Keep the IRS Out of My Uterus

[babylonsister]

http://prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=03&year=2011&base_name=keep_the_irs_out_of_my_uterus

Keep the IRS Out of My Uterus
By Lindsay Beyerstein | Posted 03/18/2011 at 04:20 PM


Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee, testified on Wednesday that, if the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" became law, audits would get a lot more personal for female taxpayers.

Barthold said that, if a woman got audited, IRS agents would have to figure out whether a woman used any tax benefit or credit pay for an abortion, Nick Baumann of Mother Jones reports. (Imagine if every angry boyfriend could call up the IRS tip line and get his girlfriend audited over an abortion.)

Barthold said that if a woman used any kind of tax credit, or benefit, to pay for an abortion, the onus would be on her to prove that she was the victim of rape or incest, or that the abortion was needed to save her life. Alternatively, she could prove that her insurance doesn't cover abortion. An earlier version of H.R. 3 proposed redefining rape as "forcible rape," but the language was dropped amid public outcry.

This is a bill that Speaker John Boehner has declared a top priority for the new Congress. The stereotype of the Tea Party is that it's a movement of small government libertarians who don't care about culture-war issues. If you crunch the numbers on H.R. 3, the absurdity of this narrative becomes evident. The House Tea Party Caucus wants the IRS up in your uterus. So much for small government and indifference to social issues.

The H.R. 3 has 221 co-sponsors, of whom 211 are Republicans. The Republicans hold 241 seats in Congress.

Of the 56 official members of the House Tea Party Caucus, 55 are co-sponsors of H.R. 3. That's right, 98 percent of House Tea Party Caucus members are not just supporting but co-sponsoring a bill that would empower the IRS to audit the uteruses of the nation. Only 87 percent of all Republican House members co-sponsored the bill.

So much for the comforting myth that the Tea Party represents some kind of libertarian antidote to Republican social conservatism. Tea Party Republicans like Michele Bachmann are just as enthusiastic about restricting women's freedom as "establishment" Republicans like John Boehner.

[niyad]

1. the woman-hating scum of the reichwing will stop at nothing in their efforts to turn women into

nothing more than breeding chattel

[YellowRubberDuckie]

2. Wow. How long until we are REQUIRED to have a certain amount of children?

If we as women are able, we will probably be REQUIRED to poop out a couple of kids and stay at home with them. That whole Good Housekeeping Guide to Being a Good Wife will probably become law and we will no longer be allowed to work outside of the home. They won't admit it, but they have a hard on for laws where women aren't allowed out without a male family member.
Duckie

[Shallah Kali]

6. I wonder if they think Ceausescu had a great plan

http://www.ceausescu.org/ceausescu_texts/overplanned_parenthood.htm

Nicolae Ceausescu loved nothing better than a monument to himself. But his ministerial palaces and avenues paled next to another of his schemes for building socialism: a plan to increase Romania's population from 23 million to 30 million by the year 2000. He began his campaign in 1966 with a decree that virtually made pregnancy a state policy. "The fetus is the property of the entire society," Ceausescu proclaimed. "Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity."

It was one of the late dictator's cruelest commands. At first Romania's birthrate nearly doubled. But poor nutrition and inadequate prenatal care endangered many pregnant women. The country's infant-mortality rate soard to 83 deaths in every 1,000 births (against a Western European average of less than 10 per thousand). About one in 10 babies was born underweight; newborns weighing 1,500 grams (3 pounds, 5 ounces) were classified as miscarriages and denied treatment. Unwanted survivors often ended up in orphanages. "The law only forbade abortion," says Dr. Alexander Floran Anca of Bucharest. "It did nothing to promote life."

Ceausescu made mockery of family planning. He forbade sex education. Books on human sexuality and reproduction were classified as "state secrets," to be used only as medical textbooks. With contraception banned, Romanians had to smuggle in condoms and birth-control pills. Though strictly illegal, abortions remained a widespread birth-control measure of last resort. Nationwide, Western sources estimate, 60 percent of all pregnancies ended in abortion or miscarriage.

The government's enforcement techniques were as bad as the law. Women under the age of 45 were rounded up at their workplaces every one to three months and taken to clinics, where they were examined for signs of pregnancy, often in the presence of government agents - dubbed the "menstrual police" by some Romanians. A pregnant woman who failed to "produce" a baby at the proper time could expect to be summoned for questioning. Women who miscarried were suspected of arranging an abortion. Some doctors resorted for forging statistics. "If a child died in our district, we lost 10 to 25 percent of our salary," says Dr. Geta Stanescu of Bucharest. "But it wasn't our fault: we had no medicine or milk, and the families were poor."

snip

"Celibacy tax": A woman didn't have to be pregnant to come under scrutiny. In 1986 members of the Communist youth group were sent to quiz citizens about their sex lives. "How often do you have sexual intercourse?" the questionnaire read. "Why have you failed to conceive?" Women who did not have children, even if they could not, paid a "celibacy tax" of up to 10 percent of their monthly salaries.

If I recall correctly Margaret ATwood researched horrific government abuses like these when writing The Handmaid's Tale.

[dems_rightnow]

3. Ridiculous... completely

That's a ridiculous comment. The IRS has no interest in how a person spends their money, and never will.

Because money that we have from tax refunds isn't government money, it's our money.

We can spend it on beer, porn, food, or abortions. We can donate it to a church, or to the Ku Klux Klan. We can burn it or bury it in the yard. All without the IRS caring a whit about how it's spent.

[babylonsister]

7. Don't be too sure. Read this...

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2011/3/18/21656/0594

snip//

"Were this to become law, people could end up in an audit, the subject of which could be abortion, rape, and incest," says Christopher Bergin, the head of Tax Analysts, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit tax policy group. "If you pass the law like this, the IRS would be required to enforce it."

[hobbit709]

4. Funny how the party of LESS government always wants MORE government.

[hansberrym]

5. Economic Decision-Making Is an Activity Subject to Congress’ Commerce Clause Power.

Economic Decision-Making Is an Activity Subject to Congress’ Commerce Clause Power.


Is this America?