The Next Big Fight for the Pro-Choice Movement: Taxpayer-Funded Abortions
Nearly 40 years ago, when she was a young congressional staffer, Representative Barbara Lee watched as lawmakers cut millions of poor women off from abortion coverage. They did so via a provision barring Medicaid from covering the procedure. Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican who sponsored the amendment, made little effort to conceal that his was an effort to undercut Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion just three years earlier; nor did he deny his amendment would disparately impact women in poverty. “If rich women want to enjoy their high-priced vices, that is their responsibility…that is fine, but not at the taxpayers’ expense,” he quipped during one debate. Later he admitted, “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. Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the…Medicaid bill.”
The amendment’s passage shocked Lee. “It was really earth-shattering for me as a young African-American woman, you know—why this guy would even want to interfere with women’s rights and women’s health-care decisions,” she remembers. After Lee was elected to Congress she served on the House Foreign Affairs committee, with Hyde as chairman. She thought often about how she might convince him that his amendment was hurting women. Eventually, Lee says, “I decided there was no way to convince him of that, so I’m going to just have to work to help try at some point to repeal it, when the political climate was right.”
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