Kanye West, 43, has held his first campaign event after announcing his 2020 bid for the presidency. The rapper spoke to a group of attendees at the Exquis Event Center in North Charleston on July 19, where he tearfully admitted that he “almost” aborted his daughter North West, 7, with wife Kim Kardashian, 39, in 2012. “I almost killed my daughter…My girlfriend called me screaming, crying. I’m a rapper. And she said I’m pregnant. She was crying,” he explained, noting that he was in Paris at the time. “Even if my wife were to divorce me after this speech, she brought North into this world, when I did not want to,” he said.
Here’s Kanye crying and screaming “I almost killed my daughter.”#KanyeWest pic.twitter.com/NT3t5tStW3
— AJ (@keepgrinding914) July 19, 2020
During the lengthy talk, Kanye also reversed his previous anti-abortion stance. “In 2020, abortion should be legal,” the Jesus Is King rapper said. “My stance is not to make abortion illegal at all. It should always be legal but there should be an option of maximum increase,” he added, defining maximum increase as, “everybody that has a baby gets a million dollars, or something.”
The Chicago native went on to reveal that his father Ray West wanted to abort him in 1976 — but his mom Donda “saved” him. “My mom saved my life. My dad wanted to abort me…There would have been no Kanye West because my dad was too busy,” he said. Kanye wore a bullet-proof best for the event, and sported the numbers “2020” on the back of his head.
The event was open to “registered guests” who signed up at Kanye’s new campaign site –kanye2020.country — and all attendees were asked to sign a COVID-19 liability release form, social distance and wear a mask, according to ABC. Earlier in the day, he tweeted a link for a petition to “put Kanye West on the Ballot in South Carolina” as the July 20 deadline to file signatures as an independent candidate looms.
It comes just two weeks after Kanye’s surprise announcement on the Fourth of July that he was running for president. Shortly after revealing his bid for The White House, Kanye sat down for a stunning interview with Forbes. Over “four rambling hours of interviews” with the publication, Kanye laid out his political views, which seem at odds with wife Kim Kardashian‘s famously liberal, pro-choice views. “I am pro-life because I’m following the word of the bible,” the religious-leaning rapper said. “Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work.”
In the new interview, Kanye also came out as an anti-vaxxer. “It’s so many of our children that are being vaccinated and paralyzed,” he said. “So, when they say the way we’re going to fix COVID is with a vaccine, I’m extremely cautious. That’s the mark of the beast. They want to put chips inside of us, they want to do all kinds of things, to make it where we can’t cross the gates of heaven. I’m sorry when I say they, the humans that have the Devil inside them. And the sad thing is that the saddest thing is that we all won’t make it to heaven, that there’ll be some of us that do not make it. Next question.” During the interview, Kanye also claimed he contracted the coronavirus earlier in 2020.