Biden sets up government shutdown to get taxpayer funding for abortion
by W. James Antle III, Politics Editor |
| June 02, 2021 06:00 AM
If $6 trillion in spending and a projected $1.8 trillion deficit did not make President Joe Biden’s first federal budget proposal a heavy lift, the blueprint also paves the way for taxpayer funding of abortion.
The Biden budget removes the Hyde Amendment, a provision attached to annual appropriations bills that has historically prevented federal funding of abortion in most cases for over 40 years under presidents of both parties. Named after Rep. Henry Hyde, an anti-abortion Illinois Republican, it initially passed in 1976 with over 100 Democratic votes in the House.
Biden, whose own position on abortion evolved as he began to harbor presidential ambitions in the 1980s, supported the Hyde Amendment until 2019. Many of his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination favored getting rid of the policy, including now Vice President Kamala Harris, as did liberals in Congress.
“If I believe healthcare is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s zip code,” Biden said at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Georgia, where a Republican legislative majority passed laws curbing access to abortion in the run-up to the presidential race.
“There’s no rationale that can be offered that if you’re covered by the federal system, you cannot then use the federal funding to seek reproductive healthcare,” Biden said at a Planned Parenthood forum in South Carolina that same year.
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