West Virginia Republican wants to ban child support because he thinks it'll incentivize abortions
Chris Pritt owns his own law practice, Pritt Law, where he specializes in divorce, custody arguments and child support. But standing before the state legislature in West Virginia, his argument was a linguistic pretzel to justify eliminating all child support for the parent who gets custody of a child.
According to Pritt, there are fathers who don't want to be involved in the lives of their children.
"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.
Parents fighting to not get child support for the child they're raising isn't something that happens. Single parents are generally cash strapped and any opportunity to ensure the other parent helps is important. Having financial support is typically more of an incentive to have a child, as the number one reason women give for getting an abortion is financial.
See the video below:
\u201cGOP isn\u2019t content with banning abortion, banning contraceptives, & blocking Medicaid expansion. Now WV Republican @pritt4thepeople wants to ban child support payments b/c requiring them might \u201cincentivize abortion.\u201d\ud83d\ude33\ud83e\udd26\ud83c\udffd\u200d\u2642\ufe0f\n\nIt was never about life, it was always about control.\u201d— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@Qasim Rashid, Esq.) 1659307084