TAX FUNDED ABORTIONS

This has been rather definitively answered in the U.S. A large majority of citizens do not want to pay for welfare abortions. With almost no exceptions, every poll with unbiased wording has confirmed this time after time.

Most of the investigations of this issue were done in the ’70s and ’80s when there were dire predictions of women dying if such abortions were not paid for.

There was an excellent example. In 1977, the federal government of the U.S. paid for 295,000 welfare abortions. In 1978, it only paid for 2,000 abortions because the Hyde Amendment had cut off the funding.

The U.S. government’s chief pro-abortion biostatistician, Dr. Willard Cates, predicted "a total of 77 excess deaths to women" who would turn to illegal abortions, plus five additional deaths due to delay of abortions into the later weeks of pregnancy.

In fact, his projection proved to be completely unfounded. An article by the same department, which later surveyed 13 states and the District of Columbia, revealed, "No increase in abortion related complications was observed. . . . No abortion deaths related to either legal or illegal abortions were detected, [and there was] no difference between institutions in funded and non-funded states."

Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, CDC,
U.S. Dept. HEW, vol. 28, no. 4, Feb. 2, 1979

A later attempt to link three deaths as "abortion funding related" was shown not to be related to the funding cut off at all. Total maternal abortion deaths were actually lower than before the cutoff in 1976.

Further, when welfare funds for elective abortion are cut off, there is a reduction in the total number of abortions, but also of live births. Apparently, conceptions decreased when the welfare state eliminated free abortions as a birth control measure.

But poor women want this help.

Not as much as rich people. In 1984, the strongly pro-abortion University of North Carolina polled its state to find that only 32% favored tax funding. An important finding was that 43% of the college-educated favored such government "assistance," while only 17% of those with less than a high-school eduction concurred. Also, 36% of men favored assistance, but only 28% of women.

So, those who would receive the "benefit" of tax-funded abortions wanted them the least. One might conclude that the elitist social planners see this as a way of reducing poverty — killing the unborn children of the poor.

Planned Parenthood did one of the definitive studies on this which showed that at the time of the study there were welfare costs of $13,900 for each first birth to a teenager (married and unmarried), and $8,400 for each first birth to her if she was 20 years or older. Compare this with the average of nearly $50,000 each will ultimately pay in taxes as an adult.

M. Burt, "Public Cost of Teen Childbearing,"
Family Planning Perspective, vol. 18, no. 5, Sept. 1986

The average time a family stays on welfare in the U.S. is 27 months, not 18 years. When we peel away the outer layer of the rhetoric, what we expose is a callous cost-benefit analysis of solving poverty by killing the unborn children of the poor.

This continues to happen. In 1982, Michigan for instance, only 14.7% of pregnancies of non-welfare mothers were aborted. This clearly suggests coercion when we realize that the minority classes who make up a large share of the welfare people are more against abortion than are the while middle and upper classes.

ibid

why can't we love them both?-Table of Contents