The Infuriating History of the Law That Doomed Abortion Rights
This piece is adapted from Amy Littlefield’s new book, Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Right_s_, published by Legacy Lit (Hachette) on March 10.
In 1974, an Internal Revenue Service attorney named Paul Haring pitched an idea to Catholic leaders that would shape the lives of millions of women for the next half-century.
A record of his plan, titled “Paul Haring’s Proposal,” details what then seemed like an improbable scheme. Haring, a devout Catholic with a history of anti-abortion activism and a flair for longshot legal maneuvers, wanted Congress to ban federal funding of abortion by passing an amendment to an appropriations bill.
Roe v. Wade had legalized abortion nationwide the year before, and Catholics were up in arms. But more Americans supported the ruling than opposed it, and an outright abortion ban wasn’t going to happen. So Haring and his allies came up with a new plan: a ban that targeted only poor women, a group far less popular than Roe, and did so through a backdoor, as a rider to an appropriations bill.
The Catholic church needed to endorse the idea—the same church that championed poor people in many of its teachings. The bishops weren’t ready. “The political strategists are sure this won’t work,” according to a memo shared with me by Sean Kelly, a scholar who discovered it in the bishops’ archives.
Unfortunately for generations of poor women, those strategists were wrong.
The policy Haring had failed to sell the bishops in 1974 would pass two years later and become the Hyde Amendment, a ban on federal Medicaid funding of abortion that will mark its 50th anniversary this year. As I researched my new book Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights, I came to see the Hyde Amendment as the key to understanding the anti-abortion movement’s gradual destruction, and eventual reversal, of Roe v. Wade.
The amendment was the first major, successful use of the movement’s incremental approach to undermining abortion rights. It was an early example of co-opting the rhetoric of the civil rights movement to demonize abortion, in this case by claiming they were saving poor, Black babies (or, as the policy’s namesake, Republican Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde, called them, “little ghetto kid[s]”).
More broadly, it marked an early collaboration between Catholic social conservatives and Republican fiscal conservatives, under the guise of protecting “taxpayers”—an alliance that has been one of the most defining in American politics. This age-old American idea—that white men should be spared the burden of paying for things that women of color needed to keep themselves and their children alive—was moving to the forefront of national politics in the 1970s, when conservative “revolts” against taxes foreshadowed the election of Ronald Reagan.
Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde delivers a statement during the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987.Bettmann/Getty
The Hyde Amendment was an opening salvo in two contemporary wars: on women and on the poor. On a material level, the funding ban shaped the lives of women and the abortion rights movement in ways we take for granted now. The right to abortion became a right only for those who could afford it. In the years since its passage, an estimated one in four women who would otherwise have obtained an abortion paid for by Medicaid have instead given birth.
Yet the history of the amendment is mostly unknown, often reduced to a single quotation from its namesake, a jovial Catholic congressman from the Chicago suburbs. “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman,” Henry Hyde famously said in 1977. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the . . . Medicaid bill.”
As I discovered in writing my book, Henry Hyde didn’t come up with the idea for the Hyde Amendment. Behind his actions, I found an assortment of mostly forgotten men, some infamous in their time, others obscure, a few still alive in their eighties. In my two years of digging and reading and listening, I also found a common motive that I never would have imagined. Many of these men seemed to share a genuine belief that by restricting abortion, they were earning something everlasting for themselves—a ticket to Heaven.
Mother Jones illustration; Photo courtesy of Amy Littlefield
The Racist
The idea for restricting abortion for specific subsets of women originated with a Southern politician with a notorious mean streak. The late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina once refused to meet with the mother of a child who had died after contracting HIV from a blood transfusion because he believed HIV was just a gay disease that gay people deserved to die from. He tried to prevent Martin Luther King Jr. Day from becoming a national holiday. He called all Black men “Fred” because he thought it was funny.
