The Hyde Amendment, first enacted in 1976, is an annual legislative provision included in federal spending bills to prevent American taxpayer dollars from directly funding abortions except in the rare cases of rape, incest, or to save the mother’s life. According to a 2016 report by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the amendment is estimated to have saved more than 2 million lives by its 40th anniversary. President Trump’s memorandum stated that the Biden administration circumvented this “longstanding commonsense policy” with two executive orders of his own that categorized abortion as “heath care” making abortion facilities eligible for federal aid, and then “imposed a whole-of-government effort” to embed taxpayer dollars into funding elective abortion.
President Trump’s Hyde Amendment executive order specifically revokes these two Biden orders by removing abortion from the category of “health care” and stops the government-wide effort to promote and fund abortion with taxpayer dollars.
The executive order reads, "For nearly five decades, the Congress has annually enacted the Hyde Amendment and similar laws that prevent Federal funding of elective abortion, reflecting a longstanding consensus that American taxpayers should not be forced to pay for that practice. However, the previous administration disregarded this established, commonsense policy by embedding forced taxpayer funding of elective abortions in a wide variety of Federal programs. It is the policy of the United States, consistent with the Hyde Amendment, to end the forced use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote elective abortion.”
