Apparently, nothing is too diabolical for Republicans in their endless efforts to gain complete and total control of the female body. West Virginia keeps moving closer to a near-total ban [1] on abortion, but now one particularly brazen anti-abortion lawmaker is arguing that child support requirements are harmful because they raise abortion rates, Truthout [2] reports.
That’s what Republican Del. Chris Pritt argued Friday on the floor of the legislature. He claimed that if a man gets a woman pregnant, he may try to encourage or force her to get an abortion due to the possibility that he may have to pay child support if a child is born as a result. His argument is that child support is inconsistent with an anti-abortion ideology, per Truthout.
“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 some sort of child support obligation,” Pritt said. “What he wants to do is he wants to in a sense encourage her to go and find a way to get an abortion…. it’s going to be better for me to go and just terminate this life.”
Pritt told his fellow lawmakers this is something that could actually happen and that this could also undermine Republican attempts to control women’s bodies, er I mean their goal of putting an end to all abortions.
Sharon Zhang, [3] writing for Truthout notes:
“Notably, even if abortion bans were about stopping abortions rather than restricting the public’s bodily autonomy, such bans don’t succeed [4] at lowering abortion rates.”
Pritt told his colleagues he didn’t want to do anything to boost abortion rates.
“I don’t want to be doing anything whatsoever that is encouraging folks to go and get an abortion,” he said. “
But quite frankly it’s difficult to see how this could encourage higher abortion rates because this law is so draconian that it all but bans abortion in the state. Numerous amendments accompany the law but only one amendment has exceptions — for rape and incest victims. But the House of Delegates is having difficulty reaching a consensus as to which amendments should be added to the bill.
Pritt is an example of just how deeply misogyny and regressive ideals run among Republicans in West Virginia. And all of this is on full display [5] thanks to far-right legislators and of course, Supreme Court Justices — two of whom [6] have been accused of sexually assaulting women. There has been a festering wave of abortion bans passed all across the country.
WV State Rep. Pritt (R attempts to argue that making absent fathers pay child support will encourage more abortions. Also, a lot of diversity in that photo.
Pro-choice advocates have long maintained that anti-abortion sentiment is deeply-rooted misogyny and the GOP’s weird obsession with controlling women [7] and treating them like they are hostages to their own bodies. And since the truly far-right rarely ever acknowledge that trans men and nonbinary people can get pregnant, we can infer their arguments for banning abortion are aimed at controlling cis women’s bodies.
Zhang writes:
“Abortion bans and the GOP’s attacks on trans people are closely related, however, as the right puts more and more groups’ bodily autonomy into the hands of a far-right [8] police state.
One can also infer that anti-abortion beliefs and arguments against mandated child support are also rooted [9] in misogyny and the desire to enslave women.
“The law already makes it hard for single mothers, who make up the vast majority [10] of single parents, to obtain child support,” Zhang notes. “Even though child support payments are sometimes required by courts, only 44 percent [11] of parents with primary custody of a child say they receive full child support payments. Single mothers are several times [12] more likely to be in poverty than married couples with children.”
Of course, Pritt is only one of probably dozens of dipsh*t Republicans hoping to control every aspect of a woman’s body while being abjectly classist at the same time. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) has, for instance, said if people can’t afford to have a child, they should not [13] have sex.
This is how low Republicans are willing to go and believe me, it’s pretty low. So many Republicans have been obsessed with controlling women, people of color, and people living in poverty, and it seems like they just never want any of us to be able to hold our heads up.
WATCH:
GOP isn’t content with banning abortion, banning contraceptives, & blocking Medicaid expansion. Now WV Republican @pritt4thepeople [14] 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 [15]
— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) July 31, 2022 [16]