Sen. Kamala Harris leveled a pointed question against former Vice President Joe Biden during Wednesday’s Democratic presidential debate in Detroit: The former senator previously backed the Hyde Amendment, a measure that bars federal funding for nearly all abortions, for decades. Then, this past June, he had a sudden change of heart: Why?
Joe Biden recently flipped on the Hyde Amendment. Kamala Harris asked him why.
After supporting the measure for decades, he reversed his position in June.
Li Zhou is a former politics reporter at Vox, where she covers Congress and elections. Previously, she was a tech policy reporter at Politico and an editorial fellow at the Atlantic.
“You made a decision for years to withhold resources to poor women to reproductive health care, including women who were the victims of rape and incest. Do you now say that you have evolved and you regret that?” the California senator and presidential candidate asked.
Harris’s question immediately followed a heated exchange between Biden and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, when he implied that the New York lawmaker was attacking a former argument he’d made about women working outside the home, simply because she was now running for president. Harris appeared to suggest that Biden’s updated position on the Hyde Amendment was pretty much for the same reason.
Biden’s stark reversal took place, after all, in the wake of immense backlash and only after he announced his candidacy, against the backdrop of a slate of conservative states passing extreme laws restricting abortion rights designed with the intent to overturn Supreme Court precedent on Roe v. Wade.
At the time, every leading 2020 Democrat expressed their opposition to the Hyde Amendment, which is seen as disproportionately restricting abortion access to low-income women and women of color. Under the Hyde Amendment, few abortions are covered by Medicaid, with exceptions for rape, incest, and instances when a woman’s life is in danger.
Biden responded by saying that his new health care plan, which would enable every American to enroll in a public option, meant that reproductive health care would need to be covered with federal dollars.
“Once I wrote the legislation making sure that every single woman would have the opportunity to have health care paid for by the federal government, everyone, then that could no longer stand,” he said. Effectively, he acknowledged that his health care proposal wouldn’t be able to work if abortions and other reproductive health care were not included in it since it relies on federal money.
Biden also highlighted a challenge that Democrats have faced on this issue: He pointed out that Harris and others onstage have also voted in favor of the Hyde Amendment, which is often included in congressional spending bills that Democrats also support.
House Progressive Caucus co-chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal has broken down this tension well: One of the main reasons Democrats continue voting for Hyde in Congress is because Republicans would refuse to approve spending bills if it were taken out, increasing the potential of a government shutdown. 2020 Democrats, however, have emphasized that they’d do their best to roll back the Hyde Amendment.
Eliminating the Hyde Amendment is among the latest priorities for Democrats seeking to preserve and expand abortion access, something several states including Ohio, Georgia, and Arkansas have sought to curb in recent months.
Biden, it seems, is finally in line with his other Democratic competitors on the subject, though this sharp reversal made for an uncomfortable debate moment for him.
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