Joe Biden’s Views on Abortion Are Unacceptable for a 2020 Democrat
On Wednesday, representatives of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign confirmed to NBC News that the candidate maintains his support for the Hyde Amendment, a 43-year-old ban on the use of federal funds to pay for abortion services. This revelation places the current front-runner for the 2020 Democratic nomination well outside the party mainstream and comes at a moment when the anti-choice movement, fresh off last fall's successful confirmation of Republican Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, is on the verge of gutting abortion rights in this country for good.
Congress first enacted the Hyde Amendment in 1977, just four years after the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Roe v. Wade recognized a constitutional right to access abortion services. It takes the name of its sponsor, Illinois congressman Henry Hyde, who explained on the House floor that since Roe prevented him from introducing legislation to ban abortion altogether, limiting its availability to low-income women was his next-best option. Under the earliest iteration of the law, only if abortion were necessary to save the mother’s life could a Medicaid recipient rely on her coverage to pay for the procedure. Congress has passed some version of the Hyde Amendment in every legislative session since then, and did not include parallel exceptions for rape or incest until 1993. For 16 years, if an otherwise healthy woman covered by Medicaid sought to end a pregnancy caused by sexual assault, federal law required her to cover the bill herself.
“There’s no political or ideological excuse for Joe Biden’s support for the Hyde Amendment, which translates into discrimination against poor women and women of color,” said NARAL president Ilyse Hogue in a statement. “His position further endangers women and families already facing enormous hurdles and creates two classes of rights for people in this country.” Some 25 million women depend on Medicaid for insurance coverage, and access to abortion services is a fundamental aspect of health care irrespective of one's socioeconomic status. The Hyde Amendment erects an artificial barrier around a specific genre of care and then cordons it off from the less wealthy and, because Medicaid recipients are disproportionately likely to belong to minority groups, from the less white.
The rationale behind the Hyde Amendment is that taxpayers should not have to fund things to which they are privately opposed. (Biden outlined this precise argument in a letter to a constituent in 1994.) This position privileges the moral objections of certain Americans over the basic human rights of others, and ignores the simple fact that in any system of government, elected officials will spend some money on some things that some constituents do not think are in the public interest. The ability of conservatives to carve out women’s health care for special treatment, turning the provision of basic medical care into a heated political debate, is a testament to how easily latent misogyny still permeates the policymaking process.
Biden’s Catholic faith has long shaped his private beliefs about this issue. On Meet the Press in 2007, he acknowledged that he disagreed with the holding of Roe when he was elected to the Senate at age 29 in 1972, and called abortion the "biggest dilemma for me in terms of comporting my religious and cultural views with my political responsibility." In his 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep, he reiterated that he is "personally opposed to abortion" but added, "I don’t think I have a right to impose my view on the rest of society."
His support for the Hyde Amendment, however, suggests differently, and puts him at odds with every other serious candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination. As NBC News notes, the four women senators in the race—Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Kirsten Gillibrand—are co-sponsors of legislation that would overturn the Hyde Amendment. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal would get rid of the amendment by bringing reproductive health care within Medicare’s ambit. Cory Booker has publicly called for its abolition and has emphasized on the campaign trail the importance of preserving reproductive rights for low-income women and women of color. For the first time in 2016, repealing the Hyde Amendment was an explicit component of the Democratic Party’s platform, and it should be a non-negotiable element of future platforms, too. And yet here is Joe Biden, the party’s de facto elder statesman, publicly embracing a regressive vision of health care that is substantively indistinguishable from that espoused by right-wing activists who seek to ban abortion altogether.
Biden's position is dangerous because it betrays an unsettling, casual apathy toward the interests of progressives, women, and voters of color—the same constituencies that stayed home in key states in 2016, and that the Democratic nominee, Biden or otherwise, will need to turn out in force to win in 2020. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court's new conservative majority may turn Roe and its ilk into dead-letter law within a few years, allowing draconian anti-abortion bills like those championed by state legislatures in Alabama, Missouri, and Georgia to pass constitutional muster. In the face of an uncompromising anti-choice movement, Democrats cannot afford to select a presidential nominee who is willing to compromise in their pursuit of reproductive justice. If the race were to end today, that is exactly what the party would get.
Originally Appeared on GQ
