I am confused about how to find the check-off box on the Federal Income Tax form that designates where you want your tax dollars to be spent. I actually have spent some time looking for it and cannot find the box to check off my preferences.  It must be there as the recent onslaught of anti-abortion bill sponsors are loudly proclaiming that tax dollars should not be used for abortions and that tax payers object to paying for them.
 

Using fiscal arguments, the Republicans are proposing to severely restrict women’s access to reproductive rights.  They are using the new health care law to prevent women from using their own funds to pay for abortions, to disallow tax deductions by businesses who pay for abortion coverage in plans and to cut off funds to health care clinics. Additionally, they want to defund Planned Parenthood whose major function is the providing of health care such as pap smears, mammograms and family planning to lower income women. According to an article in
the New York Times, conservatives are energized by their new majority and are determined to push their own anti-abortion priorities. Instead of dealing with jobs they are dealing with abortion.  

Democratic leaders like Senators Gillibrand, Boxer, Murray and Blumenthal are fighting back. They promise to stand with women and repel these attacks on the rights and health of more then fifty percent of the population.  Senator Lautenberg who joined this group compared the new proposals to “a Third World country that’s requiring women to wear head shawls to cover their faces even if they do not want to.”

As these Senators stand with women, women must stand with them and other women. We must demand that our pro-choice tax payer dollars support women and their health. We demand that women’s lives and health be covered by insurance. We demand that our tax payer dollars help fund Planned Parenthood. We demand that our tax payer dollars be used to help the children who are born to women/girls who have no resources to care for them.

We must demand that our dollars do not belong to their conservative agenda. 
 
Support pro-choice elected officials. Contact your elected officials – let them hear from you. Get your friends and family aware and involved. We cannot be silent. JAC supports pro-choice candidates regardless of gender. The life that you save may be yours, your daughter’s, your friend’s daughter or that of a woman you do not know.

Gail Yamner,

JACPAC President