Abortions in the budget

The Biden administration’s $6 trillion budget proposal released Friday removes language blocking taxpayer money from the abortion industry. Although lawmakers probably won’t enact President Joe Biden’s budget verbatim because of the 50-50 Republican-Democrat split in the Senate, the proposal signals the White House’s radical pro-abortion stance.

Planned Parenthood released a memo earlier last week in anticipation of the move, saying that removing the Hyde Amendment, which currently prevents abortion funding, from the budget proposal “would send a clear signal from the president of the United States that our federal laws should support everyone’s ability to access comprehensive health care services, including safe, legal abortion.” Pro-abortion groups complain that the Hyde Amendment blocks government-funded health care programs from providing coverage for abortions, affecting poor and minority women’s access to the procedure more than women in higher tax brackets.

But, in a letter sent on Thursday to congressional leaders, a coalition of pro-life groups argue that Former Congressman Henry Hyde, the original author of the amendment, saw the budget rider as an advancement of human rights. “For over two centuries of our national history,” Hyde said in 1993, “we have struggled to create a society of inclusion—we keep widening the circle of those for whom we are responsible—the aged, the infirm, the poor. … This great trajectory in our national history has been shattered by Roe v. Wade and its progeny.”

According to estimates from the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, the Hyde Amendment has saved more than 2.4 million lives since 1976.

Federal budgets since that time have consistently prohibited taxpayer dollars from funding abortion procedures. Biden supported the Hyde Amendment as recently as 2006, but flipped while on the campaign trail in 2019 due to pressure from the Democratic party to uphold abortion rights. The party has officially opposed the Hyde Amendment in its platform since 2016. Biden is the first president to exclude the protections from a budget proposal since President Bill Clinton in 1993.