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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Two points

Planned Parenthood supporters and abortion opponents had dueling rallies in Indy this week. A couple of points:

1. Legislatures are on shaky moral ground when they order people to lie:

Turner's measure also would require abortion providers to tell patients that abortion carries risks, including the possibility of breast cancer -- a claim disputed by the American Cancer Society . . .

There is also the move to require women to be told that the aborted fetus will feel pain. These aren't exactly outright lies, but they are debatable propositions that would be presented as absolute truth. Close enough. The legislator pushing these measures says "the pregnant lady needs to have every bit of information that she can." But reliable information, surely.

2. Money is fungible:

Ubelhor's bill parallels a measure pushed in Congress by Indiana's Mike Pence to cut off all federal funding -- about $363 million -- to Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The idea is to stop all payments of tax dollars to a group that performs abortions.

Using government money to pay for abortion is against federal law, and Planned Parenthood pays for the procedure with patient fees and private donations. But Turner, Ubelhor and Pence and other abortion opponents see little distinction between spending government money on abortions and giving government money to an entity that provides abortions.

Saying Planned Parenthood doesn't use government money for abortions is splitting hairs. Using government money for other things frees it up to use its other funding for abortions. If I give you $50 a week for groceries knowing that you're using $50 of your own money to buy drugs, it would be silly of me to argue that I'm not enabling your drug habit.

Comments

Harl Delos
Thu, 03/10/2011 - 2:36pm

Churches get government funding in the form of exemptions from real estate and personal property taxes, and the tax-deductible nature of contributions effectively amounts to partial matching of private donations.

The same could be said of hospitals.

Since money is fungible, one could argue that churches ought not be allowed to pressure people not to exercise their constitutional right to elective abortion, and that hospitals ought not be able to prohibit doctors from performing constitutionally-protected elective abortions within their facilities.

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