In the years since Hyde first passed the debate about abortion in America has transformed.
The abortion conversation in the 2020 race is already wildly different than it was in 1976, when both the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, respectively, said they opposed abortion.
Hyde might still be with us, but gone are the days of compromise that allowed politicians to remain somewhere in the middle on abortion, signaling to voters that they respected their feelings of moral complexity.
The Supreme Court established a constitutional right to abortion in 1973 with its decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, stating that abortion is protected up to the point of fetal viability outside the womb and occasionally afterwards, if the mother's health is endangered.
In the years immediately following these decisions, the federal government paid for abortions through Medicaid, covering an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 procedures per year.
Just a few years later, Hyde's proposed ban on federal funding for abortion brought congressional business to a months-long standstill.
Bella Abzug, a prominent feminist and Democratic representative from New York who opposed the ban on abortion funding, argued that "a majority of Americans believe the abortion decision should be left up to the woman and her doctor, free from government interference. This must apply equally to poor women as well as rich women." This was a common view among women's-rights activists and progressive Democrats at the time, who opposed the amendment.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/democrats-hyde-amendment-history/591646/
The abortion conversation in the 2020 race is already wildly different than it was in 1976, when both the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, respectively, said they opposed abortion.
Hyde might still be with us, but gone are the days of compromise that allowed politicians to remain somewhere in the middle on abortion, signaling to voters that they respected their feelings of moral complexity.
The Supreme Court established a constitutional right to abortion in 1973 with its decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, stating that abortion is protected up to the point of fetal viability outside the womb and occasionally afterwards, if the mother's health is endangered.
In the years immediately following these decisions, the federal government paid for abortions through Medicaid, covering an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 procedures per year.
Just a few years later, Hyde's proposed ban on federal funding for abortion brought congressional business to a months-long standstill.
Bella Abzug, a prominent feminist and Democratic representative from New York who opposed the ban on abortion funding, argued that "a majority of Americans believe the abortion decision should be left up to the woman and her doctor, free from government interference. This must apply equally to poor women as well as rich women." This was a common view among women's-rights activists and progressive Democrats at the time, who opposed the amendment.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/democrats-hyde-amendment-history/591646/
No comments:
Post a Comment