Before Nov. 8 dashed hopes for passing progressive legislation at the federal level over the next few years, African-American activists in the reproductive rights movement had made clear that the 40-year-old Hyde Amendment should be targeted for extinction.
The amendment, a congressional resolution that must be renewed annually, forbids the spending of government revenue for abortion except in cases where a pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, or when it endangers a woman’s life. This bars government abortion funding for federal employees, residents of the District of Columbia, women in federal prisons, patients at the Indian Health Service, and for women in the military. But the broadest impact is the harm it causes women on Medicaid.
And now the new Congress is determined to make abortions even more expensive. The first bill out of the gate is the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act. If approved, it would make the Hyde Amendment permanent. In addition to the items already in Hyde, the bill includes incentives for private health insurers to drop abortion coverage, bans abortion coverage in multi-state health insurance plans (except in cases of rape, incest, or life endangerment), and cuts women off from small businesses tax credits if they choose private health plans that cover abortion.
Laura Bassett writes:
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), the author of the legislation, told colleagues at a committee hearing on Monday night that fetuses “need friends” in Congress. [...]
House Democrats slammed Republicans for focusing on abortion out of the gate, just three days after the Women’s March on WashingtonWomen’s March on Washington, in which more than 3 million people protested to protect gender equality and reproductive rights.
“Roe v. Wade was not the beginning of women having abortions― it was the end of women dying from abortions,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.). “Women across the country are terrified that politicians are going to restrict their access to safe abortion, and clearly this fear is well-founded.”
Hyde is a class-based attack on low-income women and their families by forced-birthers, who know full well that more affluent women will always be able to get abortions that may not be accessible to their less well-off sisters. For those poor women, it’s a scramble to save up the money needed for an abortion.
That often means they have to wait, sometimes for many months, before being able to obtain the procedure. Though abortions are among the safest outpatient surgeries one can undergo, the later the procedure is done, the riskier it is. So much for the sinister claims of forced-birthers that the anti-abortion rules they are imposing in state after state are being enacted to protect women’s health.
No Congresswoman, and no Congressman’s wife, daughter, or girlfriend will be stopped from get an abortion because of this bill. But plenty of other women will.