Kentucky lawmakers on the Senate Families and Children Committee have advanced a bill that would allow a mother to collect child support from the beginning of pregnancy — as long as she applies after the child was born.
The bill is, SB 110, sponsored by state Sen. Whitney Westerfield. “That boy is a human life,” Westerfield said the committee. “And the support obligation starts the moment that life begins. And I think we should go after that.”
By law, the mother will have up to one year after the birth of the child to seek support from the time of conception.
“So if there’s no child support order until the child’s eight, it doesn’t apply,” Westerfield explained. “Even in a year and a day, it is not appropriate. This is only for orders in place within one year of the child’s birth.”
The original bill did not stipulate that mothers could only apply after birth, an omission that faced fierce opposition from abortion supporters, who disliked that it conferred “personhood” on preborns. child. “We don’t have a (fetus) person currently in Kentucky,” Tamarra Wieder of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates said LPM news. “But if we move that way, we’re going to see a lot of really scary laws that aim to criminalize, monitor and take away the rights of pregnant women during pregnancy.”
Faced with this pressure, the bill was amended to state that mothers could only apply and receive payments retroactively, after the child was born. This concession appears to have appeased some of the early rebels. “As long as the bill stays in committee, I’m hopeful,” Wieder said.
The bill still needs to win the approval of the full Senate and House before it has a chance to become law.
