A West Virginia state representative named Chris Pritt introduced an … interesting argument in the House of Delegates recently. During a debate on a proposed abortion ban, Pritt presented a vague hypothetical, describing a person who ends up getting an out-of-state abortion because a man didn’t want to pay child support.
Multiple outlets and Twitter personalities picked up the story, accusing Pritt of arguing in favor of eliminating child support because it could encourage people to get abortions. But Pritt has said that that is actually the opposite of what he meant. However, the alternative might be far worse.
There’s no description of Pritt’s speech that can really convey just how deeply bizarre his argument is, so here’s the full text of what he said, in his own words:
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.
So in Pritt’s hypothetical scenario here, a potential father might encourage his pregnant partner to get an abortion if he doesn’t want to pay child support, and at the same time, in the same hypothetical, the pregnant partner might also want to get an abortion if they’re worried about “everything he’s going to put me through.” Does that mean the ordeal of having to fight to get child support payments? It is true that that can be an incredibly nasty process but the solution is not to force a person to have a child, which has the potential to be a much more emotionally and financially taxing scenario than a legal dispute.
Pritt’s clumsy description of a “vulnerable” woman afraid of what her partner is “going to put [her] through” also has much darker implications than just a custody battle. A person who chooses to get an abortion out of fear of their partner is a person who needs all the resources possible, and that includes the resource of choice. The scenario Pritt describes sounds like a potentially abusive one and if so, the appropriate response is not forcing a person to have their abuser’s child because they’re scared of what he might do otherwise. That is a level of cruelty that’s hard to comprehend.
(It should be noted that when Pritt mentions enacting the “second amendment,” that is likely not a call to use firearms to prevent pregnant people from seeking abortions. Rather, since this was said during a legislative debate, I think we can assume he was arguing against implementing a proposed amendment into the bill—an amendment he describes as “allowing men to file pre-birth paternity actions.” But when read out of context, that bit can be a bit shocking.)
Pritt wrote on Twitter that “in my opinion the last thing a woman needs is unsolicited stress/uncertainty during pregnancy.” But forcing a person to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, especially when they were impregnated by someone they fear, is just about the most stressful, uncertain thing I can think of.
(via The Recount, image: screencap)
