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Elizabeth Warren considers the Hyde amendment – which prohibits federal funding of abortions except in cases of rape, incest or threat to the life of the pregnant patient – as fundamentally linked to inequality.
"It's about health care, reproductive freedom, economic freedom and equal opportunities for all women," said Warren, in response to a question from Chris Hayes of MSNBC, at a public meeting held on Wednesday. "It's not a policy issue."
Asked to respond to Vice President Joe Biden's long standing position to retain the Hyde Amendment, Warren said the provision would simply make it more difficult for low-income women to access safe abortion through through programs like Medicaid.
"Understand this, means women will always have access to abortion," Warren said. "Poor women will not be poor. It will be working women and women who can not afford to take three days of work, and very young women. It will be women who have been raped and women who have been assaulted by a family member. We do not pass laws that deprive the most vulnerable women of this freedom. "
Warren added that she was old enough to remember an America where abortion was illegal, before the landmark 1973 decision of the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade. The attack on legal abortion by red states like Alabama, which has just passed a bill banning abortion at any time, except when the mother's life is seriously in danger, has been the subject of renewed attention.
Biden, the current Democratic Party favorite, has long supported the Hyde Amendment. Warren thinks he is wrong and the amendment exacerbates the inequalities between American women.
Fighting inequality is the main theme of Warren's campaign. Her position Wednesday reveals that she thinks that access to abortion is essentially a problem that affects low-income women far more than those means.
More Democrats in 2020 Position on Hyde
As Anna North of Vox wrote, Democratic candidates calling for the repeal of the Hyde amendment are a relatively recent phenomenon. The amendment was adopted for the first time in 1976, three years after Roe, but the platform of the Democratic Party has really changed since 2016.
Hillary Clinton has called for the repeal of Hyde during his 2016 presidential run, and the The platform of the democratic party has followed suit, something that would have been almost unthinkable in the years when she and her husband had asked that abortion be rare.
Most of the leading candidates in the Democratic presidential election of 2020 are in favor of repealing the Hyde amendment. Biden is not among them, confirmed his spokesman to Vox. The spokesman added that "if recent efforts to restrict access to abortion – including almost total abortions of abortions in Louisiana, Ohio, Alabama and elsewhere – were succeeding, Biden would be open to the abrogation of Hyde ".
This argument is not sufficient for Warren, who argued that the amendment exacerbated inequalities between women and families.
Because they prohibit the federal government from spending money to fund abortions, activists and a growing number of Democratic candidates say the amendment prohibits low-income women who matter on Medicaid to get an abortion to get coverage. In other words, it is an amendment that affects the poor disproportionately.
And with Republicans attacking abortion laws and clinics in the Red States, this means that the options available to low-income women for safe and legal abortion are disappearing. Some Democrats think that the repeal of the Hyde amendment would make women's access more equitable.
As Warren pointed out, this will not necessarily prevent low-income women from having an abortion, it could simply cause them to have more dangerous ones.
"Look, from the way I see this, it's what leadership is about," Warren said. "You start with what you believe to be right, then you go out and you fight to get it.
"I lived in an America where abortions were illegal. Understand this. Women still have abortions. Now some were lucky on what happened and others were really unlucky about what happened. "
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