Biden’s triple flip-flop reveals abortion extremism of Democrats

A long time supporter of the Hyde Amendment, which restricts Medicaid from paying for abortions, Biden, in a rope line exchange with an ACLU activist last month, said “it can’t stay.” This was captured on video. That would count as a single flip-flop.

On Wednesday, NBC reported that the Biden campaign confirmed that he still supports Hyde, and the campaign put out a hard to believe statement that he misheard the ACLU activist’s question. That would be a double flip-flop. Accepting that he misunderstood the question, by the way, would only be believable if he’s totally forgotten the details of an important federal policy that he supported for decades as a senator — which in turn, raises serious questions about his accelerated age.

But digging in to his support for Hyde triggered a massive backlash on Twitter, with his 2020 rivals seizing on the controversy to affirm their support for overturning Hyde. By Thursday night, Biden had switched again, arguing that, he “can’t justify leaving millions of women without access to care they need and the ability to constitute, exercise their constitutionally protected right.”

National Review’s John McCormack sums it up succinctly:

From a political perspective, Biden’s sloppy triple reversal says a lot about the unpreparedness of his presidential campaign and raises questions about whether he can carry his current polling leads through the finish line nearly a year and a half from now.

But beyond that, it also speaks volumes about the pro-abortion extremism of the Democratic Party.

The Hyde Amendment has been in place since 1976.Though exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother were added during Bill Clinton’s presidency, it survived multiple Democratic Congresses and three Democratic presidencies. When Obamacare was passed, initially with 60 votes in the Senate, public funding for abortion was indeed an issue. But the fight among Democrats was about whether Hyde language should be extended to the new government subsidies for the purchase of private insurance. Ultimately, they compromised with softer language creating a convoluted mechanism was still touted as preventing federal funds from going to abortion. Either way, despite voting in favor of a massive expansion of Medicaid, there was no serious effort to repeal Hyde.

A 2016 Politico poll found that 58% of Americans opposed letting Medicaid cover abortions, compared with just 36% who said they supported it.

One study by the Charlotte Lozier Institute estimated that the existence of Hyde prevented two million abortions since 1976. Not only would repealing the Hyde amendment substantially increase the number of abortions, but it would be an assault on those who don’t want their tax dollars to fund something they believe is terminating a life. This was the last vestige of an olive branch to the pro-life community among Democrats, whose position for decades was effectively that abortion is a difficult personal decision that should be up to the woman, but at the same time, taxpayers who have objections won’t be forced to finance it.

As Biden himself put it in 1986: “If it’s not government’s business, then you have to accept the whole of that concept, which means you don’t proscribe your right to have an abortion and you don’t take your money to assist someone else to have an abortion.”