NOTE: this diary was originally published on Friday, June 4th. The Group Admin interface is doing all sorts of odd things so I unpublished it and am now trying again.
It’s going to be difficult to limit myself to copy-and-pasting only 4 paragraphs from this fantastic article from The Guardian, partially because I’m outraged that I didn’t know about this but also because the article is so thorough and well written. It’s from the American edition of The Guardian, Great Britain’s top newspaper and my foremost source of news. All bolding is mine for emphasis.
At least 10 US states have siphoned millions of dollars from federal block grants, meant to provide aid to their neediest families, to pay for the operations of ideological anti-abortion clinics. Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Texas have all used federal Tanf funds to support anti-abortion clinics. These overwhelmingly Republican-led states used money from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (Tanf), better known as welfare or direct cash aid, to fund the activities of anti-abortion clinics associated with the evangelical right. The clinics work to dissuade women from obtaining abortions.
Outraged, I wondered how it ever became legal to use my tax dollars to pay for this bullshit. I might have known ...
The program gained traction after it was pioneered in 2001by the former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who also helped craft the 1990s welfare reforms that made such state spending possible. That year, Pennsylvania became the first state to divert Tanf funds to anti-abortion clinics, and sent $1m to its Alternatives to Abortion program...
Pennsylvania’s Forced Birther programs went on to educate others of their ilk on how to dip deep in to the taxpayer-funded slush fund. <---Your Tax Dollars at Work!
Today, there are more than 2,500 ideologically focused, anti-abortion clinics, compared with just 800 abortion providers. But those figures don’t tell the whole story, as they are dramatically skewed in states hostile to abortion rights. In some states, the balance isone abortion provider to 15 anti-abortion clinics. In Missouri, that balance is one to 74, as the state has worked aggressively to shut down its only remaining abortion clinic, a Planned Parenthood in St Louis.
One of the most outrageous things the article points out is that there is (in my words) a Huge element of racism in these states’ programs, vividly illustrated by this quote from the 2001 book, Welfare Racism: “preoccupation with controlling the alleged sexual immorality and supposed preference of welfare over work of one group: African-American females.”
Note that there is “no public accounting of all the federal funds anti-abortion clinics have received in the last two decades...”
Read the rest here — it’s well worth your time:
At least 10 states divert federal welfare funding to anti-abortion clinics