This year, a life-saving federal policy turns 50 years old. For half a century, the Hyde amendment has protected women, girls, and unborn children from taxpayer-funded abortions. In contrast, Roe v. Wade collapsed under the weight of its own bad reasoning just shy of its 50th “birth” day. How fitting.

In the wake of the devastation he knew would follow Roe, Congressman Henry Hyde introduced his amendment to an appropriations bill in 1976: no Medicaid funds could pay for elective abortions. The reasoning was simple. A government that pays for abortions is a government that encourages abortions.

Hyde’s words from the House floor half a century ago are still relevant today. He warned that in a decent society, unborn children deserve “better than to be flushed down a toilet or burned in an incinerator. The promise of America is that life is not just for the privileged, the planned, or the perfect.”

Over the past five decades, Congress has acknowledged as much and applied the prohibition on taxpayer funding for abortion to additional spending streams. Beyond Medicaid, the Hyde family of amendments now covers Medicare, the Indian Health Service, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Washington, D.C.’s budget, federal employees’ health plans, the Peace corps, TRICARE, the Veterans Administration, foreign aid spending, and more.

Year after year, no matter who sits in the White House or which party holds a congressional majority, Congress has reaffirmed that federal dollars shouldn’t fund elective abortion, regardless of which agency is cutting the check. Even under the shadow of Roe, the Supreme Court upheld Hyde in 1980, ruling that the recently-discovered right to an abortion didn’t come with a right to make taxpayers pay for it.

Hyde is not only durable, but also quite popular. Polling has consistently found that a majority of Americans oppose using tax dollars for domestic and international abortion funding. This view is shared by a meaningful share of Democrats, a majority of independents, and most Republicans.

More important than Hyde’s staying power and enduring popularity are the lives behind the facts and figures. Multiple studies find that abortion rates drop when Medicaid and other public funds don’t pay for abortions. The Hyde amendment has saved more than 2.6 million lives since 1976, according to a 2026 study by the Charlotte Lozier Institute.

Don’t let 2.6 million be an abstraction. That’s roughly the population of Chicago. It’s more people than live in Wyoming and Idaho combined.

Each one of those millions of people has had the opportunity to grow up, go to school, fall in love, start a career, maybe even start a family of their own. These fellow Americans are with us today because Congress decided, in 1976 and every year since, that taxpayers wouldn’t be forced to pay for their deaths.

For half a century, many treated Roe vs. Wade as untouchable. Thankfully, they were very wrong. Roe is gone now, overturned and relegated to the dustbin of history where it belongs. Meanwhile, the Hyde amendment continues to do what it has always done: save lives, respect taxpayers, and reflect an enduring bipartisan consensus about what most Americans actually believe.

Fifty years in, Hyde has earned an anniversary Roe was unworthy of ever seeing. And Hyde is worth protecting for another 50 years, too.

____

Melanie Israel is a Visiting Fellow in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation.

_____

©2026 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.