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Wicker, Manchin vow support for Hyde Amendment compromise

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Updated on July 23, 2021

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Senators Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) wrote a bipartisan letter to Senate Appropriations Committee leaders encouraging them to safeguard the Hyde Amendment and keep this “long-standing provision” in the Fiscal Year 2022 bill.

In a letter to each Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and ranking member Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the senators crossed the aisle to express their “help for the Hyde Modification.”

Wicker and Manchin wrote, “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.”

The Hyde Amendment is a long-standing Medicaid amendment that prevents government funds from being used for elective abortions unless there is rape, incest, or a threat to the mother’s life.

“Latest public polls present virtually 60% of Individuals oppose or strongly oppose utilizing taxpayer {dollars} to help abortion,” the senators wrote. “Each Democrat and Republican presidents have signed the Hyde Modification into regulation.”

Despite the fact that the Hyde Amendment has been included in annual appropriations bills on a bipartisan basis since 1976, a key subcommitte of the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee recently approved the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Act without any prohibitions on federal funding for abortions.

Shelby expressed his support for the Hyde Amendment in an email to Fox News on Wednesday, agreeing with the letter’s writers that it is a bipartisan “compromise.”

“I support the Hyde Amendment. Like the letter states, it is a compromise that both Democrat and Republican-led Congresses have supported,” Shelby said. “It was even upheld by the highest court in the land.”

“I agree that any effort to repeal the Hyde Amendment from our appropriations bills would undo 40 years of bipartisan precedent and impede our efforts to fund the government,” he said.

President Biden recently reversed his decades-long support for the bipartisan amendment, and House Democrats deleted it from the budget this year in an unprecedented move.

Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List), a national pro-life organization, thanked the Senators in a statement published 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.”

Over 100 conservative leaders and activists sent a letter to House Republicans on Tuesday, urging them to support the decades-old agreement.