Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a bill into law that would require the biological fathers to pay half of the prenatal care costs for the women they impregnate in a unique new law that could challenge the traditional financial responsibility for pregnancies, NBC News reports.
The bill’s sponsors say that it will help defer some of the costs of prenatal care for expectant mothers, but challengers to the bill say the law may put women in a more dangerous situation when they are in vulnerable and abusive situations.
“We want to help people and actually be pro-life in how we do it as opposed to anti-abortion,” Republican state legislator Brady Brammer said. “One of the ways to help with that was to help the burden of pregnancy be decreased.”
Some opposition to the bill stems from the assertion that men made to pay for prenatal care could contend for parental rights at some point in the future, even though the only contributions to the pregnancy were a motile sperm and a periodic check.
It also provides a pathway for abusers–be they rapists or sexual predators–to claim parental rights even if they have been imprisoned for coercing, physically threatening or raping a woman who did not consent to sexual relations.