The Ultimate Civil Right

The Hyde amendment is a rider that is attached to appropriations bills that fund the Department of Health and Human Services. It bans Federal funding for abortion services provided by Medicaid and other Health and Human Services programs, with limited exceptions, and that was hard fought, for mothers' lives or in the case of rape or incest. Medicaid is the primary public health insurance program for low-income Americans. Poor women experience five times the rate of unintended pregnancies than more affluent women, with abortion becoming more and more concentrated among low-income women as a result. Women of color are disproportionately likely to be poor and rely on Medicaid for health insurance and health services; this racial disparity is particularly true among women of reproductive age. Therefore, the Hyde amendment, in effect bans the funding for abortion services through Medicaid, denying low-income and minority women the ability to access a safe and legal reproductive health service. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall put it most succinctly when he wrote in 1980 that the Hyde amendment is designed to deprive poor and minority women of the constitutional right to choose, because that, in effect, is what it does. The opponents of the right to choose cannot get what they really want, which is to repeal Roe outright, so instead they have chosen to deny the right, as a practical matter, to poor women and women of color.