April 15, 2024
There’s been a great deal of talk about whether abortion belongs in the hands of state governments alone in a post-Roe environment. While this thinking is enjoying a lot of media attention lately, it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of abortion in law. What the now defunct Roe v. Wade did was wipe out all abortion law in 1973, replacing the law with the judgment of the U.S. Supreme Court that essentially set itself up as a national abortion control board based on the non-existent presence of a “right to privacy” leading to an indefensible “right to abortion.”
The problem with the old model: abortion was NOT written in invisible ink in our founding document.
With Roe gone, the issue of abortion does not begin and end at the Supreme Court, allowing local, state, AND federal legislators to weigh in on the Human Rights issue of our day. And if we’ve learned anything from the Biden Administration, it’s that abortion is federal – and the best evidence of that is taxpayer support.
Ever wonder where abortion is sneaking into your tax-paying pocket? Let’s check the receipts. Below is a breakdown and analysis of just how much federal tax money is wasted on abortion and abortion vendors at home and abroad.
Lost Treasure:
Given the variety of sources for funding and reimbursement, the full picture is a unclear, but what we know should horrify those who care about whether they are in business with Planned Parenthood & Company.
Family Research Council’s “Direct Deposit” to Planned Parenthood report in 2022 noted that since 1993, Planned Parenthood has raked in $10.35 BILLION in total taxpayer funding. Planned Parenthood’s most recent annual report for 2021-2022 noted that the money keeps pouring in, with 35% of their annual budget coming from federal taxpayers, more than $670M.
Some of that math is echoed by our own government.
According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released in 2023, Planned Parenthood received over $1.7 billion from 2019 to 2021. This amount included $90.4 million that was allegedly, illegally taken from the Paycheck Protection Program. The same GAO report identified that the International Planned Parenthood Federation received another $2 million, and four domestic regional abortion providers took more than $107 million.
The Secrets:
The difficulty in fully tracking federal spending is in finding all the places funds have been secreted away.
As SFLAction President Kristan Hawkins wrote in a letter to Congress:
“Our federal government is far from abortion neutral. Pro-abortion policy and funding are intertwined throughout our federal government like a cancer, siphoning taxpayer resources for policies that end in the death of the preborn. As the New York Times reported recently, The Federal Government Subsidizes Abortions. Will That Last?
As President Biden notes, abortion funding, policy, and goals can be found in the Office of the Vice President, the Office of White House Counsel, the Domestic Policy Council, the National Economic Council, the National Security Council, the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Labor, Department of the Treasury, Department of Transportation, Department of Veterans Affairs, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of Personnel Management.
While ineffective on many fronts, the Biden Administration delivers death by abortion as a policy fully metastasized throughout the federal government, with horrifying, new efforts in a push at HHS and the DOE to change the language of sex and discrimination creating “a stealth plan to reestablish Roe.”
Abortion funding can be found in the budgets of the Department of Health and Human Services where healthcare policy and mandates of all kinds dictate spending, in Department of Defense and Education spending through school based and international aid, proposed in the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act. It’s found in funding to Planned Parenthood through Title X funds as well in grants from HHS as the U.S. Government Accountability Act notes. Abortion funding was even placed in the fine print of COVID relief, as though ending lives was part of saving lives. And this list is hardly definitive.
Such widespread funding has led to introduction of the No Taxpayer Funding of Abortion Act, in which it’s noted, “Historically, language has been included in annual appropriations bills for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that prohibits the use of federal funds for abortions—such language is commonly referred to as the Hyde Amendment. Similar language is also frequently included in appropriations bills for other federal agencies and the District of Columbia. The bill makes these restrictions permanent and extends the restrictions to all federal funds (rather than specific agencies).”
Because abortion funding infiltrates multiple budgets, a number of tools have been employed to cut abortion industry access to taxpayer funds. The Heritage Foundation describes them as follows:
- “The Hyde Amendment (1976) that prohibits the Department of Health and Human Services from spending taxpayer dollars for most abortions;
- “The Helms Amendment(1973) that restricts foreign aid funds from being expended on abortions;
- “The Smith Amendment (1983) that prohibits funding elective abortions in the Federal Employee Health Benefits program;
- “The Dornan Amendment (1989) that prohibits funding elective abortions within Washington, D.C.; and
- “The Weldon Amendment (2004) that protects health care providers from discrimination on the basis of their refusal to provide and pay for abortions or refer women to have them. The Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights enforces the Weldon Amendment.”
In the last year, controversies surrounded attempts to expand abortion funding into military spending, something Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) courageously fought.
Separately, an Opinion piece in Newsweek highlighted how the US funding of Coronavirus response efforts “allocates $120 million to the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), $450 million to the WHO and the remaining funds to other branches of the U.N. system.” The UNFPA is largely responsible for “sexual and reproductive health services.”
And a report from the left-wing and pro-abortion Center for American Progress notes that the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) contains vague and open-ended language around “women’s health services.” The proposed funding for this program in FY2024 is almost $6.8 billion, and in FY2023 it was almost $4.8 billion.
This funding is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what the abortion industry has extracted from the American taxpayers.
The Sorrow:
But here is some math that makes us stop and think. A June 2022 House Ways and Means report illustrated that loss of life caused by abortion (shrinking America’s potential population by 20 percent), has also translated to nearly $7 trillion of lost economic potential.
Since Roe was unleashed in1973, more than 65 million babies have lost their lives to intentional abortion. The data to calculate an accurate number is incomplete as we have no National Abortion Reporting law, so the CDC and the abortion industry apologist, the Guttmacher Institute, speculate with a date poll that doesn’t even include poor reports from all the states. California, for example, both brags about becoming an abortion sanctuary while not telling how many lives have been lost.
And with the ubiquitousness of Chemical Abortion Pills, which reportedly now make up more than 6 in 10 abortions, it’s even more challenging to determine them accurately.
Clearly, we’ve gotten more of what we sadly pay for in taxpayer support.
The sad reality is that the true costs of abortion in blood or money may never be known. As former President Ronald Reagan observed: “Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide.”
Our call to elected leaders everywhere is to defund and debar Planned Parenthood to end taxpayer support to them and all abortion vendors and related programs, at home and abroad, because America has paid a high price in lost resources and lost human potential.