Whitney Westerfield by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr
CV NEWS FEED // A pro-life Kentucky senator filed a bill this week that would allocate more than $550 million to support families in the state through child care, adoption, college tuition, housing for low-income families, and maternal and child healthcare assistance.
Kentucky State Senator Whitney Westerfield (R) filed Senate Bill 34, also referred to as the Advancing Lives for Pregnancy and Healthy Alternatives Act (ALPHA Act), on January 2 in the state Senate to the Committee on Committees.
“I wanted us to do something to prevent abortions that wasn’t just about banning abortions. That wasn’t just focused on the medical procedure, and in fact, this bill has nothing to do with that,” said Westerfield, according to Spectrum News 1:
This bill is filled with and hopefully will spend large sums of money on building those services up and providing for families, particularly poorer families, that don’t have the means to provide for this for themselves so that they have the money that they need to buy [groceries, gas, and cars,] which are [all] much more expensive than they used to be.
The bill “carries a $551 million price tag in state spending over the next two years with an influx of cash into services such as child care, food assistance, college tuition, housing and other needs,” and “would draw another estimated $112 million in federal funds,” according to The Kentucky Lantern.
In July of 2023, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear announced the state reached a record-breaking budget surplus of over $1 billion and the state’s “rainy day fund” has continued to grow since then.
The Kentucky Lantern reported that House Speaker David Osborne (R-Prospect) said during a press conference on January 2, 2024, “We will end this fiscal year with four-and-a-half-plus billion dollars in the budget reserve. That’s more than we need. And so it is practical that we get rid of some of that money.”
Westerfield’s bill puts $495 million of its budget towards child care assistance for low-income parents, according to The Kentucky Lantern. On January 2 Westerfield also said he hopes the additional support will help expectant mothers to choose life over abortion.
“If the woman that is thinking about abortion because she’s worried she can’t make ends meet, suddenly is able to make ends meet, maybe she won’t consider abortion first,” Westerfield said, according to Spectrum News 1. “Maybe she’ll think about both lives that are at stake and decide that she can do it, that the government is going to be there to help if she can’t make ends meet on her own.”
Westerfield has been a state senator since 2013, and first announced the ALPHA Act in September 2023. In the September announcement Westerfield stated:
In my conversations with post-abortive women, the reasons they were looking for abortion to begin with were because the father of the child pushed her to do it, or her parents pushed her, or her church family guilted or shamed her for getting pregnant, or her coach or teacher told her she couldn’t succeed and be a mother, or her boss told her she couldn’t keep her job, or a college counselor told her she couldn’t go to school and be a mom, and the list goes on.
He continued, while the government cannot “fix a boyfriend or parent that is pushing a woman to choose abortion” and cannot “compel a preacher or deacon to show love and compassion… to a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy,” there are ways the government can help support expectant mothers.
“The government most certainly can make education easier to pay for, transportation easier to obtain, housing cheaper to maintain, adoption cheaper to pursue, and maternal and childhood good health easier to keep,” Westerfield stated:
And while Kentucky has done good work to limit abortion, we haven’t done enough to make child bearing and life easier for moms and babies (unborn and born), and to make the decision to choose life rather than abortion the easier, preferable choice. We need to fix that deficit.
He concluded, “The pro-life cause deserves a monumental, and bi-partisan effort in this direction… [Those voting on] the Commonwealth’s budget ought to make investment in these areas a priority just as important as any we make toward pensions, education, or infrastructure.”
