Abortion is one of those "third rail" subjects. My personal belief on the subject is no one should have the power to tell a woman how to handle a pregnancy. You can use every contraceptive method simultaneously and still end up pregnant. I understand that an unplanned pregnancy can ruin a single woman's or her families life. I also understand that if she is forced to carry the child to term, the child might end up abused because it was unwanted. I don't have any answers, let alone any good ones. All I can do is encourage the mother to choose the life of the baby.
This article is a month old, but this is the first I've heard of it, since the MSM refuses to cover certain things. NYC Rejects Federal Funds Over Abortion Doctors' ‘Gag Rule’.
It has been federal law for several years now that "federal funds cannot be used to pay for abortions." The Trump administration decided to change the regulations to make sure this is not happening.
There is an economic term called "Fungible." Let's say I have three sources of income. One source has a requirement that those funds cannot be used to purchase tobacco or alcohol products. But all three sources deposit their payments into the same bank account. This means the requirement cannot be enforced, because the money is fungible. Once all of the dollars are inside the account any dollar is indistinguishable from any other dollar. You can't be certain that "this dollar came from the income with restrictions and this one did not." The only way to eliminate this issue is to not mingle the money with the restrictions with money without restrictions. I would have to have a second bank account that receives no other deposits other than the restricted income. Then and only then can the "no tobacco or alcohol" restriction be traceable and enforceable.
I am sure you've heard Planned Parenthood's "Abortion is only 5% of the services we offer." If you count it PP's way, Helping a woman fill out the admissions paperwork, counseling her on this decision, handing her some brochures about family planning, taking her vitals, performing a routine medical exam, performing an ultrasound, carrying out the procedure that aborts the baby, take her to recover in Post-Op and provide grief counceling and then escort her to the vehicle taking her home, that may be one visit, but it's actually ten different billable procedures. While a baby's life was terminated, the actual abortion was "only 10% of the procedures performed on that patient."
This change means, going forward, that abortion clinics must have a separate facility where only abortions are performed. That center has to be profitable on its own and cannot receive any payments from the parent facility. If the provider accepts federal funds and an auditor can trace any amount of money spent on the abortion clinic that originates with the bank account where federal funds are deposited, lots of people will be in big trouble. I assure you, this would be a severe bookkeeping nightmare, not to mention costly for the center. So, most, if not all of the abortion clinics that formerly accepted federal funds are now declining those payments.
Abortion is still legal, the access is still there, but until the next Democrat president gets into office and alters the regulations, it will not be paid for by taxpayer funds. Those clinics will have to stand on their own economic two feet.
All of that being said, how about we let individuals make the choice to help fund those procedures. The federal government has been paying about $260 Million annually to approximately 90 providers that offer abortions as a portion of their services. I am sure if Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Susan Wojcicki, George Soros and Larry Page collectively opened their wallets, they could each pay that kind of money by themselves out of their pocket change. If they decided to split the bill, that's a paltry $44 Million each. They probably spend more on company lunches.
I will never be against letting a person decide what organizations they want to support. If you think abortion is that important, start a Kickstarter, get someone famous to get on TV and plead for donations. What I am against is having someone who wants government funds "donated" through subsidies or for any reason that does not directly return a good or service to the government. No matter what the program, I promise you there is someone who does not want the government freely giving money to any given company or industry. My morals say that person's beliefs and choices should be respected. Just because I want the government to support something does not grant me the power or authority to let the government point a gun at the other person and take his tax money to be spent on programs I like but he abhors, "Concentrated Benefits and Diffused Costs" be damned.