Pro-life state senator Katrina Jackson of Louisiana recently responded in an interview with EWTN Pro-Life Weekly’s host Catherine Hadro to the pro-abortion claim that the Hyde Amendment is racist.
The Hyde Amendment originated in 1976 and specifically prohibits taxpayer funding of most abortions at the federal level. The amendment is crediting with saving more than two million preborn lives. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a self-described Catholic, recently claimed that she has been trying to think of ways to get rid of the Hyde Amendment since before she joined Congress.
“For the first time in decades, every single House Democrat recently voted to strip the Hyde Amendment from federal health funding,” Hadro began. “What started out as a bipartisan amendment years ago is very clearly partisan on Capitol Hill today.”
READ: Democratic Senator Katrina Jackson: The Supreme Court ‘has ignored the cries of women’
Jackson was asked to comment on the unanimous opposition of House Democrats to the Hyde Amendment.
“Of course, I was shocked,” Jackson said. “I was even more disappointed that some Democrats advocated that it was racist for us not to repeal the Hyde Amendment. Look, I sit in a room with African American women every day. Sixty percent of my district is African-American. I serve seven of the 64 parishes in Louisiana… I’ve never been in a group of African Americans who asked me to fund abortion. That was really disappointing, that they used that, and it was really false.”
“Right now in the African-American community, people are still screaming for equitable education and access to healthcare, and what I’ve said, and my message has been this: it’s racist to fund abortions, because you’re going to have to cut the budget somewhere,” Jackson continued. “At every level of government, in order to spend more money, unless more revenue comes in, you have to cut the budget somewhere. And in Louisiana, generally we have a deficit, we have to cut education and health care — two things the African-American community is screaming about… it was disappointing to say the least.”
Jackson further claimed that Black Americans aren’t begging for politicians to fund abortion. “What we’re screaming for right now in the African-American community all over this country is, of course, things like healthcare, education, having a seat at the table, business, economic development,” she said. “So, to use that to pass this repeal was very disappointing.”
Noting that President Joe Biden supported the Hyde Amendment as recently as 2019, Hadro asked Jackson what she would tell the President about this issue given the chance.
“When he was campaigning, he told us that he was going to work across party lines… and not pander toward one side or the other on social issues,” she answered. “Repealing the Hyde Amendment is pandering to the extreme left on this issue…. I would tell him that those who voted for him, his base, did not ask him to fund abortion. He’s listening to a small segment of America — an extremely small segment of America — who are asking him to do this.”
Polling shows that only 7% of Americans support unrestricted, taxpayer-funded abortion, with most Americans believing abortion should be significantly restricted.
Jackson, who has spoken at the national March for Life multiple times and was recently awarded Live Action’s Life Award, has a consistently strong pro-life voting record. She sponsored the “Unsafe Abortion Protection Act,” also known as June Medical Services v. Russo, that went all the way to the Supreme Court before ultimately being struck down last year, in what she called a “tragic decision.”
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