Hyde Amendment marks 50 years of protecting unborn children
For half a century, the Hyde Amendment has barred federal Medicaid funding for most abortions, a policy researchers estimate has saved approximately 2.7 million lives. Lawmakers are marking its anniversary and the convictions that drove its author to fight for it.
Fifty years after Congress first enacted the Hyde Amendment, lawmakers are marking one of the nation’s longest-standing federal pro-life policies, which researchers at the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute estimate has saved about 2.7 million unborn children.
Named for its author, Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., the amendment became law Sept. 30, 1976, three years after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. Hyde established the principle that taxpayers should not have to fund abortions.
The policy initially passed Congress with support from members of both parties and has endured for five decades through annual appropriations legislation. However, Congress has modified its scope and exceptions over the years. The current version protects taxpayer dollars from funding most abortions, with exceptions in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life.
‘‘We who seek to protect that most defenseless and innocent of human lives, the unborn — seek to inhibit the use of federal funds to pay for and thus encourage abortion as an answer to the human and compelling problem of an unwanted child,” Hyde said when introducing the amendment.
According to the Charlotte Lozier Institute’s estimate, the amendment continues to save about 60,000 unborn children each year.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who served alongside Hyde beginning in 1981, highlighted that record in a Sept. 16 House speech commemorating the amendment’s 50th anniversary. Smith, a Catholic, also introduced a resolution Sept. 24 commemorating 50 years of the Hyde Amendment.
Hyde served 32 years in Congress from 1975 until his retirement in 2007 and chaired both the Judiciary and International Relations committees. He died in 2007 at age 83.
Behind Hyde’s legislative achievement was a conviction that shaped the lawmaker’s work well beyond abortion, according to a former House Judiciary Committee staffer who worked closely with him in the mid-1990s and who spoke with Zeale News Sept. 29.
The former staffer said Hyde regarded life as a gift from God and the right to life as the foundation of every other right protected by the government.
His approach to legislation and to colleagues on both sides of the aisle was deeply rooted in his Catholic faith and the Church’s teaching that everyone deserves the dignity that God gave them, the former staffer said.
“His was not a piecemeal approach to legislating,” the former staffer said. “It was a universal understanding of who we are in God's eyes and why certain things should be and why other things should not be.”
Even in debates over criminal laws and sentencing, Hyde considered how a proposal would affect people, what good it might achieve, and whether it adequately protected due process, the staffer recalled.
Smith similarly recalled the late lawmaker’s commitment to moral principles. In his anniversary remarks, Smith recounted Hyde’s advice to incoming House members in the 1990s: “Contemplate the possibility of defeat — perhaps even the necessity of defeat” because if “you don’t know the principle, or the policy, for which you are willing to lose your office, then you are going to do damage here.”
Hyde argued that lawmakers could not separate their moral convictions from their public responsibilities.
“One of the great errors of modern politics is our foolish attempt to separate our private consciences from our public acts, and it cannot be done,” Hyde said during a 1996 House floor debate on overriding former President Bill Clinton’s veto of legislation banning partial-birth abortion.
“At the end of the 20th century, is the crowning achievement of our democracy to treat the weak, the powerless, the unwanted, as things? To be disposed of? If so, we have not elevated justice; we have disgraced it,” Hyde added.
Hyde’s strong convictions did not prevent him from working respectfully with his opponents, the former staffer said. As Judiciary Committee chairman, he debated well-known Democrats including Barney Frank, Patricia Schroeder, and Maxine Waters, and though their disagreements sometimes grew forceful, the staffer recalled Hyde insisting that arguments remain focused on policy.
“There was a level of discourse that Henry insisted upon that didn't get into name-calling or personal attacks,” the staffer told Zeale News. “It was always policy-driven and principled arguments for or against a particular issue.”
In his Sept. 16 remarks, Smith described Hyde as “brilliant, compassionate, tenacious, incredibly articulate, self-effacing” and a man of wisdom and humor.
“He was so good at debate, you always wanted him to be your closer,” Smith said.
The former staffer remembered Hyde as a lawmaker who read widely, drew on passages he had encountered years earlier, and cared about the people who worked for him. Hyde, he added, was a committed father who cared deeply about his family.
“I think everybody who worked for him really appreciated the fact that Mr. Hyde cared about them individually,” the staffer told Zeale News, adding that Hyde’s life was “worth emulating and his manner and legislative prowess are worth commending to others.”
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