There’s a new ballot initiative in Colorado that shows what the “progressive” Left wants as the next step in abortion policy. Coloradans are now in the process of voting on Amendment 79 which paves the way for taxpayer-funded abortions and for protecting pro-abortion mandates on private insurance. The amendment would also create a legal right to an abortion in the state constitution.
For many years—especially during the 1980s and 1990s— the abortion lobby in America insisted that it only supported abortion as a last resort for low-income mothers who had no other choice. The slogan was “safe, legal, and rare.” In practice, however, the mere legality of abortion was never enough for these people. Even during the “safe, legal, and rare” days, abortion advocates repeatedly lobbied for taxpayers to foot the bill for abortions.
This is why, in 1984, local opponents of taxpayer-funded abortions put Amendment 3 on the Colorado ballot, which banned the use of taxpayer money for abortions in most cases. The push for “public” funds is why Congress adopted the Hyde Amendment in 1977, banning the use of federal funds for abortion. For more than 45 years, abortion advocates have been hard at work trying to loot the taxpayers.
Now comes Amendment 79 which is specifically designed to overturn previous limits on public funding, and to ensure that taxpayer funds will be used to pay for abortions. Moreover, these funds will be used to fund abortions for out-of-state residents who travel to Colorado specifically for an abortion.
By defining abortion as a right in the state constitution, the abortion lobby attempts to ensure that state Medicaid funds and other state funds can be spent on abortions. This is all meant to be stacked on top of Colorado’s existing anti-market and interventionist abortion laws which include state mandates that require private insurance companies to pay for abortions with no out-of-pocket expense for the person seeking the abortion. Or, put another way, existing state law requires that virtually everyone who pays health insurance premiums subsidize abortions.
Abortion lobbyists often try to portray themselves as libertarians who only seek to get the government out of people’s lives. This has long been demonstrably false. It is orthodoxy among many abortion activists that “increasing abortion access” does not mean leaving people alone. “Abortion access” means forcing other people to pay for abortions. We can see this in the policy statements of most major abortion organizations today. The Center for American Progress, The Center for Reproductive Rights, and Planned Parenthood all advocate for taxpayer-subsidized abortion.
Typically, abortion activists favor “universal healthcare” programs which are defined as programs that can only be called “universal”—according to pro-abortion activists—when taxpayer dollars are used to fund contraception and abortion procedures. This is why the lobby is so committed to defining contraception and abortion as “healthcare.” The point to get it all funded by Medicaid and other taxpayer-funded programs.
In other words, the abortion lobby rarely regards the private sector and the private individual as something or someone to be “left alone.” Rather, the private sector exists as little more than something to be taxed and regulated in favor of funding more abortion.
Moreover, Amendment 79 is written in a to way pave the way for new laws excluding parental involvement when children seek abortions. In Colorado, some parental notification laws remain on the books, but if Amendment 79 is adopted, the new constitution will state that “government shall not deny, impede, or discriminate against the exercise of that right [to abortion.]” Experience shows the Colorado courts will then define parental notification laws as an “impediment,” and overturn all statutory parental notification laws on constitutional grounds.
In this way, abortion lobbyists further regulate and insert themselves into the most important private-sector institution of all—the family.
Of course, the abortion lobby can sometimes be accidentally libertarian. For example, abortion activists will often attempt to remove regulatory barriers imposed on businesses by government bureaucrats. These barriers include zoning laws and regulations applied to businesses such as health clinics. This turn to “laissez-faire,” of course, only ever applies to abortion clinics. In the mind of the typical abortion activists, endless red tape and government paternalism is perfectly fine for everything but an abortion clinic.
In this way, today’s abortion activists are like the Slave Power of antebellum America. Often, while arguing that they only wanted to be left alone by the federal government, slavery advocates relentlessly argued in favor of stronger federal fugitive slave laws, and even in favor of federal intervention in the frontier in favor of expanding slavery.
Similarly, abortion activists apply their “libertarianism” selectively depending on whether or not it will increase the number of abortions.
Colorado’s amendment 79 is just more of the same in this vein. Its purpose—as with many similar pro-abortion efforts across the country—is to put taxpayers and health insurance customers permanently and increasingly on the hook for funding more abortions. Even if one believes that abortion is some kind of right, there’s nothing about freedom here. Abortion is already legal in Colorado in every conceivable way, right up until the moment of birth. Nor is this likely to change any time soon. Amendment 79 isn’t about legalizing abortion. It’s about ripping off the taxpayers.
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