[“As our country undergoes a racial reckoning, I want to be very
clear: the Hyde Amendment is a racist policy.” Black and Native
American women are two to three times more likely to die from
pregnancy-related causes.] [[link removed]]

WITH ABORTION RIGHTS UNDER ATTACK, ACTIVISTS URGE BIDEN TO STRIKE
HYDE AMENDMENT  
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Amy Littlefield
December 9, 2020
Truthout
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_ “As our country undergoes a racial reckoning, I want to be very
clear: the Hyde Amendment is a racist policy.” Black and Native
American women are two to three times more likely to die from
pregnancy-related causes. _

President-elect Joe Biden announces the members of his health team,
including his pick for secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier
Becerra, at the Queen Theater December 8, 2020, in Wilmington,
Delaware., Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

 

Last June, the campaign of then-candidate Joe Biden reaffirmed
Biden’s longstanding support for the Hyde Amendment, the 44-year-old
ban that withholds coverage of abortion from millions
[[link removed]]
of low-income people.

The next day, after a chorus
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of condemnation from fellow Democratic candidates and reproductive
rights groups, Biden changed his mind.

“If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer
support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s
zip code,” he said
[[link removed]].

Now, advocates say, Biden must fulfill that promise by sending
Congress a budget that strikes down Hyde and related bans
[[link removed]] that
force Native Americans, federal employees and Medicaid recipients in
most states to raise hundreds or thousands of dollars for abortion or
remain pregnant if they can’t. More than 150 reproductive health,
rights and justice organizations sent a letter to Biden Tuesday
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calling on him to introduce a budget that repeals Hyde.

“He committed to ending Hyde during his campaign — and this is the
clear first step to keeping that commitment and sending a message that
this administration will not accept discriminatory restrictions on
abortion coverage,” said Georgeanne Usova, senior legislative
counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.

President Obama left the Hyde Amendment intact in the budgets he sent
to Congress, although he did repeal the ban on the use of local funds
in Washington, D.C., for abortion. The last president to send Congress
a budget that attempted to remove federal restrictions on abortion
funding was Bill Clinton.

During Clinton’s first term, in 1993, spokesperson George
Stephanopoulos said
[[link removed]],
“The President called for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment during
the campaign, and that will be his position.”

Over the past four years, the tide has shifted on the topic of public
funding of abortion, thanks in large part to organizing by the
reproductive justice group All* Above All. “Fundamentally, there is
now a groundswell of public support, a groundswell of support in
Congress,” Destiny Lopez, co-director of All* Above All Action Fund,
told _Truthout _in an interview.

If Biden removes the Hyde Amendment from his budget, it would “begin
the process of lifting this coverage ban that is impacting the folks
who are in the crosshairs of the social and political moment that
we’re living in,” Lopez added. “People of color struggling
financially are at the center of the uprising; they’re at the center
of the pandemic; they’re dying and they’re going to bear the brunt
of the economic downturn that COVID has created.”

The president’s draft of the budget is only a first step — any
attempt to repeal Hyde would require cooperation by Congress.

The president’s draft of the budget is only a first step — any
attempt to repeal Hyde would require cooperation by Congress. The
movement to repeal Hyde through passage of the EACH Woman Act
[[link removed]] faces an uphill
battle there, with the balance of power in the Senate resting on two
runoff races in Georgia next month. But there are a number of steps
Biden can take on his own, Lopez said, including pledging not to sign
legislation that includes abortion coverage restrictions, highlighting
abortion access in his first State of the Union address and reversing
the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict private insurance
coverage of abortion.

“I can’t underestimate the power of the bully pulpit,” Lopez
said, citing the 2016 Democratic presidential campaign as an example.
“When I think about the game-changing moment for us, it was actually
back during the last cycle, when both [Hillary] Clinton and [Bernie]
Sanders went on the record saying that they support a repeal of
Hyde.”

In the latest sign of growing momentum against the bans on public
funding of abortion, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) convened a
subcommittee hearing Tuesday that All* Above All described as the
“first proactive hearing” on the subject in the House
Appropriations Committee, which determines how to spend the federal
budget. The hearing was one of DeLauro’s first steps after her House
colleagues elected her to the powerful post of chair of that committee
last week.

“The inequities in our country’s health care system that have been
exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic all further expose the impact of the
Hyde Amendment,” DeLauro said as she kicked off the hearing. “All
of these issues deny the humanity of people of color and their ability
to do well for their families and their communities.”

Speakers at the hearing underscored how Black, Latinx and Native
American people — who have borne the brunt
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of infections, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 as well as
the economic recession — are also disproportionately impacted by
funding restrictions on abortion.

“As our country undergoes a racial reckoning, I want to be very
clear: the Hyde Amendment is a racist policy,” Herminia Palacio,
president and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute, said in her testimony.
Palacio noted Black and Native American women are two to three times
more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes.

“I ask you to reflect on these overlapping and perverse
indignities,” Palacio said. “The Hyde Amendment disproportionately
withholds abortion coverage from Black and Brown communities, a
potential consequence of which is being forced to continue pregnancy
in a system in which Black and Indigenous people are astonishingly
more likely to die.”

“As our country undergoes a racial reckoning, I want to be very
clear: the Hyde Amendment is a racist policy.”

Palacio cited a Guttmacher literature review
[[link removed]]
that found about one in four women who would have Medicaid-funded
abortions instead give birth when this funding is not available. Women
who want an abortion but are denied access to one have four times
greater odds of living below the federal poverty level and are more
likely to experience serious pregnancy complications and to stay with
abusive partners, according to the Turnaway Study
[[link removed]].

Even before the pandemic and the soaring unemployment it has ushered
in, about 40 percent of Americans said
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they would struggle to raise $400 for an emergency expense, which is
less than what an abortion often costs. The pandemic has forced people
to wait longer or travel further for care, especially in states like
Texas that tried to use COVID as a pretext to ban abortion. That has
put pressure on groups like the Lilith Fund in Texas that work to help
people afford abortions.

“The average distance traveled by our clients in 2019 before the
pandemic was 158 miles, about the distance from D.C. to
Philadelphia,” Amanda Beatriz Williams, executive director of the
Lilith Fund, testified Tuesday. “But during the pandemic, when our
callers were forced to travel out of state for their care, it
increased to 635 miles, which is more than the distance from D.C. to
Louisville, Kentucky.”

As abortion access faces an uncertain future due to the appointment of
three Trump nominees to the Supreme Court, the issue of repealing Hyde
has moved from a third rail in abortion politics to a more central
issue. As Biden and Kamala Harris prepare to enter office,
reproductive justice groups are preparing to exert the pressure that
may be necessary to force Biden to take action.

“The historical tide has turned on this issue, and that means if he
does not move on this, he will be on the wrong side of history,”
Lopez said. “And I think we’re at a moment where we will have to
hold the administration accountable.”

_Amy Littlefield is a freelance investigative reporter focused on the
intersection of religion and health care._

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