When it comes to woke, there’s nothing more woke than making sure women continue to get abortions. This is certainly true for the Biden military, which no longer sees defending America as its primary mission. Instead, its role is to keep its base happy and, because its base loves abortion, the Biden Defense Department has figured out how to keep those abortions going…and to heck with the Hyde Amendment.

When it comes to federal monies and abortion, the Hyde Amendment is unambiguous. It bars the use of any federal money (i.e., dollars the government takes from taxpayers via its police powers) to fund abortions other than those that save the mother’s life or that affect pregnancies from rape and incest.

The problem for the Biden military is that, once the Supreme Court (correctly) held in Dobbs that abortion is not a constitutional right and that the federal government has no say in it, several states passed laws banning or severely limiting abortion. Currently, abortion is illegal in Idaho, South Dakota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

The states in which abortion is banned are almost all states with a heavy proportion of military bases. That’s because most were former Confederate states so, after the Civil War ended, the U.S. government put a disproportionate number of military bases there to be sure to pacify the population. It’s one of the great ironies that the same states that once viewed blacks as subhuman and, therefore, appropriate for slavery, have now completely turned around and recognize the humanity in all of us, regardless of race, from the first spark of life at inception.

Image: Maternity wear for women in the Navy who choose not to abort. U.S. Navy.

This geographic reality creates a problem for a woke military: How do you handle women in the military who get pregnant and want an abortion? Before Dodd, these women would just drive to the local abortion clinic. Now, though, to get an abortion, they may have to travel significant distances. The “brains” at the Pentagon came up with an idea: While they cannot provide or fund abortions, they’ll fund the travel to get abortions:

The Defense Department dropped a trio of new policies Thursday aimed at closing some of the gaps that the overturn of Roe v. Wade opened up in service members’ ability to access reproductive health care.

They include fully paid travel expenses for troops who have to go out of state to obtain an abortion and up to three weeks of leave, including to accompany a dependent or spouse, whether it’s for an abortion or a fertility treatment. The new regulations also give service members until 20 weeks to notify commanders of a pregnancy.

[snip]

“Service members and families are required to travel and move to meet the needs of the nation. And while they certainly have a voice in the process of where they’re assigned, ultimately, decisions are made in the best interest of the department’s mission requirements,” a senior defense official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told Military Times during a Thursday interview. “And we strongly believe that these moves should not impact their access to essential health care. These policies that we’re releasing today will help ensure long-term that we’re able to recruit, retain and maintain the readiness of a highly qualified force.”

Did the defense official just say that killing babies is good for America’s military? Why, yes, he did. Well, leftists have always called the U.S. military a baby-killing machine. But, typically for the left, the problem was never about killing babies; it was just about killing the wrong babies.

If this tactic of working through the private sector looks familiar, you’re right. It’s a workaround that’s very similar to how Democrats in government sought to bypass the First Amendment by handing censorship responsibilities over to the tech companies. The post-Dodd Navy, while it’s not paying directly for abortions, is using tax dollars to pay for women to travel to states in which they can get abortions.

This falls into the category of “too clever by half.” If the government is using its power to obtain censorship or abortions, the fact that it channels its power through cutouts is irrelevant. In the case of censorship, it’s violating the First Amendment, and in the case of using taxpayer dollars for abortions, it’s violating the Hyde Amendment.