What's the Hyde Amendment?
Since the monumental 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, abortion legality has been confused with abortion access. Many Americans to this day cannot access the procedure for reasons like rampant social stigmatization, lack of local clinics, religious pressure, transphobia & misgendering, the threat of domestic abuse, citizenship status, lack of funds, and more. When reproductive health advocates center the question of access, rulings like Roe v. Wade don’t carry the same significance, particularly for marginalized communities. Instead, lesser-known national and state legislation play a larger role in determining quotidian abortion freedom.
For middle-class, white women, Roe v. Wade significantly reduced barriers to abortion access. This was not the case for others, including poor and working-class women of color in particular. Disparities in access on the bases of race, sexuality, gender, and class were codified into law just three years after the Roe ruling in the passing of the Hyde Amendment (1976), which forbade the use of Medicaid funds to cover the cost of an abortion procedure except in extreme cases. Since its passing, the Hyde Amendment has not only stayed safely in place but has also grown with the addition of more restrictions. The legislation is named after its author, U.S. Representative Henry Hyde (R-Illinois), who said, “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.”
(Image: ALRANZ)
Hyde’s intent was clear: sacrifice the abortion access of marginalized Americans in order to chip away at the Roe ruling. Over 40 years later, his original mission still functions to prevent access to the life-saving procedure. Yet, Hyde’s mission has prevailed over time in large part due to wealthy, white (cis) women’s willingness to ignore abortion rights outside of their own privileged life experience. The archaic, 40-year-old Amendment should have been overturned by now, but privileged, pro-abortion constituents remain consumed by the narrative of “protecting abortion rights.” In other words, privileged, pro-abortion Americans (namely those who can get pregnant) are narrowly focused on political action that only applies to their own access at the cost of organizing around the access needs of the most marginalized among us. Activism around “protecting legal abortion” unwittingly overlooks what intersectional analysis tells us about abortion access. This is true now when the conversation around abortion and Roe v. Wade is predominantly discussed in terms of what we might lose, not what has already been lost or missing as evidenced by legislation like the Hyde Amendment and the shuttering of clinics across the country. Henry Hyde teaches us the hard way that, historically, the barometer for abortion access has been set to what the most privileged can access; this was true before Roe, and it is true in 2020.
(Image: Time Magazine)
Our fight to guarantee safe and accessible abortion for all must follow the lead of women of color and poor women who have been working to dismantle the Hyde Amendment for decades. We owe it to the people, like Rosie Jimenez, who have lost their lives due to unsafe abortions. Rosie Jimenez, a 27-year-old Mexican-American woman, sought an abortion shortly after the Hyde Amendment went into effect in 1977. Without the funds to go to an OB-GYN (and now without Medicaid support), Jimenez was forced to pay half the normal cost and get the procedure done by a health professional who was only trained in childbirth, not abortion. The day after her procedure, on the night of September 26th, 1977, Jimenez was rushed to the hospital after developing a fever, vomiting, and even beginning to hemorrhage. Life-saving measures including a hysterectomy were taken, but an infection -- believed to be caused by unsanitary abortion tools -- had already spread to her other organs. Rosie Jimenez died 7 days later on October 3rd from organ failure. Rosie deserved to have an abortion free of fear, financial duress, or stigmatization. Her story painfully reveals that the stakes of dismantling the Hyde Amendment are life and death.
Rosie Jimenez. (Image: Texas Observer)