The following comes from a September 20 OC Catholic article:

The Hyde Amendment is 40 years old this year. It undoubtedly has saved many lives. But the Democratic Party officially wants to repeal it, against the wishes of pro-life Democrats and almost everyone else.

Named for the late Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, who was a strong pro-life congressman, the amendment had wide bipartisan support when it was passed in 1976 because neither party thought that taxpayers should be forced to pay for abortions.

The Hyde Amendment says: “None of the funds appropriated by this title shall be available to pay for an abortion, except where the life of the mother would be endangered if the fetus were carried to term, or in the case of rape or incest.”

For 40 years, the amendment has been attached to the federal budget and spending bills passed by Congress. The Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, has estimated that one out of four babies born to mothers on Medicaid would have been aborted were it not for the Hyde Amendment.

At this summer’s Democratic National Convention, pro-abortion delegates managed to pass the party’s platform with this language: “We will continue to oppose — and seek to overturn — federal and state laws and policies that impede a woman’s access to abortion, including by repealing the Hyde Amendment.”

For the Hyde Amendment to be repealed would require an act of Congress, and it is highly unlikely that Democrats will win control of the House of Representatives. But just the fact that this got into the Democratic platform demonstrates how far our society has fallen in this post-Christian world.

Abortion proponents have been successful in convincing Americans that abortion is just a normal part of women’s health care, something that women should do if they happen to become pregnant at an inconvenient time. At the Democratic convention, delegates actually cheered when Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, bragged that she had aborted her child for that reason. Women are being encouraged to be proud, not ashamed, of killing their unborn child, as demonstrated by the #ShoutYourAbortion campaign.

All this is being reported shortly after the canonization of St. Teresa of Kolkata. Perhaps we can think about what she said back in 1982 when she gave an address at Harvard University: “It is something unbelievable that today a mother, herself, murders her own child, afraid of having to feed one more child. This is one of the greatest poverties. A nation, people, family that allows that, that accepts that, they are the poorest of the poor.”