West Virginia Republican State Delegate Chris Pritt argued that the state should stop enforcement of child support because it could lead to fathers encouraging the mothers to have abortions:
GOP isn’t content with banning abortion, banning contraceptives, & blocking Medicaid expansion. Now WV Republican @pritt4thepeople wants to ban child support payments b/c requiring them might “incentivize abortion.”😳🤦🏽♂️
It was never about life, it was always about control. pic.twitter.com/4ex9QQNiKm— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) July 31, 2022
From Raw Story:
"If she carries through with the pregnancy, he's going to have, possibly, some sort of child support obligation," said Pritt. "And, so, what he wants to do is, he wants to — in a sense — encourage her to go and find a way for her to get an abortion. Because he knows that a certain individual — if he has any kind if familiarity with her, he knows that she might be of such a state of mind, she must be in such a vulnerable position that it's not worth everything that he's going to put me through to carry this pregnancy forward. It's going to be easier, it's going to be better, for me to just go and terminate this 'life.' So she goes over to Virginia or to some other state where she goes and gets the abortion. So, I think that's a really clear possibility if we enact the Second Amendment here, I don't want to be doing anything that is encouraging thugs to go and get an abortion."
It's unclear what he means by referencing the Second Amendment.
This proposal just doesn't make sense. Financial support actually encourages the mother to carry to full term. The lack of any sort of support would be more likely to make the mother consider abortion. Furthermore, most states enforce child support in order to take some of the burden off of taxpayers.
So why this inane proposal? Perhaps the fact that Pritt's day job is a lawyer at his private law firm, specializing in divorces, custody battles and child support might go a long way to explain that.