He deserved far worse than having his house covered in a giant condom that read, “Helms is deadlier than a virus” (a brilliant stunt AIDS activists somehow pulled off in 1991). Instead, he spent 30 years in the Senate, retired in 2003, and died five years later, old and comfortable, on the Fourth of July. Helms was so Trumpian that researching him made me wonder if he had hidden a piece of his soul for our president to discover, like Tom Riddle’s diary at Hogwarts. He started out as a pundit on talk radio. He disregarded norms. He knew how to harness white male anger through blistering populism. He was even said to have small hands. Plus, he opposed sending US aid down what he called “ratholes” in poorer countries of the world, places that decades later Trump would call “shithole[s].” That was why he introduced the Helms Amendment in 1973, a ban on the use of foreign aid funds for abortion—a policy that under Reagan expanded with the Global Gag Rule. Fifty years later the Helms Amendment remains in place, renewed regularly by Congress, and an estimated 17,000 women die each year as a result. Trump, fittingly enough, broadened the Global Gag Rule’s restrictions on foreign aid in January, reaching beyond abortion to restrict international work around diversity and transgender rights. Helms would have been proud.
The Little Brother
The first Congressional record I found of the Hyde Amendment—in essence, a domestic version of the Helms Amendment—was introduced, in November 1973, by Senator James Buckley. He was a staunch Catholic and abortion opponent who, along with Helms, would try unsuccessfully to ban abortion outright through a constitutional amendment. He served a single term in the Senate from 1971 to 1977 after winning an unlikely victory in New York on the third-party Conservative Party ticket. He was also the less-famous younger brother of William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the National Review and the man who turned refusing to pay for the needs of poor people into an elite intellectual movement. It was Senator Buckley who suggested that if Congress was going to pass the Helms Amendment and prohibit federal funds from being used to help “foreign women” get abortions, “then at least we could accord the same protection to our own.” By February 1974, the Nixon administration was reported to be “quietly resisting the amendment.” (Watergate probably didn’t help.)
The Devout Bureaucrat
Paul Haring grew up in Goliad, Texas, where he went to Catholic church twice a week, sitting with his father on the side reserved for men while his devout mother, for whose sake the family attended these services, sat alone on the side for women. He would make a name for himself in the nascent anti-abortion movement in 1971, when he filed a lawsuit arguing that as a “taxpayer” he should have the right to stop abortions scheduled to take place at a Texas air force base under a federal policy that allowed the procedures under certain circumstances. He served a brief stint as head of Americans United for Life, which is now a major anti-abortion organization, but which back then, apparently, couldn’t afford to pay its director. Haring told me he did the job as a volunteer while working at the IRS. In other words, a man who would set about trying to revoke taxpayer funding for abortion was subsidizing his own activism with taxpayer funds in the form of his government paycheck.
Haring told me he wrote a version of the Hyde Amendment that was introduced in the House in the summer of 1974, months before he tried to sell the idea to Catholic leaders. It defined abortion as “the intentional destruction of unborn human life, which life begins at the moment of fertilization”—an early iteration of personhood. The House rejected a modified version of Haring’s proposal by a margin of 2 to 1. Another version of the bill was quashed in the Senate. Unfortunately for Medicaid recipients, that wasn’t the end.
The Closeted Tax Avoider
If it hadn’t been for the sex scandal that torpedoed his political career, Bob Bauman might have gone down in history as a run-of-the-mill Republican tightwad with a fetish for offshore tax avoidance. Instead, in 1980, an FBI investigation revealed that the Maryland congressman and married father of four had been drunkenly cruising the streets of Washington, DC, behind the wheel of a Lincoln Continental with congressional plates, picking up men and paying them for sex. At least one of the men turned out to be a boy of 16. Bauman was far from exceptional as a closeted gay man in DC, but he was exceptional as a closeted gay man who was widely considered one of the most conservative members of Congress.
