During a freewheeling campaign event that has left family members “seriously concerned” he could be in the middle of a significant bipolar episode, rapper Kanye West said God stopped him after he “almost killed” his daughter via abortion.
The entertainment magnate broke down in tears Sunday during a rally in Charleston, South Carolina — the first stop in his supposed campaign for president of the United States. During the event, he claimed he attempted to pressure his wife Kim Kardashian into aborting their now-7-year-old daughter North.
“I almost killed my daughter,” said West, clearly upset. “I almost killed my daughter!”
He went on to say: “I was having the rapper’s lifestyle. I was sitting up in Paris, and I had my leather pants on. … I had my laptop up, and I got all of my creative ideas. … And then the screen went black and white and God said, ‘If you [expletive] with my vision, I’m going to [expletive] with yours.’”
That alleged incident prompted the 43-year-old West to call Kardashian and tell her he did not want her to have an abortion.
“I called my wife and she said, ‘We’re gonna have this baby,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘We’re gonna have this child.’ … Even if my wife were to divorce me after this speech, she brought North into the world and I didn’t want to. She stood up and she protected that child.”
According to a report from TMZ, West’s family and friends believe he is in “desperate need of professional help” at the moment, but has so far refused to listen to anyone. As for Kardashian, West’s wife’s family is reportedly very upset over his decision to discuss her first pregnancy.
West, who wore a bulletproof vest during the appearance, later promoted a bizarre policy to incentivize parents against abortion. Anyone who chooses to carry a baby to term “gets a million dollars,” the rapper said. He called the idea “Plan A,” a knock against the emergency contraceptive pill known as Plan B.
“The only thing that can free us is by obeying the rules that were given to us for a promised land,” West said. “Abortion should be legal because guess what? The law is not by God anyway. So what is legality?”
West, who last year underwent what appeared to be an intense religious conversion to Christianity, also voiced his opposition to pornography and drug addiction, Reuters reported.
“Freedom does not come from an election,” he asserted. “The freedom comes from you not loading up the pornography. The freedom comes from you not taking the Percocet.”
He lost some of his audience when he seemingly cast aspersions on famed American abolitionist Harriet Tubman, heralded for her work to rescue some 70 slaves through a network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.
West claimed she “never actually freed the slaves” but instead “just had the slaves work for other white people.”