Kansas House’s child support bill invites scrutiny of meanings between lines of written text

TOPEKA — Obstetrician and gynecologist Elizabeth Wickstrom urged legislators Thursday to handle with care what appeared to be an innocuous bill authorizing Kansas courts to adopt a new pathway for ordering persons to make child support payments to pregnant women.

The Kansas House bill introduced by Rep. Leah Howell, a Derby Republican, on behalf of the faith-based Kansas Family Voice would expand the definition of child support to cover interests of a fetus from conception until birth. The two-page bill included a prohibition on use of the supplemental payments to cover the cost of an abortion except when the procedure was intended to save a pregnant woman’s life.

“Written between the lines is a description of limitations on abortion that appears similar to the proposed abortion ban of 2022,” Wickstrom said. “The newest twist is trying to define ‘fetal personhood,’ which gives an embryo or fetus equal legal standing to the person carrying them in the uterus. A living, breathing member of your constituency deserves your regard much more than a pre-viable fetus.”

She told the House Federal and State Affairs Committee that House Bill 2653 conflicted with results of the statewide vote in August 2022. A majority of Kansans defeated a proposed amendment to the Kansas Constitution nullifying a Kansas Supreme Court decision that the right to bodily autonomy, and therefore termination of a pregnancy, was embedded in the state’s Bill of Rights. Anti-abortion advocates sought to alter the state Constitution to further restrict access to abortion in Kansas.

“Stop trying to reinvent your abortion bans and listen to your constituents,” the doctor said. “We do not want your laws controlling our private health care decisions. It’s more than my high-risk pregnant patients can bear.”

Howell, the Republican who introduced the bill, said the legislation incorporated definitions such as fetal personhood and elective abortion that existed in current statute. It’s not clear how the bill would take into account pregnancies resulting from fertilized embryos in IVF procedures.

“This just gives the courts a different guideline to consider,” Howell said. “We all know it takes two to create a child or create a life and both parties should be responsible. It’s really just that simple.”

The House committee didn’t take action on the legislation, but gathered testimony from 15 opponents of the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes and Trust Women. Four proponents of the bill included Kansans for Life, the Kansas Catholic Conference and Kansas Family Voice.

‘Fathers are still fathers’

Brittany Jones, an attorney with Kansas Family Voice, which initiated introduction of the bill, said the objective was enactment of law protecting fetuses and assisting pregnant women. It was time Kansas courts took into account interests of a baby in the womb during child support proceedings, she said.

“Expenses for children do not start once a baby is born,” she said. “In fact, pregnancy is when a woman likely needs the most support. Fathers are still fathers even if the child is not yet born and our laws should reflect that reality and that responsibility.”

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment reported 12,732 children were born out of wedlock in Kansas during 2023. Over the past five years, an average of 13,000 children were outside bonds of marriage.

Jeanne Gawdun, a lobbyist with Kansans for Life, said 36% of Kansas births were to single mothers and 84% of abortions were performed on single women in 2022.

“While it may not always be the case that paternity is known before the birth of the child,” Gawdun said, “once paternity is established the court may make child support payments retroactive to include expenses incurred by the mother during the time her child was unborn.”

The Kansas Department for Children and Families said there was no provision in state law for support of an unborn child because parental relationships were not legally established until a live birth. Pregnancy and birth-related expenses were currently sought as court judgments after a child was born.

The House bill would increase expenditures by the court system and DCF by extending duration of child support cases and requiring more testing, back dating of court orders and tracking of payments. The bill didn’t take into account administrative burdens if a person was later determined to not be the legal parent of a child, DCF said.

Kansas Catholic Conference policy specialist Lucrecia Nold said absent fathers should be held accountable by courts engaged in addressing child-support decisions.

“Alleviating at least some of the financial burdens a mother encounters, beginning with the child’s conception, is a moral imperative,” Nold said. ”

‘Legislation is insincere’

Taylor Morton, a lobbyist with Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, asked House members to oppose the bill on legal, bureaucratic and financial reasons. The organization is the political arm of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which provides reproductive health care to patients at three health facilities in Kansas.

She said the House bill was “nothing more than an attempt to further an anti-abortion agenda.”

It would do so by elevating rights of a fetus to be equivalent or superior to a pregnant person, she said. Extending the definition of fetal personhood to state law would make it easier for anti-abortion legislators to criminalize or restrict health care during pregnancy, she said.

“Implementation of HB 2653 raises serious questions, both from a financial and bureaucratic perspective,” Morton said. “A positive pregnancy test does not in itself indicate the birth of a child, and this bill does not set out any structure for child support payments for a pregnancy that ends in miscarriage, stillbirth or abortion.”

Amber Sellers, director of advocacy for Trust Women Foundation, said the organization devoted to protecting access to abortion in Kansas and Oklahoma opposed the House measure. She objected to the potential of an expanding state government bureaucracy through pregnancy surveillance.

“How will the state establish the date of conception?” Sellers said. “One in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. A single person might be eligible many times during a single year. There could be different paternity results for each pregnancy. What started as a little bit of government overreach could quickly balloon into massive pregnancy surveillance.”

The bill’s narrow definition of “elective abortion,” which would exclude considerations of mental health for the pregnant woman, exemplified attempts to curtail women’s autonomy, reproductive freedoms and civil liberties, said Rashane Hamby, director of policy and research at ACLU of Kansas.

“It dangerously oversimplifies the myriad reasons behind the deeply personal decision to terminate a pregnancy, dismissing the socio-economic, health-related and personal factors that are weighed in making such decisions,” Hamby said.