Why Democrats ditched the Hyde Amendment

Public opinion on abortion has been steady since the early years after Roe. In 1976, the year Hyde was passed into law, 54 percent of Americans believed abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances, according to Gallup. Four decades later, in 2018, 50 percent of Americans said the same. What has changed, however, are the politics of abortion, which have become sharply polarized after years of intense activism on both sides of the debate. In 1978, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania, Richard Schweiker, wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times protesting efforts to link the anti-abortion movement to right-wing Catholics, calling it “a smear against millions of Americans deeply opposed to ‘abortion on demand.’” He praised his Democratic colleagues who supported the ban on federal funding for abortion, including Biden, who was about to win his second term as a U.S. senator from Delaware.

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Democrats are not ready to fully take on the Hyde Amendment, at least not in Congress; Pressley’s recent revolt was mostly symbolic. But today’s Democratic Party is more Abzug than Carter: Its leaders have united around describing abortion using the language of discrimination in health care, rather than compromise on a morally challenging issue. The Democratic dream of 2020 is not just to take back the White House, which would allow party leaders to appoint a generation of judges and justices who will support abortion rights. Democrats want to maintain the House and reclaim the Senate as well. If that happens, the reluctant truce that’s held since 1976 may end. If Democrats have their way, taxpayers will fund abortion once again.

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