One way or another, most people agree that the federal tax code is a mess. Its web of convoluted rules, formulas, and exceptions is the result of politicians and bureaucrats piling endless favors to some constituencies while punishing others. It’s fertile ground for all sorts of abusive and outrageous provisions to grow safely beyond public notice.
This week, the Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow highlighted several surprising activities that are included among tax-deductible expenses, including the following:
Have an abortion, get a tax deduction! How strange that pro-abortion advocates aren’t using this as a selling point. Hmmm.
Oh, and while they hyperventilate over Hobby Lobby not wanting to provide every type of birth control without a co-pay, it turns out that birth control pills can be deducted if prescribed by a doctor.
Also, you can deduct the purchase of pregnancy test kits and vasectomies.
Specifically, the Internal Revenue Service’s list of tax-deductible medical expenses says:
You can include in medical expenses the amount you pay for a legal abortion.
And:
You can include in medical expenses the amount you pay for birth control pills prescribed by a doctor.
No, this isn’t the government directly or fully picking up the tab whenever you have an abortion – according to the IRS, people can generally deduct “only the amount of your medical and dental expenses that is more than 10%” of adjusted gross income. But it adds up; as long as the cost of abortion can be put toward getting tax dollars back at all, the assurances made by President Barack Obama, Planned Parenthood, and their apologists like ThinkProgress, Media Matters, AMERICAblog, and Cosmopolitan are bald-faced lies.
Then again, denials that abortion gets federal funding were already lies. Even without the IRS, there are numerous other ways the feds can – and do – funnel your money toward prenatal butchers.
First, deniers always point to the Hyde Amendment as quick, definitive proof that federal abortion subsidies are already illegal. But Hyde only partially protects taxpayers – it’s an annual amendment to appropriations for the Departments of Labor, Education, and Health & Human Services, and as such it forbids abortion funding through only those departments. It doesn’t apply to subsidies directly appropriated by acts of Congress or otherwise unconnected to Labor, Education, or HHS.
Second, our tax dollars are stuffing Planned Parenthood’s pockets as we speak. According to their latest annual report, 45% of the abortion giant’s $1.21-billion net revenue – $540.6 million – came from taxpayers. Planned Parenthood’s latest financial report confirms that it surgically aborted 327,166 unborn babies, distributed reversible contraception to 2,129,855 women, and distributed emergency contraception (including an unspecified number of abortifacients) to 1,590,133. PP can say they put our involuntary contributions to uses other than abortion, but even if that were true, every dollar they receive from us frees up another dollar they can put toward baby-killing.
Third, ObamaCare alone funds abortion in numerous ways. As I summarized last September:
[W]hile the abortion surcharge lets Obama apologists say tax dollars aren’t directly funding abortion, abortion-inclusive exchange plans remain eligible for federal subsidies, meaning that even if your state bans abortion coverage completely, your taxes will still be paying for plans that kill babies in other states. By Alliance Defending Freedom’s math, “this fund could completely subsidize 2 million abortions per year.”
… Health and Human Services contraception mandate includes drugs that can induce abortions, such as Ella and Plan B—with virtually no regard for your religious beliefs or conscience rights.
… ObamaCare directs hundreds of millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood by including 480 PP facilities among the approved “essential community providers” insurers are required to cover, by funding PP sex education programs, by directly subsidizing PP locations as “community health centers,” and by paying PP to serve as ObamaCare “navigators.”
Schow’s scoop about the IRS is eye-opening, but disgracefully it’s only the latest in a long line of ways our would-be rulers have bled us financially to make the unborn bleed literally.
