Friday marks the 40th anniversary of the Hyde Amendment, a widely-supported measure that has saved more than 2 million lives by prohibiting taxpayer funding of abortions in Medicaid.
But abortion activists have put a big, fat target on the Hyde Amendment this year.
The Democratic Party approved a radical new platform in July that calls for Hyde to be repealed – despite some strong opposition from within the party. And presidential candidate Hillary Clinton promised that she would work to overturn the Hyde Amendment and force taxpayers to fund abortions, if elected.
According to Clinton’s campaign site: “She will repeal the Hyde amendment to ensure low-income women have access to safe reproductive health care. And she will fight to protect and build on President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which bans insurance companies from discriminating against women and guarantees more than 55 million women access to preventive care.”
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Upheld by the Supreme Court, the Hyde Amendment is now a target of abortion advocates who have moved from pro-choice to pro-abortion — forcing Americans not only to accept unlimited abortions before birth but also to pay for them.
Historically, the Hyde Amendment has received bipartisan support. The amendment has been passed every year since 1976 and has largely prevented federal Medicaid dollars from paying for abortions. The Supreme Court eventually upheld the Hyde Amendment and limits on taxpayer funding of abortions in 1980.
Research from the Charlotte Lozier Institute indicates that the amendment has saved more than 2 million lives from abortion in the past 40 years.
“Since 1976, the Hyde Amendment has saved thousands of lives in almost every state. For example, 248,488 lives have been saved in Texas. In Florida, 165,613 lives have been saved. Over 100,000 lives have been saved in Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania,” according to the research.
To Clinton and her fellow abortion activists, the Hyde Amendment is another restriction on a woman’s “right to choose” to abort her unborn child. Abortion activists claim that the Hyde Amendment hurts poor and minority women and transgender people because they tend to be the ones who cannot afford to pay for an abortion. One abortion activist compared the Hyde Amendment to slavery while testifying in front of Congress on Sept. 23.
“Any right that requires you to take extraordinary measures to access [abortion] is no right at all,” Clinton said recently in reference to Hyde.
If Clinton and her fellow abortion activists succeed, the Guttmacher Institute estimates 33,000 more unborn babies will be killed in abortions every year. Planned Parenthood, which already receives about $550 million in federal tax dollars every year, would benefit hugely from the move.
Taxpayer-funding of abortion is not popular, even among Democrats and those who identify as pro-choice. Unfortunately, few of the major news networks have covered Clinton and the Democratic Party’s radical new shift to push taxpayer-funded abortions. Earlier this week, News Busters reported ABC, CBS and NBC did not report on the Hyde Amendment once this election year.
Recently, abortion activists did their own research on the issue and found that more Americans now support taxpayer-funded abortions. According to The Daily Dot, a June 2015 poll of voters in 11 battleground states found that 56 percent of voters would support a bill that requires Medicaid to cover abortion.
However, most polling through the years consistently shows that a majority of Americans oppose taxpayer funding for abortions. A 2015 Marist poll found that more than two-thirds of Americans oppose taxpayer funding of abortion, including a majority of women and people who identify as pro-choice.
