Judges limit North Carolina child support law requirement in IVF case involving same-sex couple

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Someone acting as a child’s parent can’t be ordered to pay child support in North Carolina unless the person is an actual parent or has formally agreed to provide such compensation, the state Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday in a case involving an unmarried same-sex couple.

A divided three-judge panel reversed a lower court that declared the ex-partner of the child’s mother, who gave birth in 2016 through in vitro fertilization, as a parent within the state’s child support laws. The local judge directed Tricosa Green, who didn’t give birth, to pay the biological mother about $250 per month and keep covering the child’s health insurance premiums.

The two women have had joint legal and physical custody for years. Child support law establishes that a “mother” and “father” share the primary liability for child support. In 2021, Mecklenburg County District Court Judge J. Rex Marvel wrote that it was appropriate that mother and father apply in this dispute in a “gender-neutral way,” and that “the duty of support should accompany the right to custody in cases such as this one.”

But Marvel’s order, if allowed to stand, would treat unmarried same-sex couples using IVF differently than unmarried heterosexual couples in which the male partner is not the sperm donor, Court of Appeals Judge Donna Stroud wrote in the prevailing opinion.

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