Incarcerating parents for failing to pay child support when they did not consent to the pregnancy may violate the 13th Amendment.
April 25, 2026
Original Paper
Imposed Parenthood and Compelled Labor: Child-Support Enforcement, Consent, and the Thirteenth Amendment After Dobbs
SSRN · 6623641
The Takeaway
The intersection of new abortion restrictions and aggressive child support enforcement creates a form of forced labor. When the state removes the choice to end a pregnancy, it also compels the parent to work specifically to fund the state's mandate. Using the threat of prison to ensure this payment mirrors the conditions of involuntary servitude. This legal argument links reproductive rights directly to the constitutional protection against slavery. It suggests that if the state controls the body's reproductive output, it cannot then use the carceral system to seize the body's labor. This framework challenges the fundamental way we think about the obligations of parenthood and the power of the government.
From the abstract
This paper examines whether modern child-support enforcement practices-particularly the use of arrest and incarceration-conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment's prohibition on involuntary servitude when applied to individuals who did not voluntarily assume parental status and lacked decisional control over its creation. While the obligation to support children is a legitimate governmental interest, the mechanisms used to enforce that obligation increasingly sever responsibility from consent and