West Virginian delegate Chris Pritt, a Republican, appeared to argue in the House of Delegates on Friday that making absent fathers pay child support contribute to encouraging more women seeking abortions, either in state or out of state. The argument was made during a debate on West Virginia’s near-total abortion ban legislation.
PRITT: “Let's say you've got a father who doesn't want to really be involved in the life at all, really. He knows that if she carries through the pregnancy he's going to have possibly some sort of child support obligation. And so what he wants to do is he wants to in a sense encourage her to go and find a way to get an abortion because he knows that if it's a certain individual, if he has any kind of familiarity with her, he knows that she might be of such state of mind, she may be in such a vulnerable position that she decides, it's not worth everything he's going to put me through to carry this, this pregnancy forward. It's going to be easier, it's going to be better for me to go and just terminate this life. And so, what she does is she goes over to Virginia, she goes over to some other state, where abortion is legal, and she goes and gets the abortion. And so I think that's a really clear possibility if we enact the Second Amendment here, I don't want to be doing anything whatsoever that is encouraging, folks to go and get an abortion.
