Travis Henry is the NFL star who became infamous rather than famous for having nine children with nine different mothers, which is kind of like being the Octo-mom of the NFL.

At 30 now (a relatively old age for NFL running backs), he now has to pay some $170,000 a year in child support.  Yeesh.  “I’ve lost everything in this mess I’ve gotten myself into,” said Henry.  Hey, at least he admits he got himself into it.

This is exactly the kind of thing they warn you about at the NFL Rookie Symposium, which is held every year for the incoming rookies and warns them about drugs, sex, and the pressures of living the NFL life.

From the New York Times:

Attending the annual N.F.L. rookie symposium as a 2001 draft pick of the Buffalo Bills, Henry watched a skit that dramatized the repercussions of imprudent sexual activity. It might as well have been geared toward him.

Henry laughed through the sketch. “I thought, ‘That ain’t ever going to happen to me,’ ” he said.

But it had, and it was just beginning.

Henry maintained that he was involved long-term with many of the mothers. Some, he said, told him they were using birth control, and he professed surprise at discovering they became pregnant by him.

“I did use protection at first,” he said. “Then they’d be saying they’d be on the pill. I was an idiot to trust them. Second or third time with them, I didn’t use it. Then, boom!”

There are a few lessons here.  First, don’t trust strange women.  Second, don’t get those strange women pregnant.  Third, if you’re a football star, practice a lot, because you’re going to need a lot of NFL money.

Of course Henry’s situation is outrageous (how many people get nine women pregnant and spend a quarter of a million dollars on jewelry in the same lifetime that aren’t ancient Egyptian pharaohs?), but so is the way we often handle child support in this country:  it incentivizes single motherhood, which as Ann Coulter notes is a plague on American society.

Am I wrong here?  Are there not women who seek to get pregnant by people like Travis Henry in order to receive the child support payments?  Should that kind of thing be happening?  Travis Henry was wrong to do it.  But that’s not where the wrongness ends here.