Fatherhood Begins at Conception, and So Should Child Support

I have been thinking about “Mama Mia.” Not the ABBA songs, but the premise.

In the movie musical, the character Donna raised her daughter alone on a Greek island for 20 years. The movie is warm and funny about it. But underneath the charm is a quiet arithmetic: one person carrying the full weight of something two people created. The film never really asks what the other side of that ledger looked like, because that is not the kind of story it wants to tell.

A harder version of that story is told in the film “Kramer vs. Kramer.” No island, no sequins. Just a father who was absent for years suddenly present, and a mother who had managed everything in the interim. The court, in that film, is where the question of responsibility finally gets forced into the open. It should not take a courtroom to get there. And it certainly should not take nine months.

The conversation around fatherhood tends to start at the birth certificate. That includes child support orders, visitation schedules, enforcement mechanisms. That architecture matters. But it starts nine months too late.

A Texas single mother with one infant can expect to spend nearly half her annual income on base costs and childcare alone in her child’s first years of life. That financial reality does not begin at delivery. It begins the moment a pregnancy is confirmed, with prenatal appointments, insurance premiums, months of preparation, a crib, a car seat, everything purchased in anticipation of a child who has not yet arrived. The average cost of pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum care for women enrolled in large health plans exceeds $18,000. In Texas, delivery alone averages over $10,000, depending on the metro area. None of these costs wait for a birth certificate.

Yet Texas law currently gives courts permission, not a requirement, to order retroactive prenatal support after paternity is established. The relevant statute uses the word “may.” That single word is doing significant damage to real families.

Texas is not being asked to pioneer anything. Utah passed a law in 2021 requiring fathers to cover at least half of pregnancy-related expenses upon demonstrated paternity. It has not been legally challenged once. Georgia extended child support eligibility to unborn children in 2019. Kentucky’s version passed its state Senate overwhelmingly: 36 to 2. A 2022 national survey found that roughly half of Americans (including nearly equal shares of those who identify as pro-life and pro-choice) support beginning child support at conception.

This is not a partisan issue dressed in policy language. It is a straightforward question about who pays for something both parties created.

What makes the Texas gap harder to explain is the history. The obligation for fathers to cover pregnancy and birth expenses is not a novel invention of post-Dobbs politics. Georgia required fathers to provide security for children “born or to be born” as far back as 1793. Pennsylvania statutes from 1810 allowed courts to extract maintenance from fathers for pregnant women. In 1922, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws authored model legislation requiring fathers to cover necessary pregnancy expenses, nearly a century before any of our current debates began. If anything, the legal tradition we inherited is more demanding than the law we have now.

The argument for reform is not about government programs or expanded entitlements. It is simpler than that.

A father did not become a father at delivery.

The financial reality his child’s mother entered, the appointments, the preparation, the months of physical and economic cost, was set in motion by both of them. The law should reflect that.

There is also a broader cost to the current gap. Research is consistent on the pressures facing single mothers: higher rates of poverty, higher rates of psychological distress, more limited capacity to invest in their children during the period that most shapes development. Thirty-eight percent of single mothers live below the poverty line, compared to 9 percent of married mothers.

Financial stress during pregnancy is not an abstraction. It shapes how mothers eat, whether they keep their prenatal appointments, how much they have left for anything else. A child’s developmental trajectory can be altered before they take their first breath.

As reflected in Texas Public Policy Foundation research, changing “may” to “shall” in Texas Family Code 160.636 is not a sweeping reform. It does not modify paternal rights, create new entitlements, or wade into any of the larger debates that have made maternal policy so contentious in recent years. It closes a gap that the law created and that the law can close.

In “Mamma Mia,” Donna built something real despite that gap. But the version of that story that plays out in Texas courts and Texas homes is quieter and harder than any musical allows. It is a woman who did the math before her child was born, and did it alone, for something two people decided together.

Texas has the precedent, the examples from other states, and the data to act. The only thing left is the will to change one word.