September 30th marked the 50th anniversary of perhaps the most life-saving budget-rider ever written.
Nearly 2.7 million of your fellow-Americans owe their existence to the Hyde Amendment.
In 1976, Henry Hyde was a freshman representative from the western suburbs of Chicago. It was three years after the United States Supreme Court had handed down Roe v. Wade, an unconstitutional monstrosity that would take almost 50 years to correct. And Hyde noted that, in the three years since Roe, the federal government had financed the murder of a million children.
So, working with a bi-partisan coalition, he crafted an amendment to the annual funding bill for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The rider prohibited any of the budgeted federal money from paying for abortions, or for insurance that covers abortions.
President Ford vetoed the bill. But the House overrode his veto on a vote of 312-93. Three quarters of Republicans voted in favor and nearly half of the Democrats. An amendment like this has been re-enacted in every HHS funding bill for 50 years since. And that is why the Charlotte Lozier Institute calculates that the Hyde Amendment has saved a total of 2,678,274 lives.
In a town the size of Evanston, that’s a hundred voters, a hundred shoppers, a hundred parents, a hundred workers and a hundred of your neighbors.
Most of those lives have been saved by preventing federal Medicaid money from paying for abortions. That’s why pro-abortion politicians enthusiastically support the Obamacare provision called “Medicaid Expansion.”
This money-laundering operation ostensibly lets states fund new categories of Medicaid under their own rules. But 90% of the money still comes from the federal government. In this way, 16 states have circumvented the Hyde Amendment by using taxpayer dollars to kill unborn children.
While the Hyde Amendment used to garner support from both Republican and Democratic presidents and legislators—including Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden—the Democratic Party began, in 2016, to oppose it.
Since then, Democratic-controlled Houses have twice stripped the amendment from its HHS funding bill. But in both cases, Republican-controlled Senates restored the prohibition.
To put the success of the Hyde Amendment into perspective, in all of America’s wars from her beginning in 1776 through Roe v. Wade in 1973, America lost slightly over one million soldiers on the battlefield. Yet in 50 short years, a single budgetary amendment has saved nearly three times as many American lives.
That is the legacy of a single principled congressman from the Land of Lincoln. As we celebrate the golden anniversary of Hyde, let us learn from his foresight and courage.
Henry Hyde saw how the power of the purse is not only the power to support life, but also the power to kill. He understood that the political temptation to count every dollar spent as a blessing to humanity is a lie. Government money, unjustly spent, can just as easily destroy human lives as help them.
It doesn’t matter that the language of the government program is sprinkled with glitter and rainbows. Money spent to kill directly harms people that we are constitutionally required to protect. Not only that, it compromises the conscience of every citizen who contributes to the public fund.
Just as people tend to hold all Germans responsible for the mass murder of the Nazi regime, every American bears some responsibility for the consequences of federal spending. That, alone, is reason enough for God-fearing citizens to pay attention.
This is where courage enters in. Henry Hyde was neither afraid nor ashamed to give voice to his conscience. He unabashedly confessed, “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 cultural elites of his day had not yet fabricated the term “Christian Nationalist,” or they would surely have tarred him with it. But Hyde remained undaunted. He called out their “dangerous arguments” saying, “cultural elites in our country are so paralyzed by fear that theistic notions might reassert themselves in the official activities of the government that they will go to Gestapo lengths to inhibit such expression.”
Don’t let them. “This is a debate about our understanding of human dignity, what it means to be a member of the human family, even though tiny, powerless and unwanted,” said Hyde. “The law exists to protect the weak from the strong.”
In this Hyde talked the language of the Wyoming Constitution which protects the right to life for “every member of the human race.”
“A person’s a person, no matter how small.” Let’s build on the courage and foresight of Henry Hyde to protect millions of persons who will be conceived in the next 50 years.
Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com
