Fungibility: "the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution. Examples of highly fungible commodities are crude oil, wheat, orange juice, precious metals, and currencies."
Fallacy: "usually incorrect reasoning in argumentation resulting in a misconception."
If you haven't been keeping up with the HR3 news, here's a recap: There's no such thing as federal funding for abortions. Unless, of course, you believe that PAP smears, contraception, cancer screenings and treatment, WIC appointments, STI tests/treatments, and, in some cases, in vitro fertilization, all somehow consist of procuring abortions.
Why is this relevant? Because today our House votes on the "No Taxpayer Funding For Oompaloopas Act". Oops. I mean "Abortion" - "No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act". Our trusted government officials are wasting taxpayer dollars voting to defund and restrict from using taxpayer dollars something that is already, and has been since 1976, restricted from using taxpayer dollars. So yeah. They're defunding a unicorn. It all comes down to Title X and the funding of Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood provides abortions. Not every clinic provides that specific service. But they all provide very vital services for all people regarding reproductive health. And they all keep their doors open through funding of Title X.
Since 1976 and the passing of the Hyde Amendment, federally funded health services (such as Planned Parenthood) who provide abortion services were prohibited from using any of the funding to assist with the cost of an abortion, except in the cases of rape, incest, or threat to the mother's health. Even with such exceptions, getting approval for that coverage is near impossible; thus only 191 women were covered in 2008. But even though the conservatives got their way and cut off health care assistance to the poor women who probably need it most (and that's all the Hyde Amendment did, I assure you), the conservatives still aren't satisfied. They want to strip all federal funding from these clinics so they can protect their tax dollars from being used for abortions. Oh, wait. They're not? Oh. Well then I just don't want my tax dollars being used for a clinic that provides that service despite the fact that not one cent of my money will touch "the unspeakable procedure". I'm going to play this card in the name of Fungibility.
The idea goes as such: that if our money goes to Planned Parenthood, it doesn't matter that our money is kept separate from abortion provision. It only matters that our money went to Planned Parenthood, despite the fact that it would be used for such services as preventing the further need for abortion. Their thinking is that if it goes to the same clinic, then, in a round-about way, it still pays for abortion no matter how separate the funding is.
At face value, this may seem like a logical line of thinking. But when talking about federal funding so accidentally and loosely being applied to something someone doesn't like, we have to be all-inclusive. While the rest of the world knows that federal tax dollars don't fund abortion procedures, when looked at through the fungibility fallacy it turns out that all federal tax dollars apparently pay for all abortion procedures.
1. The woman who rides the bus to the clinic is using federal funding in two ways: the bus itself and the road that was paved using taxpayer dollars.
2. If she is low income and thus on welfare, the money she didn't have to spend on food was used to pay for her procedure.
3. Law Enforcement protects the clinics, clinic workers, and the patients from harm. This includes the FBI who have to clean up after such anti-choice messes as the murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Pensacola bombings of 1984.
4. Every government employee's salary is paid by taxpayers. In the event that any one of those employees, for any reason, sought an abortion, you paid for it.
5. Federal grants for college have a few ways they contribute to abortion access. The first being: MED SCHOOL. I think that one speaks for itself. The second: financial aid refund checks. Yeah, the one that students have to stretch out across the semester to ensure they can survive. In more than a few cases I can assure you her survival consisted of scraping together what the private abortion funds couldn't cover.
And those are only a few ways that your tax dollars are "fungible" when it comes to abortion. And it has nothing to do with what money Planned Parenthood gets. You see, even if you do succeed in destroying the only access to adequate reproductive health care that poor people have, you will still, under the great law of Fungibility, still be paying for these abortions. Your only solution, in this case, will be to stop paving roads, sending people to college, having a police department, or paying government employees. In other words, you'd have to stop paying taxes completely.
But the rational choice would be to drop all this HR3 crap and keep all funding for Planned Parenthood to ensure the further prevention of that which you don't want. Defunding them to prevent abortion is as counterproductive as trying to stop war by attacking other countries or setting something on fire to cool it off. That said, it's time to do the responsible thing and contact your state representatives. Stop letting a complete fallacy strip impoverished people of their right to reproductive health care.
