In the middle of the night on Friday, December 1st, Republicans pushed a vote on their tax cut bill. When Democrats tried to ask for a recess to read the new changes to the bill, Republicans denied their request. With only a few hours to read a 500 page bill with many handwritten add ons, many things were looked over and weren’t noticed until after the bill had passed, a few unrelated to taxes in what they aim to do. The big one is that people are now allowed to open a college savings account for a child still in the womb.

You might be thinking, what’s the big deal with that? So people get up to another nine months to start saving for their child’s college. College is expensive, so let people save for longer. But this provision to the bill does something much worse than just let people start saving earlier; it codifies into law that life starts at conception.

By getting into a tax bill that at conception a fetus is enough of a life that you can start a college fund for it, they can use that as a way to prove personhood of a fetus. And by saying that a fetus is legally a person, they can start passing anti-abortion laws and try to get the Supreme Court to reverse Roe v Wade. This is not here for the tax purposes of doing that, it’s so they can advance their social agenda by working it into their fiscal agenda.

This is a sneaky way for Republicans to try to get what they want, abortions to be illegal, because they know that at this point unless they can get a mainly conservative court with a new abortion case brought to it, then they aren’t going to be able to completely outlaw abortions for a while.