At an event to accept the endorsement of Planned Parenthood in New Hampshire on Sunday, Hillary Clinton called for unlimited taxpayer-funding of elective abortions for Medicaid recipients.
“I believe we need to protect access to safe and legal abortion, not just in principle, but in practice. Any right that requires you to take extraordinary measures to access it is no right at all,” Clinton said. “Not as long as we have laws on the book like the Hyde amendment, making it harder for low income women to exercise their full rights,” she added at the end of a list of restrictions that supposedly deny women a right to abortion.
The Hyde amendment prevents federal funding of abortion through Medicaid, except in cases where the pregnancy endangers the life of the mother or is the result of rape or incest. The ACLU notes that after the Hyde amendment was first passed in 1976, “abortions financed by federal Medicaid funds dropped from about 300,000 per year to a few thousand.” Studies have shown that hundreds of thousands of people are alive today because of the Hyde amendment.
Opposition to direct federal funding of elective abortion is so strong that Democrats didn’t attempt to repeal the Hyde amendment when they held the White House and overwhelming majorities in the Congress from 2009 to 2011. A 2010 Quinnipiac poll found that American voters opposed public funding of abortion by a 40-point margin–67 percent to 27 percent.
Although a President Hillary Clinton would likely face tough opposition in Congress to repealing the Hyde amendment, it may only take one Supreme Court appointment to accomplish that goal. Restrictions on taxpayer funding of abortion were upheld by the Supreme Court by a 6-3 decision in 1980 and by a 5-4 decision in 1991.
In 2009, Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Bill Clinton appointee, said she was “surprised” the Court upheld the Hyde amendment because she believed “concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of” would lead the Court to declare a constitutional right to taxpayer-funded abortion. It would only take the replacement of just one Republican-appointed justice to give liberal activists a solid majority on the Supreme Court.
“Not only is she opposed to defunding Planned Parenthood, Hillary Clinton has now argued that taxpayers have an obligation to support abortion at any time, for any reason,” Marjorie Dannenfelser of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List said in a statement. “This is the most dramatic pro-abortion position espoused by a leading political figure to date, and it changes the abortion debate. ‘Safe, legal, and rare,’ is long gone.”
In an interview with Face the Nation host John Dickerson last fall, Clinton opposed any legal limits on late-term abortion. She later told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd that there “can be restrictions in the very end of the third trimester.”
