The Limits on Pregnancy Support In North Carolina

By Jessica Wollum

The financial and physical impacts of pregnancy disproportionately affect women, as biology makes it easier for men to evade their equal responsibility. However, laws that provide robust pregnancy support can make women and children more secure, while also ensuring more equitable pregnancy cost distributions. Regardless of whether pregnancy support is framed as prenatal child support or preglimony,[1] society benefits. This idea of support during pregnancy is within North Carolina statutes and case law, but the type of support and ability to receive support is limited and fails to provide for the full range of women or children’s needs.

In North Carolina, a woman can theoretically collect support while pregnant since paternity proceedings can begin before birth and a “father becomes responsible for medical expenses incident to the pregnancy and the birth” once paternity is established. Assuming courts timely determine paternity, a father could become responsible for some expenses during pregnancy. However, such an outcome is unlikely, leaving retroactive support more likely. Retroactive support is also limited to medical expenses for pregnancy and birth. It is important to note that these statutes limit recovery to medical expenses; thus, the ability to obtain pregnancy support is limited even though there are many nonmedical costs to prepare for a child. At the very least, a child needs clothes and a place to sleep after birth. Should not both parents have to foot that bill?

Loosvelt v. Brown was the first case in North Carolina to decide this issue of pre-birth expenses; the North Carolina Court of Appeals reversed an award for pre-birth nursery expenses and maternity clothes, because they were not medical expenses.[2] Further, the court said that there was no legal basis for awarding pre-birth expenses other than medical expenses because a “child support obligation does not arise until birth” and North Carolina statutes limit pre-birth support to medical expenses.[3] Also, while the court did not allow recovery of the post-birth nursery expenses, its ruling suggests that they would have been covered in the retroactive child support order if the mother had followed proper procedures.[4] Birth is the only difference between pre-birth nursery expenses, which were not considered support owed to mother or child, and post-birth nursery expenses, which could have been child support.[5] These two limits fail to provide for the full range of women’s pregnancy costs, as well as the nonmedical expenses that directly benefit children during pregnancy.

The distinction between pre- and post-birth nursery expenses appears to make sense, given that nursery expenses directly benefit children, rather than mothers, and courts appear to draw the line for child support at birth.[6] However, the distinction quickly falls apart. Medical pregnancy expenses directly benefit children too, meaning that they could also be categorized as child support, yet North Carolina statutes establish that mothers may be reimbursed for those expenses and case law implies that the reimbursements are obligations to the mother. As such, neither a framework of obligation, nor a framework of who receives the direct benefit explains why the same expense is treated differently depending on gestation or birth. Likewise, this distinction fails to explain why certain pre-birth expenses directly benefiting the child are treated as an obligation to the mother, while others are not. Such an arbitrary line disincentivizes mothers from adequately preparing for children before they are born, but rather encourages lack of preparation and waiting until after birth when the costs can be reimbursed.

Ultimately, North Carolina law only permits limited pregnancy support for women from their (former) partners, which unequally burdens women with the costs of pregnancy. As such, North Carolina should expand its narrow restrictions for what qualifies as recoverable pregnancy support, so that women can receive comprehensive support from the fathers of their children, men are held equally responsible for pregnancy, and children are adequately prepared for upon birth.