I have to find it both funny and sad that planned parenthood is being defunded. I mean, yeah this sounds like it's just an issue that women have to worry about. But you don't realize that it also affects you a lot. What are you going to do now that the access to a plentiful amount of free condoms and STD testing gets defunded?
I mean, only 7% of Planned Parenthood services were for abortions, so this was one of those scare tactics that you really saw coming a mile away and still it succeeded sadly. I guess the more depressing aspect of all this is that so many women are not only okay with having their ovaries regulated but actually support it.
Just look at it that way, some old white men are controlling the reproductive rights of young poor minority females. It was bad enough that Planned Parenthood took about a third of their annual budget from the federal government and ran at a terrific loss because they gave away basically anything for people who needed it in order to be responsible sexually active people....
And I guess that was the problem to most of these right wing religious nuts. It really was a situation where the House Speaker John Boehner was saying that women are not to be trusted. Don't believe me?
Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt?
In testimony to a House taxation subcommittee on Wednesday, Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee, confirmed that one consequence of the Republicans' "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" would be to turn IRS agents into abortion cops—that is, during an audit, they'd have to detemine, from evidence provided by the taxpayer, whether any tax benefit had been inappropriately used to pay for an abortion.
The proposed law, also known as H.R. 3, extends the reach of the Hyde Amendment—which bans federal funding for abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is at stake—into many parts of the federal tax code. In some cases, the law would forbid using tax benefits—like credits or deductions—to pay for abortions or health insurance that covers abortion. If an American who used such a benefit were to be audited, Barthold said, the burden of proof would lie with the taxpayer to provide documentation, for example, that her abortion fell under the rape/incest/life-of-the-mother exception, or that the health insurance she had purchased did not cover abortions.
"Were this to become law, people could end up in an audit, the subject of which could be abortion, rape, and incest," says Christopher Bergin, the head of Tax Analysts, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit tax policy group. "If you pass the law like this, the IRS would be required to enforce it."
The proposal, which House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has declared a top priority of the new Republican Congress, has 221 cosponsors and is expected to pass the House easily. The bill caused controversy and sparked a national protest campaign in January after Mother Jones reported that it would limit the Hyde Amendment's rape exception to cases of "forcible rape."
It really is a fucked up situation. I mean, now they're forbidding the use of tax benefits like credits and/or deductions to pay for abortions or health insurance that covers abortion. They're basically criminalizing and pricing abortions out of the range of people who can't afford to have children from the beginning.
Though I don't get how any tax credit or deduction can be used to pay for anything. Unless you actually sign over your refund check directly to your abortion doctor. Otherwise how could they tell?
But in that I guess they're saying that you can't use one of those tax exempt health savings accounts to buy health insurance that covers abortion. Sure seems like an intrusion into the health care choices of everyone. Not to mention tax deductions and credits are not actually government expenditures.
But over all this is a great combination. It's symbolically shitting on women and making the IRS agents' jobs more miserable. Even more so because at the same exact time that all this is happening, funding for the IRS is being cut.
It's like painting "Fuck France!" on the side of a missile before you launch that fucker into some Pakistani wedding. But just picture that, you're there with your tax guy going over this year's paper work and you just have to break the news to your wife/girlfriend/mistress that your tax guy said that you need to cut back on abortions this year.
By this point you just are better off assuming that eventually abortion will become illegal again. I just wonder how I can learn how to perform back-alley abortions without a clothing hanger. I could really use the extra cash right now in this economy.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment