On Sept. 30, 1976, just three years after abortion was legalized across the nation, a freshman member of the House of Representatives — a Republican in a Congress dominated in both chambers by Democrats — managed to successfully push through what has since been known as the Hyde Amendment.
The Hyde Miracle might be a more fitting sobriquet for the amendment that has saved an estimated 2.7 million lives by prohibiting federal taxpayer funding for most abortions.
The amendment even survived a legal challenge that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision in 1980, in the case Harris v. McRae, the Court found that a woman’s “right” to kill her child by abortion does not require the government to pay for it.
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To this day, that theme has been repeated in numerous subsequent court cases. The state may always choose to prefer childbirth over abortion even while permitting the latter.
The amendment, introduced by then-Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., passed as part of a spending bill for the Labor Department and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
The bill was supported by Democrats who opposed abortion (where have they gone) and Republicans who supported it and was enacted over the veto of President Gerald Ford, who at the time identified as more anti-abortion than not.
Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows, but it’s also true that the two parties had not yet made support or opposition to abortion the ironclad divide it is 50 years later.
Today, Democrats can’t even bring themselves to vote in favor of a bill to provide life-saving care to a baby who survives abortion.
No matter their positions about abortion, the majority of Americans do not want their tax dollars paying for someone else’s abortion, as public opinion polls since the 1980s have shown.
But Hyde doesn’t completely get us off the hook.
To get the measure through Congress with enough support to override the president’s veto, some exceptions to the prohibition were added.
Originally, Medicaid could pay for an abortion if the mother’s life was at risk. In 1993, an exception was added for pregnancies conceived through rape or incest.
Those who are anti-abortion are committed to protecting every baby, but those exceptions – which we see even today in states whose laws protect most babies from abortion – taught us a lesson about incrementalism.
Not being able to save every baby does not absolve us of the obligation to save those we can. We do not choose incrementalism; it chooses us.
That’s why we support Heartbeat laws that protect babies from about three weeks past conception; why we fight for an end to late-term abortion, and why an amendment passed in Nebraska in 2024 was a victory, even though abortions are still allowed through 12 weeks.
A competing amendment would have allowed abortion until viability and beyond.
Every year, Congress decides on whether or not to renew the Hyde amendment in its spending votes.
That’s another reason I think it should be called the Hyde Miracle, because through the decades when the Democrats were hardening their hearts to the unborn, the amendment continued to save lives, year after year after year.
And yet not all our tax dollars are protected from funding abortion. There are many funding streams that can be turned on or off by Congress or the president, as we saw over the past year with the One Big Beautiful Bill.
The Hyde amendment keeps our money from funding the abortion procedure itself, but money is fungible, and simple bookkeeping permits businesses like Planned Parenthood to just use other money they receive.
And while Hyde prohibits federal Medicaid to fund abortion, states are free to use their Medicaid dollars to kill the unborn and 21 of them do.
Moreover, a federal Government Accountability Office reports that 26% of insurance policies purchased on the Obamacare exchanges cover elective abortion.
So the Hyde Amendment is not a panacea but neither is its renewal every year just a symbolic victory. Lives are being saved.
For proof of that, we can look at a study from Illinois last year that found when the state began allowing Medicaid to pay for abortion in 2018, the abortion rate increased by 18.2%, while the birth rate decreased by 2.8%, compared with states without such coverage.
When Medicaid doesn’t pay, lives are saved. It’s simple math that Henry Hyde, with his heart for the unborn, understood.
I had the privilege of knowing Congressman Hyde and being with him at various panti-abortion events.
He was an inspiration on the national stage, and a great encourager on the personal level.
It was a special honor for me to receive the Henry Hyde Leadership Award the year before he died.
In his memory, I join countless other Americans in continuing to fight as he did to save the youngest children.
LifeNews.com Note: Frank Pavone is the national director for Priests for Life.
