US House GOP's irony meter is pegged this year. Via Mother Jones:
Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest.
This would go quite well with charging women for rape kits. Then at least there would be some assurance that they could provide receipts for such when the IRS comes knockin'.
I don't mean to be flip. Rape or incest is traumatic enough, resulting in pregnancy even more so. The GOP wants government to deepen and perpetuate the trauma by employing the IRS as a tool of anti-choice policy. This is truly despicable, especially with the GOP/ tea party mantra of small-government-stay-out-of-our-lives.
In testimony to a House taxation subcommittee on Wednesday, Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee, confirmed that one consequence of the Republicans' "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" would be to turn IRS agents into abortion cops—that is, during an audit, they'd have to detemine, from evidence provided by the taxpayer, whether any tax benefit had been inappropriately used to pay for an abortion.
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"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."
This is truly an abomination.