House Democrats Are Once Again Pushing Taxpayer-Funded Abortion
By ALEXANDRA DESANCTIS December 14, 2020
Last week, the House Committee on Appropriations hosted a hearing to push forward a Democratic bill that would eliminate the Hyde amendment, which forbids the federal government from directly reimbursing for elective abortion procedures through Medicaid. In other words, Democratic politicians are making a renewed effort to require taxpayers to directly underwrite abortion procedures.
The Hyde amendment is a rider that Congress has added on a bipartisan basis to every relevant spending bill since 1976, an effort in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade to prevent Americans who oppose abortion from having their tax dollars used to fund it. Hyde once had such strong bipartisan support that, the first time it was added to a federal budget, 247 Democrats in the House and 48 Democrats in the Senate voted for it.
Even with Hyde in place today to ensure no direct reimbursements of abortion procedures, plenty of taxpayer money flows to abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood, which receives about $450 million annually from the federal government. But that isn’t good enough for Democratic politicians, who for the last several years have set their sights on eliminating Hyde entirely.
