Abortion Activists Want to Force You Pay for Abortions So Abortion is “Free for All Women”

National   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Jul 25, 2016   |   11:15AM   |   Washington, DC

Abortion activists are doing their best to try to convince the American public that women must have free, taxpayer-funded abortions.

Ending the Hyde Amendment and forcing full-on taxpayer funding of abortion has become the movement’s No. 1 goal. Abortion activists have a promise from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to help push the agenda, and liberal media outlets are falling in line, too.

The Hyde Amendment prohibits direct taxpayer funding of most abortions and has done so since the late 1970s. Upheld by the Supreme Court, the amendment is now a target of abortion advocates who have moved from pro-choice to pro-abortion — forcing Americans not only to accept unlimited abortions before birth but also to pay for them.

While abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood do receive taxpayer funding, they are not supposed to use the money for abortions. If Hyde was repealed, that would change, and abortion businesses could freely and openly receive tax dollars for abortions.

This week, two pro-abortion researchers at the Guttmacher Institute, the former research arm of Planned Parenthood, wrote a column for Jacobin Magazine arguing their point. Olivia Cappello and Kate Castle claimed that abortions should not be rare and women should not be burdened with paying for them.

“We must start treating abortion care as a necessity — not a luxury. The way forward lies in pushing back public funding restrictions at every level, from cuts to federally funded family planning providers to repealing the Hyde Amendment,” they wrote.

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Cappello and Castle cited statistics showing that three-quarters of the women who had abortions in 2014 had incomes less than 200 of the federal poverty level. They argued that poorer women are not as easily able to exercise their “right” to an abortion because they cannot always afford one.

Low income women’s only option right now is through groups like the National Abortion Federation that provide grants to help low income women get abortions. To fit their pro-abortion agenda, the writers deceptively described the groups to make them seem too small and too inadequately funded to pay for many poor women’s abortions. In reality, NAF is well-funded by some of the richest people in the world. The pro-abortion group received $23 million from Warren Buffett in 2014 alone, according to Inside Philanthropy.

Cappello and Castle’s solution, however, is that taxpayers must be forced to foot the bill for women who cannot afford abortions.

“To combat the stigma that allows the anti-abortion movement to assert falsehoods as facts, we need to make it abundantly clear that abortion — safe, legal, and accessible abortion — is fundamental to women’s lives,” they wrote.

Their column was coupled with a new pro-abortion study supposedly showing how America is much more conservative on abortion than the rest of the world. The study, published in the journal Contraception, found that 34 countries “offer full funding for abortion” with taxpayer dollars. These include Australia, France, Denmark, Canada, Spain and the United Kingdom.

Abortion activists are using the report to argue that the United States is lagging behind the rest of the developed world on abortion. They want taxpayer-funded abortions to be widely available in the U.S., too.

But they fail to mention that most of the countries that do fund abortions with tax dollars restrict abortion in other ways. In most of the world, including many European countries, abortion is prohibited after the first trimester. The U.S. is one of only a handful of countries that allows elective abortions for basically any reason after 20 weeks. Others include China, North Korea and Vietnam.

If abortion activists get their way, the U.S. would become even more radically pro-abortion. They want taxpayers to pay for women’s abortions not only in the first trimester or in difficult cases, as happens in Europe, but for any reason through all nine months of pregnancy.

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