A U.S. budget ban on federal funding of most abortions is nearly as old as the 1973 Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade, but President Joe Biden has made it disappear from his $6 trillion budget.
There is no mention of the Hyde Amendment in the 2022 budget released Friday, which is a first for a federal budget since 1976.
The amendment restricts abortion coverage for recipients of Medicare, Medicaid, federal employees, servicewomen, and Washington, D.C., residents.
Biden, a life-long Catholic, supported the Hyde Amendment for most of his political career, but changed his position in 2019 while campaigning for president, saying the right to abortion was under assault in many states and increasingly inaccessible to poorer women.
Planned Parenthood, which is partially funded by the federal government through those programs, donates almost exclusively to Democratic political campaigns, according to OpenSecrets.org.
It praised Biden's omission.
"Exciting to see the admin's historic step!" the organization tweeted Friday.
"For too long, the Hyde amendment has put the gov't in control of personal health care decisions for people with low incomes. Your ZIP code, income, or health insurance should never determine the care you can access, incl. abortion."
Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said the move "breaks with decades of settled precedent by calling for direct taxpayer-funded abortion."
Pro life group Susan B. Anthony List rebuked the reciprocal campaign backwashing by the "radical abortion lobby."
"For more than four decades, the Hyde family of pro-life policies has kept American taxpayers out of the abortion business, with the Hyde Amendment itself saving nearly 2.5 million lives," group President Marjorie Dannenfelser wrote in a statement. "The Biden budget throws that longstanding, bipartisan consensus out the window to fulfill a campaign promise to the radical abortion lobby.
"The majority of Americans remain opposed to taxpayer-funded abortion. We urge our congressional allies to be fearless in fighting to preserve the common-ground Hyde principle and to reject any budget that omits vital pro-life protections."
Though abortion is legal in the United States, regulations can vary dramatically from one state to the next. California, New York and several other states use public money to cover abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, while many others states prohibit that practice.
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could gut Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.
Congress can still add the Hyde Amendment during the legislative process to pass the 2022 Biden budget.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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