In early November the voters of New York City elected a liberal Republican to replace the city’s new hero Rudolph Giuliani. Mike Bloomberg is now in office.

As mayor of the nation’s largest city Bloomberg wants New York to become a pioneer in government spending.

Not a pioneer in the funding of schools, not a pioneer in the funding of welfare and not a pioneer in the funding of economic development. Bloomberg would rather make his mark in a much more powerful way, sticking it to his conservative party members by spending tax dollars on abortions in public hospitals. And he must be stopped.

Bloomberg’s plan would stop sending Medicaid recipients to places that do not provide tube-tying or abortion. In addition, he wants the hospitals to be required to offer emergency contraceptives to rape victims and have some sort of abortion training program.

Sounds like a conservative’s nightmare and a liberal’s utopia, but its much more than that.

The Catholic Church is staunchly against abortion and birth control. In fact, most Catholic hospitals don’t offer these services because it is against the religion. But it is still not clear if these hospitals will be forced to take part in this form of health care.

This is humorous. In a city where Christianity is pretty much banned from public schools as to not violate the religious rights of others, the government may completely dismiss the religious freedoms of Catholics in an effort to push a political agenda. But who cares about the First Amendment?

Being against the public funding of abortions is not an issue of pro-life versus pro-choice. Most pro-lifers understand that the minds of pro-choicers will not be changed. This issue has much more to it than simply being in support of legal abortions.

What is a major concern to conservatives is the government stepping in and saying “Hey, if you don’t do what we want, we will take business away from you.”

Once again we find government interfering with a perfectly capable industry that seems to be working just fine.

However, New Yorkers elected a man that campaigned on this issue. It is local control.

But what is feared is a spiral effect. Once New York does it, public funding for abortions will slowly work its way across the country.

Those who don’t believe it will spread, look at smoking ordinances. It has become very popular to outlaw smoking in restaurants and bars.

The state of California started a trend that has worked its way to Ames. Now, just in the state of Iowa, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City are thinking about interfering with the private sector and initiating a smoking ban of their own.

But why shouldn’t tax-funded abortions be embraced by New York? There is no need. If a person wants to have an abortion, they can do that now. That person can legally do so without the help of millions of strangers. If a person can’t afford an abortion, stop having sex. It is not the responsibility of society to correct that error, it was avoidable in the first place.

But perhaps the most ironic thing about this new issue involves the people in support of it. In defense of legal abortion, pro-choicers have long used the argument “no one should be able to tell a woman what to do with her body.” But now they are the ones telling people what to do with their pocketbooks.

Zach Calef is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Cedar Rapids. He is a copy editor for the Daily.