No wonder New York City’s latest move in respect of abortion was advanced “under the radar,” as the New York Times put it. The plan being hatched to start allocating taxpayer funds for abortions for poor women who travel here from other states may not, at least at the moment, involve a lot of money. It is, though, a shocking escalation in the population wars.

The plan, according to the Times, which broke the story, is for the city to allocate $250,000 for abortions. The idea, the headline suggests, is to challenge conservative states that have been moving to curb abortions. The allocation from taxpayer funds would go to a charity, the New York Abortion Access Fund, that cuts checks directly to clinics to cover abortions for women who cannot pay.

“We heard the news on the abortion bans across the country,” Councilwoman Carlina Rivera is quoted by the Times as saying. “Many of us in New York felt helpless. We wanted to do more.” So she and her colleagues seem prepared to send tax collectors to raid the savings of even religious Catholics and Jews, among others, and force them to underwrite a practice that horrifies them.

“Abortion rights activists,” the Times reports, “believe that this is the first time that a city will allocate money specifically for abortions.”

Who knew the City Council had such solicitude for Alabama? No need for it and other conservative states to reconsider expanding their laws against abortion. If they don’t want to allow — never mind pay for — abortions, the New York City Council will be delighted to force its citizens to cover the cost, even, it seems, travel. The Council reckons our working stiffs don’t pay enough in taxes as it is.

All this would be newsworthy enough as a local story — a chapter in New York’s emergence as the national abortion mill. It has the highest abortion rates in the country. In some minority communities in the city, the abortion rate has in recent years touched 60% of pregnancies not ended by miscarriage. Religious leaders, who have long despaired of outlawing abortions, see this as a tragedy.

Yet it’s hard, too, not to see it as the logical next step to what is happening nationally, where the Democrats are bidding to become the abortion party. The frontrunner for the Party’s presidential nomination, Vice President Biden, has just cashiered his long-held principle of opposing public funding of abortions. He did that to get right with the new Democratic Party ideology.

The Sun did not set out to become even a modest tribune of the pro-life movement. We favor a liberality of spirit, a preparedness to accommodate contending convictions. Yet we recoil against the shift toward illiberality, typified by Governor Andrew Cuomo’s declaration that those who “are right-to-life” are among the “extreme conservatives” who have “no place in the state of New York.”

That remark was met five years ago with incredulity and a certain amount of horror. Yet it’s the spirit in which the New York City Council is moving with its plan to allocate tax monies to fund abortion. We can see why it tried to advance its latest plan under the radar. Lucky that it’s out there in public now, just in time for a national election.