The 50th anniversary of the life-saving Hyde Amendment is about as good an illustration of the adage that “one man’s meat is another man’s poison” as you’ll ever get. Pro-abortionists loathe this rider to the annual Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) appropriations bill and have spent five decades doing their level best to strangle it.
The rabidly pro-abortion Nation magazine announced that it would have “a virtual conversation on the legacy of the Hyde Amendment’s restrictions on abortion access” in October. They wrote
This fall marks 50 years since the passage of the Hyde Amendment. The ban on federal funding of abortion is the most significant yet under-acknowledged anti-abortion policy in U.S. history, restricting access to a fundamental right through a budget rider.
SUPPORT LIFENEWS! If you want to help fight abortion, please donate to LifeNews.com!
By contrast, pro-lifers revere the late pro-life champion Rep. Henry Hyde, who as a freshman congressman in 1976, introduced the amendment named after him. We forgot how the dynamics were all against passage.
For starters, there were more than twice as many Democrats in the House—291 to 144—and a 24 vote Democrat cushion in the Senate. Before you knew it, Medicaid was paying for 300,000 abortions per year—and the number was increasing! (Congress never explicitly authorized coverage for abortion either in the original 1965 Medicaid statute or in the years immediately after Roe was handed down.)
But the Hyde Amendment passed after a titanic congressional battle. Here is an superb overview.
“That a freshman Republican, Rep. Henry Hyde, could build a bipartisan coalition to attach a binding rider to an annual appropriations bill so soon after Roe caught pro-choice advocates and congressional leadership off guard, as they had assumed the legal debate was largely settled at the federal level for the foreseeable future.”
What were the chances the Hyde Amendment would hold up once it came to attention of a Supreme Court riddled with pro-abortionists? How about slim and none. After all, there had been only one change on the court between 1973 and 1980, with one pro-Roe justice replacing another pro-Roe justice.
But three justices (Potter Stewart, who authored the majority opinion in Harris v. McRae, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, and Lewis F. Powell Jr.) who voted in favor of Roe seemingly pivoted to sustain Hyde. But, in fact, the three saw no contradiction in holding that states could distinguish between abortion and “other medical procedures.”
Why? Because “no other procedure involves the purposeful termination of a potential life.”
In Justice Stewart’s words
“The Hyde Amendment… by encouraging childbirth except in the most urgent circumstances, is rationally related to the legitimate governmental objective of protecting potential life.”
The Court stubbornly clung to its holding that a woman had a “right” to an abortion until 2022 but did say the state was not required to siphon off taxpayer money to pay for abortions.
We will continue to write about the 50th anniversary of the Hyde Amendment. Please continue to read them all.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. He frequently writes Today’s News and Views — an online opinion column on pro-life issues.
