Thank you for the explanation. This indeed is pretty obscure, and if that it what it is aimed at, the joke is also not well constructed - US govt does not ban a

Thank you for the explanation. This indeed is pretty obscure, and if that it what it is aimed at, the joke is also not well constructed - US govt does not ban anybody from promoting abortion with this rule (I assume we accept the joke's premise that talking about this function is "promoting abortion") - it just withdraws US governmental financing. But that would imply that otherwise GNU project is financed by US federal government? Not sure this is the impression RMS would want to make... OTOH, given RMS's politics (as I understand it), maybe he wouldn't mind it at all if that were true.