Virginia Policy Review 55 A Case for Repealing the Hyde Amendment By Megan Elisabeth Rivera Abstract Since federal funds do not cover abortions and many low-income women cannot afford the procedure in the first trimester, low-income women on Medicaid face considerable barriers to obtaining an abortion in the United States (Medicaid Funding of Abortion, 2016). Thus, women who are the least financially prepared to raise a child and face unintended pregnancies are more likely to be forced to carry them to term (Federal Reserve Board Issues Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households, 2019; Jones et al., 2017). 45% of U.S. pregnancies are unintended, displacing the sizable financial burden of raising a child partially onto the American public, as women who carry pregnancies despite preferring an abortion are more likely to be unemployed, receive welfare, or live in poverty (Sawhill & Guyot, 2019; Foster, et al., 2018b; CDC, 2019). If Congress repeals the ban on federal funding for abortion services on the next appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services, American taxpayers stand to reap long-run benefits as future outcomes for low-income women on Medicaid improve. Background For poor- and low-income women in the United States who qualify, Medicaid offers a wide range of health care services they otherwise could not afford. 38 states and the District of Columbia have adopted Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, making women with incomes below 138% of the Federal Poverty Line eligible for Medicaid (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2019; Salganicoff et al., 2020). Women in the remaining 12 states must meet their state’s income criteria and be pregnant, a parent of dependent children, a senior, or have a disability (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2019). Women who live in states that have not expanded Medicaid face varying eligibility criteria depending on their state of residence, and the levels are often substantially lower. For example, in Texas, women must have incomes lower than 17% of the federal poverty level (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2019). In the 1973 case Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that women have a Constitutional right to an abortion.2 Four years later in 1977, Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois placed an amendment on the Congressional appropriations bill on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) annual budget that barred federal 2
The 1973 decision handed down in Doe v. Bolton declared that states may not “unduly burden the exercise of that fundamental right with regulations that prohibit or substantially limit access to the procedure” (Shimabukuro, 2019).