Unsurprisingly, Bauman lost his reelection bid later that year. He eventually moved to Wilton Manors, Florida, known as one of the gayest cities in the United States, and built a second career writing dictionary-length manifestos with titles like Where to Stash Your Cash Legally and Swiss Money Secrets. It was a perfect encapsulation of the conservative movement’s wider political project; the man who had helped cut off taxpayer funding of abortion had gone on to a second career helping corporations and the ultrawealthy avoid paying taxes at all. To reach him with an interview request, I had to fill out a form pretending I was a potential client with an eight-figure fortune. Thankfully, Bauman never asked me about my finances. Once I disclosed I was a journalist he likely realized I was notworth eight figures.
Official portrait of Robert Bauman of Maryland, who served in Congress from 1973 to 1981.Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives
Like many of the men involved in the early days of the Hyde Amendment, Bauman was a devout Catholic. But his opposition to abortion wasn’t just religious—he was adopted. “I think, probably looking back on it, maybe it was my own adoption and the fact that I didn’t know who my mother was, I could have died, you know, and so on,” he told me. “But that was not an openly conscious thing; it might have been a subconscious thing.”
Bauman was also extremely unpopular on Capitol Hill. A 1976 New York Times profile described him as the “gadfly of the House, its most active nitpicker, its hairshirt, its leading baiter of its most powerful members.” When he introduced his own version of a federal abortion funding ban in 1975, it went down to defeat.
But he was smart enough to know how to work around his unpopularity. Understanding that the rules of Congress were approximately the rules of the playground, he looked for someone cooler and more popular to put his name and face to the idea. Bauman found his man in a 6 foot 3 former basketball player, the affable Illinois Republican, Henry Hyde.
“Henry was a very dynamic speaker. He was a large man,” Bauman, who was stocky and short, told me. “Very, very humorous, and a very friendly person.” One day in 1976, Bauman sidled up to his Midwestern colleague outside the House cloakroom and suggested that, in Hyde’s words, they “sneak an amendment” into the House appropriations bill.
Republican Henry Hyde, then chairman of the House Judiciary committee, at a press conference.Luke Frazza/AFP/Getty
The Namesake
Henry Hyde served in Congress for 32 years until just months before his death in 2007 at the age of 83. Abortion first came across his radar in 1969 when he was serving in the Illinois General Assembly and a Democratic colleague asked if he would cosponsor a bill to liberalize the state’s abortion ban. Four years before Roe, bills like these were being introduced all over the country. Women sickened by unsafe, illegal abortions were dying of infections and hemorrhages in hotel rooms and hospital septic wards. But Hyde was a Catholic, and he “quickly decided that abortion was something to be resisted strenuously,” he later wrote. Instead of supporting the bill, he worked to defeat it.
After coming to Washington in 1975, Hyde carved out a powerful role on the House Judiciary Committee, where he eventually became chairman. As leader of the Clinton impeachment trial, he was forced to make the embarrassing admission that he had carried on an extramarital affair of his own. On Capitol Hill, I learned from my reporting, he was also known for his propensity to grope women.
A former congressional staffer named Margaret Goodman told me Hyde had grabbed her ass one day while she was just trying to do her job. She wanted to slap his hand away but there was a room full of people watching, so she took a deep breath, steadied herself, and kept walking.
“You just made sure, you sort of sidled along with your back up against the wall,” she told me, “because Henry Hyde liked to reach out and grab you. On your butt, just, surreptitiously.”
Then there was the time, Planned Parenthood’s ex-president Faye Wattleton told me, he made a pass at her during a break in the Phil Donahue show. A man with a habit of treating women this way ought to have been disqualified from making laws about their bodies, although that would probably have disqualified many lawmakers from that era (which, come to think of it, might have been fine). But Hyde’s behavior didn’t make a dent in his popularity; instead, he went down in history as one of the most influential conservatives of his time.
The Democratic Accomplice
Even with Hyde as the front man, getting the Hyde Amendment to pass was no easy feat. A main obstacle was Democratic Pennsylvania Rep. Dan Flood, a cape-wearing former Shakespearean actor who oversaw the subcommittee in charge of the bill. Flood hated the Hyde Amendment. Yes, he represented a heavily Catholic district and believed abortion was wrong. But a “vote for this amendment is not a vote against abortion,” he fulminated. “It is a vote against poor people. That is what it is, as plain as the nose on your face.”
