Legislature passes tax credit for pregnancy resource centers
May 16, 2006
JEFFERSON CITY – The Missouri General Assembly on May 12 finalized approval of tax credits for pregnancy resource centers, sending Gov. Matt Blunt one of the three pro-life priority bills for 2006 that he wants to sign.
Rep. Allen Icet, R-Wildwood and a member of Ballwin Baptist Church, worked to get House Bill 1485 passed by representatives so that Sen. Luann Ridgeway, R-Smithville and a member of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Edgerton, could handle the bill effectively. The Senate voted 32-0 for approval May 11, sending it back to the House of Representatives for passage on the last day of the session.
“It’s a very positive way for people to be able to use their own money by directing their tax dollars to a very worthy cause, which is supporting women who are making the positive choice of saving the life of their unborn child and helping support them in that very serious decision,” Ridgeway said.
Last September, after he called a historic special session of the Legislature that produced a new pro-life bill that he immediately signed into law, the governor drew attention to the state’s approximately 30 evangelical pregnancy resource centers and 30 birthright centers by traveling to some of them in a ceremonial bill-signing tour. The tax credit will increase the amount of funds available to these centers by $2 million annually, according to John McCastle, director of Alliance for Life Missouri. A tax credit worth half the value of donations between $100 and $50,000 would be lawful, as administered by the Department of Social Services.
“If you have any understanding of the Bible, it is very clear that for whatever reason, human life is extremely important to God,” Ridgeway said. “If He places such a high value on it to the point that He was willing to sacrifice His own Son for it, then we need to place that kind of value on human life as well. If the sacrifice is that valuable, how much more is the object of that sacrifice? That’s us.”
While pro-life advocates were celebrating the passage of the tax credit bill, Kerry Messer, legislative liaison for the Missouri Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission, reasoned that “any step forward on the pro-life battlefront is a victory,” even though the other two pro-life provisions that the governor wanted died in the General Assembly. A bill to prevent abortion providers who use public funds from teaching sex education in Missouri public schools and a bill to protect Missouri’s pharmacists from being forced to provide “morning after” abortion pills to patients both were thwarted.
Messer said Planned Parenthood, America’s largest provider of abortions, cranked out an amazing amount of disinformation to get the outcome it desired.
“They recruited public school activists, pro-abortion activists, education labor unions and pro-government program activists associated with various levels of government agencies who all want money for family planning,” Messer said. “Basically there’s this huge coalition of people who are either overtly pro-abortion or who are quietly non-players on the issue. They’re comfortable with a culture of abortion, or they may even actually be self-deceived into believing that they are pro-life when in reality their version of pro-life is hand out as much contraception as minors want without parental notification or parental consent and call yourself pro-life because you’re supposedly preventing pregnancy.
“Planned Parenthood initially admitted that this bill (House Bill 1075) was going to cost them millions of federal tax dollars, because they get paid to put those materials in those classrooms. This bill was a major financial threat, so they had to protect their interests.”
It was harder to determine what happened to derail the pharmacists’ conscience protection bill.
“It would appear that maybe there is a lot of big business that doesn’t want to have government come between them and their employees,” Messer said.
Because of term limits, many lawmakers are new to Jefferson City, which means they often are not equipped to process the information that is handed to them on controversial measures like the two pro-life bills that did not make it to the governor’s desk this year, Messer said. The abortion industry knows this and has used it to its advantage, Messer said.
“People just don’t come to grips with the fact that maybe these people aren’t always 100 percent honest,” he said. “I’ve been seeing it daily.”