Prenatal Child Support Across the United States

In the early colonial era of what became the United States, it was very common for local governments and charities to care for paupers, indigents, and others who couldn’t care for themselves and had no blood-relatives available to care for them. Many of the methods of implementation were inherited from English common law.


When “bastardy” and “illegitimacy” laws initially arose in the late colonial era, the courts would try to collect from the father to cover child support expenses, either by reimbursement to the local funds or as direct payments to the mothers. Most jurisdictions handled the cases in the form of criminal trials, but they were almost always quasi-civil matters in the sense that the burdens of proof were allowed to be “clear and convincing,” rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt.”


Initially, the bastardy and illegitimacy laws took wildly different forms, but they started exhibiting commonalities as territories became new states in groups. Sometimes, the legislation included references to prenatal coverage as “lying-in expenses” or “confinement.” 


By the turn of the twentieth century, eleven states had requirements for the father to cover prenatal expenses in child support proceedings. With the rise of Uniform legislation, states continued to add prenatal requirements in blocks. The first quarter of the twentieth century saw fifteen states add prenatal support requirements, many of these specifically titling legislation as the Uniform Illegitimacy Act.


As the decades progressed, many state legislatures replaced their applicable laws with new ones that treated the children as victims of their circumstances, focusing on the “paternity” or “parentage” aspects. Additionally, Federal-level and state-level programs began to overtake local ones, so the entire landscape relating to child support evolved.


By the late twentieth century, most states and a few territories had their own prenatal child support requirements. The final push for universality in the United States came with Federal passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996. This amended Title IV-D of the Social Security Act and provided minimum child support requirements for the entire United States, by allowing of bills for the costs of pregnancy and childbirth as evidence in paternity courts.


This book takes a look at the journey for each state and territory, by showcasing their earliest ever laws to require the father to cover prenatal child support expenses, including medical costs, confinement, lying-in, childbirth, and sometimes lost wages or health insurance premiums. It presents many changes to such laws over the decades and centuries up to the current applicable legal codes. The jurisdictional breakdowns include images of legislation and hyperlinks to legal codes to provide context and assist in research.