Democrat Party leaders have taxpayer-funded abortions on their list of goals for 2021.
Not only do they want to undo the progress that President Donald Trump made when he defunded Planned Parenthood and other abortion groups through his Mexico City and Title X policies, they also want to end the Hyde Amendment.
The amendment is a decades-old measure that prohibits taxpayer funding for elective abortions in Medicaid. Pro-life researchers estimate it has saved at least 2.4 million babies from abortion.
Until recently, the Hyde Amendment had strong bipartisan support in Congress, and polls consistently show that most Americans still support it.
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However, as NBC News reported this week, Democrat leaders want it gone.
“This is the last year,” said U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, during a Dec. 8 hearing about ending the Hyde Amendment. “The time has come in this current moment to reckon with the norm, with the status quo.”
DeLauro, the in-coming chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said they will vote to end the Hyde Amendment in 2021. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also supports the goal.
“I myself have been an opponent of the Hyde Amendment long before I came to Congress, so I would be receptive to that happening,” Pelosi said earlier this month. “It’s long overdue, getting rid of it, in my view.”
Democrat leaders, who receive huge campaign donations from the billion-dollar abortion industry, are trying to portray the Hyde Amendment as discriminatory. Their argument is based on the idea that women need to be able to abort their unborn babies to succeed, and poor women, many of the black and Hispanic, may not be able to afford abortions on their own.
“It’s an issue of racial justice and it’s an issue of discrimination against low-income women, women of color, women who don’t have access to what middle- and upper-income women have in terms of the choice to have an abortion,” said U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, earlier this year.
President-elect Joe Biden also wants to force taxpayers to fund abortions. For years, he supported the Hyde Amendment, but, under pressure from abortion advocacy groups, he changed his position on the campaign trail in 2019.
Democrats control the U.S. House, but Republicans still hold a narrow majority in the U.S. Senate. According to NBC, Senate Appropriations Chair Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, promised to resist Democrats’ push for taxpayer-funded abortions.
“We’ve had the Hyde Amendment a long time. And I think it’s pretty clearly embedded in the fabric of our legislation. I support the Hyde Amendment,” he told the news outlet.
Here’s more from the report:
Even if they lose control of the Senate in the Georgia runoffs Jan. 5, they’ll retain filibuster power and be able to force a 60-vote threshold to pass a bill in the chamber.
If Biden uses his veto power to demand removal of the Hyde Amendment, it could enhance the Democrats’ leverage. But the president-elect’s recent focus has been on other matters and it’s not clear how much political capital he will spend on that goal.
The Hyde Amendment first passed in 1976. The U.S. Supreme Court later upheld it, and it has remained popular with Americans for decades.
Recent polls from Marist and Harvard University/Politico show strong opposition to taxpayer-funded abortions. According to Marist, six in 10 Americans (60 percent) oppose taxpayer funding of abortion, while the Harvard poll found that 58 percent oppose it.
What’s more, research suggests low-income women do not want taxpayer-funded abortions. According to the Harvard/Politico poll, voters who make more than $75,000 were more supportive of ending the Hyde Amendment (45 percent in favor), while those who make $25,000 or less were strongly against it (24 percent in favor). In other words, the people most likely to qualify for a Medicaid-covered, taxpayer-funded abortion are the ones who oppose it the most.
If Democrats end the Hyde Amendment, Americans could be forced to pay for 60,000 elective abortions through Medicaid as well as through insurance to Peace Corps volunteers, federal workers and military members. Currently, the amendment prohibits taxpayer funding for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or risks to the mother’s life.
