The two Senators draw praise from pro-life Susan B. Anthony List.
This week, U.S. Senators Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) sent a joint letter to Senate leadership and the Senate Appropriations Committee requesting the continued inclusion of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for elective abortions, in legislation that will soon be considered by the committee.
“The Hyde Amendment is a decades-long, consensus-building compromise, and we urge you to maintain this longstanding provision in the Fiscal Year 2022 bill,” Wicker and Manchin wrote.
Though the Hyde Amendment has been included in annual appropriations bills on a bipartisan basis since 1976, a key subcommittee on the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee recently cleared the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Act without prohibitions on federal funding for abortions.
The letter cites public polling that supports their position.
“Recent public polls show almost 60% of Americans oppose or strongly oppose using taxpayer dollars to support abortion. Both Democrat and Republican presidents have signed the Hyde Amendment into law. It has passed through both Democrat and Republican-controlled Congresses, and it was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1980. Repealing this provision would eliminate over 40 years of bipartisan precedent,” the two Senators write.
“Repealing this provision would eliminate over 40 years of bipartisan precedent,” the Senators concluded.
In response, the national pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) praised the Senators in a statement released on Wednesday.
“We thank Senators Manchin and Wicker for reaffirming strong bipartisan support for the Hyde Amendment after pro-abortion House Democrats stripped Hyde and other key pro-life policies from their spending bills. Their pro-life constituents and countless Americans will thank them, too,” said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser. “For more than 40 years, the Hyde family of pro-life policies has kept taxpayers out of the abortion business – with the original Hyde Amendment alone saving nearly 2.5 million lives during that time. Forcing taxpayers to be complicit in the destruction of innocent life by funding abortion on demand through birth is abhorrent. House Democrats’ bill is too extreme to pass the Senate and they push a radical agenda at their own political peril.”
SBA’s release went on to note that last week pro-abortion Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee blocked a pro-life Republican effort to restore the Hyde Amendment and other pro-life protections eliminated from spending bills. President Biden’s previously released budget also gutted the decades-old, bipartisan Hyde Amendment and would force taxpayers to fund abortion on demand through birth.
Other recent polling cited by SBA shows 77% of Americans oppose using taxpayer dollars to promote abortion overseas, and 58% oppose using taxpayer money to fund abortions in the United States.
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