I am hopeful,” Wieder said.

The bill still needs to gain the approval of the full Senate and House before it has a chance at becoming law.

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