Ralph's other options?

Why murder to finance an abortion and not either a shotgun wedding or just taking off, leaving Delores to be a single mother and/or on welfare? Being a short order cook does not seem like it would be a hard job to acquire someplace else.

I was born about that time in the Northeast, and my mother started off as a working single mother and when child care did not work out, she reluctantly went on welfare when she inquired about child care at the Department of Social Welfare. Both her parents were dead, so there was no backup plan. I had a "daytime" dad, whom I saw almost every day, but he rarely spent the night. He was quite clear he was not a deadbeat dad because he paid child support (a pittance). He was quite okay that the system was supporting us. Matter of fact, he would occasionally rub my mother's face in it about how "she was on welfare."

My family situation was not unique and I know many, many other poor children, so I was shocked that welfare or shotgun wedding was not in the cards.

While I presume Ralph was much older than Delores, through a genealogy Web site, I learned that an aunt, whom I have never met, was only 14 in the 1960s when she married the 17-year-old father of her child with parental and judicial consent. So even below age 16, a significant jail sentence is not inevitable if for having impregnating a minor.