That should have been that—except that now the Catholic leaders who had doubted Paul Haring were fully on board with the plan. A lobbyist for the Catholic bishops got every Catholic pastor in the district to write Flood a letter, the lobbyist would later brag to scholar Sean Kelly. Flood was flooded with anti-abortion mail. Suddenly he became a champion of the Hyde Amendment.
He was far from the only Democrat implicated in this history. After all, Democrats controlled the House and the Senate in 1976, when the Hyde Amendment passed. Many of these Democrats likely supported the right to abortion. But many of them likely realized that voting in favor of public funding of abortion so close to the 1976 election, when evangelical Christians were becoming a crucial new electoral force, would put them at risk of punishment by anti-abortion diehards.
That summer, pro-choice groups were doing their best to push back against this anti-abortion deluge. But as a NARAL lobbyist would write in a memo I found in the group’s archives, abortion opponents had “really outstripped” them. Records show that even as the pro-choice movement tried to fight the ban in Congress, they were shifting their hopes to what would become their primary strategy for the next 50 years: challenging abortion restrictions in court. In a July 1976 memo, the pro-choice Republican Senator Ed Brooke wrote that groups including NARAL were banking on the belief that they could defeat the ban with litigation. “The group[s] would prefer leaving the Hyde Amendment in if there is not sufficient support to strike it altogether, for they feel that they would have a strong court case against the Hyde Amendment,” he wrote, according to the memo shared with me by the scholar Nicola Beisel.
Unfortunately, they were wrong. In 1980’s Harris v. McRae, the Supreme Court upheld the ban, expressing in legal form the driving narrative of American conservatism: that being poor, especially when you’re pregnant, and most especially if you are a woman of color, is an individual moral failing, not a societal one. Or, as the court put it, a woman’s constitutional right to abortion did not grant her a “constitutional entitlement” to the resources she might need to exercise that right.
The Secret Motive
“If I don’t answer on the first few rings, be patient,” Bob Bauman wrote to me before our phone interview in late 2022. “At 86, I don’t move as fast.”
Before speaking with him, I devoured his 1986 autobiography, The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative, which dripped with sordid details about his complicated life. “I did not want to write this book,” Bauman admitted in the preface. “I wrote it because I need the money.”
This one of the many contradictions that plagued Bauman throughout his life. Although he was a single-minded devotee of fiscal conservatism, Bauman had been profligate with money. Once his family was saved from ruin by a friend, the intellectual champion of fiscal conservatism himself, National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.
When I asked Bauman his thoughts on the impact of the Hyde Amendment, he expressed a motive I didn’t expect.
“Well, if I get any credit when I get to Saint Peter at the gate, I hope that’s on my list,” he said. “I think it’s the most important thing I ever did in Congress.”
His words would be echoed the following year when I interviewed Paul Haring at a public library near his home in suburban Virginia. Haring used our interview to try to convert me to Catholicism and save my soul from hell.
“The most important thing is we go to heaven,” Haring told me, over and over, until his words took on the tenor of a marketing pitch.
Henry Hyde also shared a preoccupation with eternity, I discovered. “I believe that I will one day render an account to God for what I did and failed to do about the issues that have caused such deep distress in our national life,” he once wrote.
The Hyde Amendment has long been understood as an opportunistic use of the appropriations bill to restrict abortion access. But there were more opportunities hiding in the stories of the strange crew of men who brought it into being. My two-year investigation into the death of Roe led me to the conclusion that the anti-abortion movement succeeded because of mutually beneficial alliance between opportunists, like Dan Flood, and true believers, like Paul Haring.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the true believers were opportunists, too. In their quest for heaven, it turned out, the architects of the Hyde Amendment had their eyes on the greatest opportunity of all.
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