I thought of a way to make both conservatives and liberals happy.  Social conservatives want to see abortion outlawed.  Liberals want to fund bigger government programs like nationalized healthcare.  Why not heavily tax the abortion provider?

Before you think I’ve lost my mind suggesting something so insane, consider these quotes:

• Barack Obama - “let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions” at the Notre Dame commencement, May 16, 2009. 
• Nancy Pelosi - “And we want abortions to be safe, rare, and reduce the number of abortions.... If you want to reduce the number of abortions, and we all do…” in an interview with Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press, August 24, 2008
• Hillary Clinton - “I think abortion should remain legal, but it needs to be safe and rare.”  - at Messiah College, during the Democratic Compassion Forum, April 13, 2008

These current generation liberal icons have paved the way – they admit that abortion needs to be rarer.  Like everything else they tax, they just need to be told how they can justify taxing it in order to actually legislate the tax into existence.  The justification for taxing abortion providers is simple mainly because taxing the woman receiving the abortion is probably a non sequitur for legal reasons.

Taxing women who have abortions probably wouldn’t withstand a legal challenge because of case precedent, specifically Planned Parenthood v Casey, 1992.  That ruling stated that states couldn’t place an undue burden on a woman seeking an abortion.  In that case, the “undue burden” was notifying the spouse that the woman wanted an abortion.  Since the Supreme Court considered it an undue burden for a woman to tell her spouse that she wanted to abort his child, it’s a no-brainer to think that wouldn’t also be adverse abortion cost prohibitive.

Rather than putting any burden on the woman at all, we can do what liberals like to do best, tax the company (or doctor) that provides the service.   The logic behind taxing the abortion provider is simple - the abortion provider is going to be removing a potential tax payer from the pool of available future tax payers. Additionally, since liberals agree that it should be safe, we need better federal oversight of abortion facilities to ensure compliance.  In order to do manage that, the provider should be required to pay a (huge) fee to offset that potential loss of federal income and the costs associated with oversight. Depending on the stage of the pregnancy, an abortion costs anywhere from $300 to $5000.  If the provider had to cough up at least $1000 for each unborn life that they take, that would be quite a chunk of change coming into federal coffers.  The Guttmacher Institute reports that for 2005, 1.3 million abortions were performed in the United States.  Consider that if each of those abortions had been taxed, the federal government would have brought in 1.3 billion dollars!  While that may be pocket change to your average liberal, it would go a long way to funding some of their pet projects.  This would place no direct burden on women seeking abortions, but it would probably have a chilling effect on the doctors who discredit their profession by performing the ghastly procedures.  It would no longer be cost effective for them to perform abortions so many would stop providing them.  However, even if the provider passed that fee on to the woman, it would be no worse than any other tax that Congress chooses to levy on an industry that ends up being passed on to the consumer.

Since the Congress wouldn’t be levying the tax directly, they could wash their hands of doing anything that would infringe on the so called right to abortion, while at the same time, be certain that they were doing something that would indeed make abortion rarer.  Unless all that talk about making abortion more rare is just that – talk.  Although it wouldn't be an outright prohibition against abortion, it would go a long way towards making them more rare, and that's something most conservatives would be happy about. 

What do you think?  If you have an opinion, leave a comment.  If you think I’m crazy, let me know.