Why Hillary Clinton’s Call-Out of the Hyde Amendment Is So Important

[BooScout]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/01/11/why_hillary_clinton_s_call_out_of_the_hyde_amendment_is_so_important.html

Why Hillary Clinton’s Call-Out of the Hyde Amendment Is So Important

As she accepted Planned Parenthood’s first-ever presidential primary endorsement at a New Hampshire rally on Sunday, Hillary Clinton recited a list of economic and social barriers that prevent women from obtaining abortions. She said:

Any right that requires you to take extraordinary measures to access it is no right at all. Not when patients and providers have to endure harassment and intimidation just to walk into a health center. … Not when providers are required by state law to recite misleading information to women to shame and scare them. And 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.

The Hyde Amendment, a rider that’s been tacked on to every annual appropriations bill since 1976, bans the use of federal Medicaid funds for abortion except to save the life of the pregnant woman or in cases of rape or incest. Though it’s not ratified law, it’s been treated by some as a foregone conclusion and thus avoided the kind of organized protests that have accompanied more recent restrictions of abortion rights. Clinton’s call-out of the amendment points to strides made by the reproductive justice movement, which has for years worked to expand a limited pro-choice, abortion-centered framework to include other human rights issues, especially those that disproportionately affect marginalized communities.

"We are thrilled that pro-choice champions are no longer accepting the Hyde Amendment as the status quo,” Kierra Johnson, executive director of Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, told Slate in an email. “The young people that we work with recognize that abortion may be legal, but the decades of political interfering have made it almost impossible for some to access. We should not be interfering with anyone’s personal decision because of how much they earn, how they are insured, their age, or where they live." URGE and other reproductive justice organizations have rallied behind the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (EACH Woman) Act of 2015, which would include abortion coverage in federal health insurance plans, including Medicaid, and remove barriers to public funding in other plans.

and <snip>

If Clinton makes the Hyde Amendment a 2016 campaign issue, it will be a long-overdue step toward addressing the intersection between economic insecurity and reproductive health. Studies show that poor women take up to three weeks longer than other women to secure an abortion, in part because she needs time to come up with the money. But the further along the fetus, the more expensive her abortion will be and the more likely she is to experience health complications. Hyde has influenced new health programs, too. Poor women have long been used as poker chips in political debates over abortion, and lawmakers have used their power to stymie women’s health care access as a way to prove their anti-choice chops. “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,” amendment namesake Henry Hyde said in a 1977 discussion on Medicaid funding. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the…Medicaid bill.”

(more) http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/01/11/why_hillary_clinton_s_call_out_of_the_hyde_amendment_is_so_important.html

[MADem]

1. And is not that HYDE the Henry "Hide The Salami" HYDE, who was a disgrace to his office and

constituents? Talk about a sleazeball taking the moral high ground!!!! So many moral failures...not all of them "youthful indiscretions" either!!!


Cheatin' basstid doesn't look terribly "youthful" to me! LOL!

History for the young 'uns:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/hyde091798.htm

http://www.salon.com/1999/06/07/hyde/

[jeff47]

2. If only Clinton had held some sort of government position where she could

have directly worked against Hyde amendment language in every spending bill for 8 years.

Oh well.

[ismnotwasm]

3. K&R