For forty years the bipartisan Hyde Amendment has kept federal tax dollars from being used to directly fund abortions. The amendment has saved over two million lives in the past 40 years, and even President Obama has signed it into law every year.
But this year, the Democratic Party made repealing the Hyde Amendment a plank in their national platform for the first time ever, and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has also publicly supported the idea of its repeal.
The Hyde Amendment was authored by the late Henry Hyde, a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from 1975 to 2007, who chaired the Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 2001 and the House International Relations Committee from 2001 to 2007. Hyde gained national attention for his leadership role in managing the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton.
In defense of life, Hyde emphatically stated:
I believe nothing in this world of wonders is more beautiful than the innocence of a child. That little, almost-born infant struggling to live is a member of the human family. And abortion is a lethal assault against the very idea of human rights – and destroys along with a defenseless little baby, the moral foundation of our democracy. It isn’t just the babies that are dying for the lethal sin of being unwanted, or being handicapped, or malformed. We are dying, and not from the darkness, but from the cold. The coldness of self-brutalization that chills our sensibilities, deadens our conscience, and allows us to think of this unspeakable act as an act of compassion.
Let the innocency of the unborn have the last word in this debate.
Prior to enactment of Hyde, the Medicaid program paid for about 300,000 abortions annually.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump wrote in a letter to pro life groups that he would like to see the Hyde Amendment become a permanent law.
Visit HelloHyde.org for more information.
