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 Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
Exactly $0 of the government's funding for Planned Parenthood is allowed to be used for abortion services, by law.
Any government funding for PP means that some of it is probably going to abortion even if the line of sight isn't direct. This is because all spending decisions are marginal and come from the same pool of possible spending decisions. The pool of resources to cover the possible spending decisions are allocated first to the spending with the greatest marginal benefit, second to those with the second greatest marginal benefit, etc..
If PP has a budget of $10, where funding consists of $2 from government and $8 elsewhere, without restrictions, the two funding sources are essentially merged and put to pay for the $10 of services. If the budget is deconstructed to pap smears ($5) and abortions ($5) and the law says no government funding can go to abortion, PP then pays for the pap smears with the $2 from government and $3 from elsewhere, and pays for the abortions with the remaining $5 from elsewhere. As we see, a change in the law regarding allocation didn't change the funding for abortions. If, however, the government stopped funding PP altogether, PP would have only $8 and would have to cut its spending. It would do so based on the marginal assessment characterized above. Unless abortions are valued more highly than pap smears such that PP would rather lose $2 of pap smears to keep all $5 of abortions, abortions would decline.
The only way to make it so that no taxes go to abortions is to make it so that institutions that produce abortions get $0 funding from the government. Furthermore, that means that consumers of abortions also need to get $0 funding from the government.
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