Abortion Funding and the Welfare State
Posted by Anthony Gregory on March 22, 2011
Moderate Republican Scott Brown, who was heralded and feared as some sort of Tea Party dark horse when he won Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat, has once again shown that he is not the hardline conservative that many have expected. His latest break with the GOP base is over the proposed cutting of federal funding for Planned Parenthood—cuts that he says “go too far.”
It is of course a moral outrage that prolife taxpayers are forced to finance abortions. Under the U.S. Constitution, the federal government shouldn’t give a single penny to Planned Parenthood, and so surely real fiscal conservatives and constitutionalists should have few reservations about cutting the spending.
There are, however, at least two reasons to look upon this charade with a bit of skepticism. In terms of both fiscal responsibility and the prolife agenda, we can see the proposal is more about symbolism than results.
At a time of unprecedented deficit spending, no spending cut should be off the table. But Planned Parenthood reportedly took in “$657 million in federal dollars between 2002 and 2009,” according to Fox News. This works out to about as much per year as Obama’s bombing of Libya cost in one day. The annual cost of Planned Parenthood truly is negligible in terms of the deficit problem. Instead of wasting time singling out politically charged programs to cut like this or NPR (both of which any consistent free marketer should want to see cut), Congress should, assuming they want to actually fix America’s fiscal troubles, take an axe to programs across the board—and more important, address the entitlement state and defense spending. With the Pentagon, Social Security and Medicare spending as they are projected to, even if everything else was entirely eliminated, we would still have a crisis. Without significant and serious reform or eventual abolition of these “social insurance” programs and a wholesale rethinking of U.S. foreign policy, America is sunk financially. Planned Parenthood’s cut of the pie, even if it were literally multiplied by one thousand, would still not even amount to rounding error.
Secondly, this is at best a crumb being thrown to the prolife movement, which predictably supports Republican politicians and never gets anything substantial from it. Even when the Republicans run Congress and the presidency and the Supreme Court is dominated by their appointees, they never do anything, for example, to reverse the effect of Roe v. Wade. Under the Constitution, a Republican Congress (such as during the Bush years) could have easily stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction over abortion and left the issue up to the states. Whether or not this is good policy, it is something that the prolife movement would generally like to see, one would think, and yet nothing approaching this ever comes from Republican prolifers in power.
More to the point, there is the question of federal financing of abortions—something that all conservatives, libertarians, constitutionalists and prolifers should oppose. As defenders of Planned Parenthood argue, the organization does not spend all its money on abortion-related activities, and the money it receives from the federal government is designated for other purposes. Others counter that money is fungible, and dollars that Planned Parenthood uses for one function free up resources that can be diverted toward abortions.
It is true that money is fungible, but then we have to consider the whole of the welfare state, not just the miniscule amounts of cash that go to Planned Parenthood. Food stamps mean that poor people can spend what money they have on abortions instead of food. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families can, through the fungibility of money, also contribute to abortions. So can Medicaid, unemployment insurance, student loans, public housing subsidies and even money for military health services.
In other words, the more collectivist society is on the whole—the more we live under a system of welfarism, wealth redistribution and considerable government spending on everything under the sun—the less people must personally internalize the financial costs of abortions. This is not even considering how greatly subsidies for the poor, dismal public education, empire, paternalistic law enforcement and all the rest of the government’s policies undermine individual responsibility and degrade social and family values. All of this means far more abortions than we would likely see in a free society of personal accountability, where families and cultural norms, rather than statism, uphold morality.
If you oppose government spending on abortions, that is fine. But only by abolishing the welfare state root and branch—only by eliminating as much government as humanly possible—are we truly going to approach the separation of abortion financing and state that all prolifers should hope to see.
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Gil
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Anonymous
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Mystermr2003
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http://profiles.google.com/anthony.disantos Anthony Disantos
