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The Legal Eagle: Minor children, spousal support are covered by state law
Thursday, December 21, 2000 Patricia G. Miller
Are there people out there whom you can be legally forced to support, whether you want to or not? You bet!
Some are obvious -- your husband or wife if you are separated but not divorced; your minor children. But what about your aging parents? Grandparents? How about that college-aged child?
The rules regarding support obligations have changed a lot in the past 250 years. In Colonial times, no one had much of a personal responsibility to care for the poor, including their own poor relatives. Abandoned children or aging parents were no better off, in a legal sense, than a poor person with no relatives.
In those days, the poor were sometimes actually rounded up and run out of town.
We became more enlightened in the early 1800s and built poorhouses to accommodate these unfortunate people. Not pleasant places, they were filled with widows, unwed mothers with small children and old people with no place to turn. Men who might have been the fathers of those small children or adults who were the children of those impoverished old people had no legal duty to support them. Neither did the government. The poorhouses were essentially voluntary charities.
A great deal has changed since then. The first step was to make relatives pick up the slack. Pennsylvania did that in 1771, when it passed a law that required men to support wives, children, impoverished parents and, sometimes, even grandparents or grandchildren, if the circumstances were right. Back then wives had no duty to support a husband.
There were exceptions. You didn't have to support a parent who had abandoned you as a child, and you didn't have to support a spouse whose conduct would give you grounds for a "fault divorce." In other words, if your wife behaved in ways that were unwifely, she couldn't expect support.
The philosophy was act right or no support.
The passage of Social Security legislation by the federal government in the 1930s took elderly parents and grandparents off the backs of their adult children -- at least partially -- by providing a modest stipend to the elderly. It also provided benefits for wives and children if their breadwinner had died.
Grandparents and grandchildren were taken out of the support equation in 1945, when the state Legislature passed a law stating that no support obligation could arise out of those relationships.
At that point, it seemed the support obligation circle was shrinking.
It expanded in 1971, when Pennsylvania passed a state equal rights amendment.
It said that men and women had to be treated equally; that meant women, minor children and, in proper circumstances, husbands. Until then, only men had a legal duty to support their children or their spouses.
The support obligation circle shrunk again when Pennsylvania decided all bets were off when it came to forcing parents to pay support for their adult children who were in college. Once you were 18, our highest court said, no one had to support you or pay your tuition, unless you were seriously disabled. You were on your own.
So where are we today? It's hard to tell, because there has been no consistent trend. It would seem support obligations are expanding, because this year a mother in Pike County, whose parental rights had been legally ended, was ordered to pay support for her child until the child was adopted.
Now for the answers to the questions I posed at the beginning of this column: parents, no; grandparents, no; college students, no; minor children, yes, even if your parental rights have been terminated; husbands or wives, that depends. Talk to your lawyer.
If you are in the "that depends" category, the answers aren't easy. Talk to your lawyer if you are unsure of your obligations because once the legal system orders you to support someone, it has some pretty powerful weapons to make certain it happens -- like taking part of your pay- check, tax refund or bank account.
Patricia G. Miller is the permanent equitable distribution master for the Family Division of the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County. Her views do not necessarily represent those of the division or its judges.
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