This blog post is one branch of a broader stream, “We Are All Helping Commit Abortions – Should We Be?”

Federal funding of Planned Parenthood has received a lot of attention. That funding is not supposed to go for abortions, but one person who objects to participating in that funding says that the $500 million dollar annual amount funds “knives, scalpels, [operating] rooms . . .,” etc. Moreover, whether or not that person has mentioned it, federal funds do go directly for abortion in cases of rape and incest. Hence to pay taxes is to be complicit.

(Even if tax money did not actually help facilitate abortions, one might well find it morally repugnant to fund an organization that symbolizes, whitewashes, and misrepresents abortion, and one might object on those grounds.)

Federal Planned Parenthood funding aside, tax funding of abortion goes on more unabashedly (or even proudly) in fifteen states. In fourteen of them, state dollars paid as Medicaid (not presently the federal dollars paid as Medicaid) reimburse a clinic whenever it does a“medically necessary” abortion for a Medicaid recipient; in any of those states that define “medically necessary” as Doe v. Bolton defines “health,” that restriction can be considered meaningless. And in California, meanwhile, the slogan is “Medical justification and authorization for abortion are not required.” There in California, Medicaid money comes out of the state General Fund, which is fed mostly by state corporate taxes and sales taxes.

So if you attended the Walk for Life in San Francisco and bought your poster materials in California, a little of the sales tax you paid went for abortion. Moreover, if you use Google, every time you click, it makes advertisers willing to pay a little more ad money to Google. As a result there are more Google employees in Santa Clara receiving paychecks and buying more Teslas, and the sales tax they thus pay results in unborn children being suctioned out who would not have been otherwise. If you spend money in any way at all that increases the employment or incomes in any state that uses sales tax money as Medicaid reimbursements, some of your money will end up as sales-tax money and eventually abortion money.

Therefore, if paying tax money that goes for abortions is complicity, as I think is undebatable at least to some extent, we are all complicit – those living or spending their money in some states more so than those living or spending their money in other states.

But then, even apart from taxes, your purchases from within your own state or from any other state will help enrich countless people, some of whom will use the money to commit different kinds of violence, and unconscious effects of that kind cannot be deemed complicity. (Some of the people enriched will also spend to prevent violence.) If you purchase from companies in a state like California, that merely enables that state’s government to squeeze out a little more money for abortion than if you had purchased from a state like Mississippi – a small degree of complicity if you do it knowingly.

And if you patronize or use Facebook, Starbucks, Ben & Jerry’s, Microsoft, Paypal, General Electric, ExxonMobil, PepsiCo, United Airlines, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc., a certain amount of your money will end up donated to Planned Parenthood.

What Pro-Lifers May Decide to Do

1. Some pro-lifers, if they are encouraged to think about it enough, might be ready to follow the example of Michael Bowman in Oregon, who has not paid federal income tax since 1999 lest some of it go to Planned Parenthood. Pro-lifers who must work as employees and a portion of whose wages are likely to be withheld in advance by their employees can endeavor to work for pro-life employers also ready to resist.

2. Some might be ready to concertedly, in a way that will get attention, move from a state where sales taxes go toward abortion to a state where they do not.

3. Some might be ready to organize, in an attention-getting way, to completely boycott Amazon, Starbucks, Ben & Jerry’s, Paypal, General Electric, ExxonMobil, PepsiCo, United Airlines, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and other companies who donate to Planned Parenthood.

4. Some, without reducing their abortion footprint, might, if they come to understand it better, be willing to offset it – by increasing their support for CPC’s, by redoubling their efforts to undo tax laws, etc.

5. At the very least, pro-lifers should be better educated about their abortion footprint. An abortion-footprint app could be developed: It might ask you about 25 questions – where you live, how much you make, what brand of gas you buy. Then it will estimate what your footprint is – it will itemize all your money streams that are ending up supporting abortion. You will see that you are sending money to PP via Exxon, for example. Then you switch to Shell or whatever, and the app will show you that your footprint has become smaller. The abortion footprint of the typical taxpayer will be minuscule, but that is beside the point, because one’s money going toward abortion sets an example, and collectively a failure by the consumers and taxpayers of some states to resist will result in thousands of abortions a year that would not have occurred otherwise.

