Obamacare’s ‘Back Door’ Cheats the Hyde Amendment’s Ban on Federal Abortion Funding
By Mark Anderson
STOP THE PRESSES
The Hyde Amendment, the legislative accomplishment of the late Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois (1924-2007), bans federal tax dollars from being directly used to fund abortions. However, it has some weak spots that the pro-abortion movement tends to “hide” behind, you might say. Thus, the abortion industry still manages to pilfer some tax dollars to carry out the grisly abortion trade, which is generally regarded as the leading cause of death on a world-wide scale—far deadlier in sheer numbers than any war that has ever been fought, or famine or ravaging disease that has ever been experienced.
OBAMACARE THE CULPRIT
The way that such tax-dollar pilfering has been done, despite the Hyde Amendment, is a backdoor approach, via the structure and rules of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, signed into law in 2010.
While under the ACA, federal and private funds can become fungible and mix together, blurring the guidelines that restrict abortion with respect to the Hyde Amendment, the ACA’s premium federal tax credits that help policy holders pay their monthly premiums make the ACA’s various insurance plans, including those that cover abortion, more affordable and accessible to a wider range of people.
But President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans apparently are working on an alternative plan right when Obamacare’s subsidies, which assist struggling Americans in being able to afford decent health insurance, are set to expire for the year—until and unless Congress renews them.
The new plan, whether it’s a change in Obamacare’s structure or something different altogether, would not fund abortion, nor would it fund gender-transition procedures.
Notably, Trump has tried to establish himself as a thoroughly pro-life president, taking some credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, while also supporting measures to protect physicians from being forced to perform abortions against their conscience, among other pro-life actions.
“Existing Affordable Care Act subsidies are slated to expire at the end of the year. While Republican congressmen are reluctant to extend those subsidies as they stand, the president has yet to [specify] an alternative means of keeping health care costs down without funding abortion and gender transition procedures, as the ACA subsidies would require in their present form,” the pro-life news and commentary website “Life News” explained in a recent report.
According to the beltway journal Politico, Trump may, for example, introduce an option for ACA subsidy recipients to receive a portion of their tax credit in a tax-advantaged savings account, provided that they downgrade to a lower-premium health plan. Whatever may transpire, most congressional Republicans want any alternative plan to adhere to the Hyde Amendment.
Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) remarked: “I’ve said . . . even if we were okay with extending these stupid subsidies, that go to insurance companies, by the way, not to people—even if we were okay with that, we’re not okay with allowing those to be spent on abortions.” Burlison added that while “some kind of Hyde language” would need to be utilized, doing so would mean that probably all the Democrats’ votes would be lost when trying to extend the reformed ACA subsidies. He also alluded to seeking “a Republican solution, not just a patchwork on Obamacare.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt did not commit the president to any particular alternative program in a recent press conference.
ABORTION INDUSTRY CHANGING
The foregoing developments are happening against a backdrop of other developments that indicate that, overall, the U.S. abortion industry is on a downward trend after 50-plus years of placing tens of millions of pre-born children on the altar of a secularist governing apparatus that practices what amounts to child sacrifice.
This has happened in the name of personal pleasure, convenience and autonomy, a distorted view of women’s rights, and the chillingly misleading Orwellian terms ‘reproductive care’ and ‘abortion care.’ Ultimately, abortion also is a major factor in the current plummeting of birth rates that threatens to dramatically depopulate the human race. Furthermore, the U.S. Social Security System, like similar retirement-pension programs worldwide, cannot survive under the prevailing financial-monetary system unless there are enough births. There simply have to be enough young workers paying into the system to support the elderly as Baby Boomers retire in massive numbers.
Meanwhile, three more Planned Parenthood facility closures, this time in Wisconsin, are being seen as a significant blow to the abortion industry; these shutdowns raise the national tally of Planned Parenthood closures in 2025 to 48, underscoring the impact of federal funding restrictions aimed at protecting taxpayers from subsidizing elective abortions and the overall for-profit abortion industry.
Also, North Dakota’s Supreme Court has issued a ruling that restores the state’s near-total abortion ban, after a lower court had struck down the state law, SB 2150, enacted in 2023 with overwhelming legislative support.
YES, MOTHERS CAN BE AT RISK
Granted, there clearly are times when a mother’s life can be threatened by a pregnancy with complications. But should that be taken to mean that the baby’s life is worthless and automatically expendable? As the Catholic Church and other moral authorities have pointed out, under the law of double effect, the physician can and should try to save both the mother and child. If the doctor fails to do so and the child inadvertently dies, that is not an induced, intentional abortion.
“The abortion we’re talking about is the direct and intentional killing of the baby,” the late Notre Dame Law Professor Emeritus Charles E. Rice once told this writer.