In the shadow of Alabama’s on-going “fetal personhood” argument, the Republican-led Kentucky Senate has passed a potentially controversial bill, granting retroactive child support for fetuses.
Senate Bill 110 won Senate passage on a 36-2 vote and will advance to the House. The measure, which garnered bipartisan support, will allow a parent to request child support for up to a year after birth to cover pregnancy costs.
Sponsor/author of the bill, Republican state Senator Whitney Westerfield, after the vote, stated that the widespread approval and support of Senate Bill 110 indicates an acknowledgment that pregnancy entails a responsibility for the partner to contribute towards the expenses over the nine-month gestation period.
“I believe that life begins at conception,” Westerfield said in the Senate chambers 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 establishes a stringent time frame on filing for child support. A parent can retroactively request child support for pregnancy costs only up to one year post birth.
Westerfield made that point crystal clear to those present for the vote by saying, “So if there’s not a child support order until the child’s eight, this isn’t going to apply. 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.”
According to an analysis conducted by Pregnancy Justice, a pro-abortion rights organization, over half of the states in the country have laws that either define a fetus or embryo as a person. As we have seen in recent news, these laws can and/or could be used to advocate for a fetus being seen as a person.
The measure still needs to clear a Republican-majority House committee and then be approved by the full Kentucky House. Any changes along this process will derail the bill into becoming a law and it would be sent back to the Senate.