6. A pro-life barter website could be launched where, for example, a pro-lifer who needs a refrigerator could acquire a used one by exchanging a used dishwasher, without having to pay sales tax. The economic impact of such a website might be negligible, but it could attract some public attention to the seriousness of pro-lifers’ convictions and make people want to understand the reason for those convictions.

Those ideas proceed in order from harder for pro-lifers to commit to, to softer and more palatable.

© 2019

This blog post is one branch of a broader stream, “We Are All Helping Commit Abortions – Should We Be?”

If a prisoner in a concentration camp is ordered to kill a fellow prisoner or die oneself, then one should choose to die, clearly. On the face of it, to supply money, one of the essential cogs of the abortion machine, is to be no less instrumental in an abortion than to use one’s hands to kill. But I have heard two main arguments against such an analogy:

1. Considering all the ways that your federal and state taxes will have to be spent, only a minuscule amount of it will ever go for abortion.

But the problem with this argument is that when we pay our taxes, we set an example. And once everyone pays, there will be thousands of abortions every year, in a big state like California, of babies who would otherwise have been spared.

2. As a pro-lifer wrote to me, “There’s probably something our taxes go to that would be morally objectionable to nearly every single person who pays taxes.” And yet if everyone withholds all tax money, we will lose much of the benefits that our Homo sapiens cooperation instinct could otherwise provide us for our mutual defense and our general welfare. Advanced civilization could not exist without a tax system involving mutual concessions.

It is true that cooperation on government funding requires mutual concessions, and while on the one hand pro-lifers might lose in conscience terms by paying for abortion, on the other hand, other people would in return agree to fund something that we want and they oppose. In 1982 the Supreme Court held that “Because the broad public interest in maintaining a sound tax system is of such a high order, religious belief in conflict with the payment of taxes affords no basis for resisting the tax.” Regarding the deeper philosophy of taxation there must be a vast legal literature with which I am mostly unfamiliar. However, I think in the first place that the argument about the benefits of mutual concessions might be a good argument for the proposition that the government should in general impose tough consequences for conscience exceptions – in order to guarantee that few people will demand them – but not such a good argument for the idea that a real person of conscience should not withhold taxes and accept the consequences. The argument assumes that civilization is of more value than preserving our innocence in relation to mass killing. We shouldn’t automatically assume that the universe is better off with a civilization that is seriously morally compromised, than it would be without. The assumption yields to reductio ad absurdum arguments. What if we even suppose that our tax money were being used to suction, poison, and dismember born children – would we acquiesce to that?

And secondly, would civilization really collapse? While the government could not afford to let all conscientious tax defaulters off, it could afford to let some off, and it seems to me that compunctions about killing human beings are in a class by themselves in terms of most deserving accommodation. There must be no blow to the conscience so excruciating as the realization that one has unjustly killed and cannot undo it.

So compunctions about killing human beings are most deserving of accommodation. If in thinking about the need for mutual concessions and the danger of a breakdown thereof, we limit our thinking to that most deserving category (that is, if society decides that only such compunctions merit “appropriate relief against a government”*), then pro-lifers who refused to pay for killing the unborn would only have to fear that other people might refuse to pay for killing some human beings whom the pro-lifers wanted them to kill.

People differ on military conscription, but even most of those who are skeptical that the US has ever in history fought a just war could probably at least imagine a benevolent and altruistic state that under some circumstances should require its citizens to kill enemy combatants. Now suppose that if I refuse to pay for killing the unborn as they want, some people will refuse to help kill those enemy combatants as I want, and moreover will refuse to pay taxes for it. But my answer is that that is a chance I would be willing to take. Let the government cut its coat according to the cloth that is available of willing participation in killing.

* See Section 2000bb-1 of the United States Code (Section 3 of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993). Some of it reads:

. . . Government may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person –
(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and
(2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

. . . A person whose religious exercise has been burdened in violation of this section may assert that violation as a claim or defense in a judicial proceeding and obtain appropriate relief against a government . . .

© 2019