- Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
- The Hyde Amendment is a garbage piece of legislation that systematically targets low-income women.
Here’s Fusion:
When asked if she would support congressional efforts to repeal the Hyde Amendment, Hillary Clinton wasted no time pondering her answer: “Yes.”
“And actually I have for a very long time,” the Democratic frontrunner added at Monday night’s Iowa Brown and Black Forum.
The Hyde Amendment bans federal funding for abortion, except in cases of rape, incest and life endangerment. The law is a major impediment to safe-abortion access for low-income women because that’s precisely what it was designed to do. “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman,” former Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde, the law’s namesake, said in 1973. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the… Medicaid bill.”
The Hyde Amendment is a garbage piece of legislation that systematically prevents low-income women from exercising their right to abortion. It’s also the reason that the GOP’s crowing against public funding for abortion is so deeply silly: Ever since the passage of Hyde, federal funds have been banned from covering abortion procedures, with the rote rape/incest/life-endangerment exceptions—exceptions that are really quite worthless considering that at least half of American women will have an unintended pregnancy by age 45.
It’s pretty unprecedented for a presidential candidate to come out so strongly in favor of abortion rights, much less in favor of expanding access to abortion, even though it’s absolutely needed. Abortion has become a right in name only in many parts of the country where clinics are scarce, often due to absurd anti-choice targeted regulations of abortion providers AKA TRAP laws. Low-income women commonly rely on privately-run abortion funds for assistance with the costs of the procedure (in case you live under a rock, abortions aren’t cheap).
Last week, two of the nation’s biggest reproductive rights advocacy groups endorsed Clinton. Given Clinton’s comments yesterday, it’s easy to see why they did.