Taxes and Abortion

Readers may have seen reporting on the fact that the current Right to Life v Abortion Supervisory Committee case has cost the government around $280,000 to defend as of early July, 2009. (For a timeline and information on the case, click here) The issue of taxpayer spending is one that’s been raised recently in a series of letters from RTL to newspapers around the country, in which the group argues that abortion should not be a core health service paid for by the taxpayer. As one of the commenters to this blog has noted (quoting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), abortion access will never be a problem for wealthy women, which is one reason why it must remain a fully funded part of comprehensive reproductive health care.

It’s worth noting that raising opposition to taxpayer money being spent on abortion has been a very successful anti-abortion tactic in the United States, where for instance the Hyde Amendment of 1976 precluded the spending of federal money on abortions. [By way of a brief aside, Henry Hyde, the Republican sponsor of the legislation, visited New Zealand as a guest of SPUC (the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child) in 1978, and he offered an interesting twist on the rich v poor access to abortion debate, arguing that “the unborn children of the rich … have no defence when it comes to abortion” (Auckland Star) and that “If we can save the child of a ghetto mother then we have achieved something.” (NZ Herald.)]

It’s also interesting to note the complete 180 on this issue on the part of anti-abortion advocates. In the 1970s, SPUC used the ‘spectre’ of making profits from abortion as well as a loss of state control to champion legislation that would require that all abortions be carried out public hospitals (the Hospitals Amendment Bill). Of course, the real reason for the bill was to close NZ’s first abortion clinic, the AMAC clinic in Remuera. Still, it’s quite a turnaround – to go from putting forward laws mandating only tax-payer funded abortions to arguing now that no tax dollars be spent on abortions.