WASHINGTON (BP and local reports) — The U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee on July 15 rejected an amendment that would have restored the 45-year-old, pro-life Hyde Amendment that has saved the lives of an estimated 2.5 million unborn children.
First enacted in 1976, the Hyde Amendment has barred federal taxpayer funds in Medicaid and other federal programs from paying for abortions. The amendment and similar bans in other federal programs must be approved each year as “riders” to spending bills.
The Democrat-controlled Appropriations Committee also refused to reinstate a ban on taxpayer funds for a U.S. Department of Justice program used to provide abortions for federal inmates.
Democrat U.S. President Joe Biden excluded the Hyde Amendment and other abortion funding bans from his $6 trillion budget proposal for fiscal year 2022.
Biden supported the Hyde Amendment during his 36 years representing Delaware in the U.S. Senate, but reversed his position in 2019 while running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Republican Steven Palazzo of Mississippi, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, voted to restore the Hyde Amendment and the other pro-life measures.
The Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) expressed dismay over the committee’s latest actions. “It is inexcusable that in the same week one chamber of Congress gets a step closer to rightfully confronting the Uyghur genocide in China, the other chamber also takes steps to utilize taxpayer funding for abortion,” said Chelsea Sobolik, a policy director for the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission in Nashville.
“This is not only inconsistent from a policy standpoint; it is morally incoherent,” she asserted.
The day before the House action, the U.S. Senate approved an import ban on goods made by forced labor in western China in an effort to combat the Chinese government’s genocidal treatment of Uyghur Muslims and other religious and ethnic minorities.
The ERLC has sought a permanent, government-wide prohibition on abortion funding that would include the protection of pro-life “riders” in spending legislation as a priority in its 2021 Public Policy Agenda.
Biden’s exclusion of the Hyde Amendment came a month after messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting in Nashville approved a resolution that denounced any attempt to rescind the amendment.
The SBC resolution, which gained nearly unanimous approval, condemned any attempt to overturn the Hyde Amendment as “morally abhorrent, a violation of Biblical ethics, contrary to the natural law, and a moral stain on our nation.”
The resolution called for the preservation of the Hyde Amendment and all other pro-life amendments “to protect life, and to prevent taxpayers from being complicit in the moral evil of abortion.”
Abortion rights advocates applauded the committee’s actions. Adrienne Kimmel, acting president of pro-abortion NARAL Pro-Choice America in Washington, D.C., described the committee’s actions as “a critical step towards ensuring that the discriminatory Hyde Amendment becomes a shameful relic of the past.”
