A Crack in the Dike?

In the Netherlands, they call them dikes. In New Orleans, they call them levees. In other places across the country and around the world, they call them seawalls, jetties, or milldams. Their purpose is to hold back the waters that are forever encroaching, forever threatening, the surrounding land and the people that live there.

For instance, in the Netherlands, about half of the land mass sits – and more than 60% of the population lives – below sea level. Consequently, the Dutch have been building dikes for over 700 years to hold back the powerful North Sea and its tributaries. However, when a dike fails or is breached, the results can be catastrophic, such as the North Sea Flood of 1953 that claimed 1,836 lives, displaced thousands, and flooded vast areas of the country’s southwestern provinces.

Likewise, when Hurricane Katrina, a Category-5 storm, struck New Orleans in 2005, it caused 53 breaches to the levees protecting the city from the rising waters of Lake Pontchartrain. As a result, more than 80% of “The Crescent City” was inundated with water, over 900,000 residents lost power, and an estimated 1,400 people were killed. The economic damage totaled $125 billion.

In other words, remove or weaken a dike – or fail to properly maintain a levee – and you risk disaster.
O.K., so where am I going with this analogy? Well, on September 30, 1976 (my 17th birthday), the U.S. House of Representatives voted 312-93 to override the veto of a funding bill by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Named for its chief sponsor, Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), the Hyde Amendment took effect in 1980.

Prior to its passage, an estimated 300,000 abortions were performed annually using taxpayers’ money. However, the Hyde Amendment turned off those spigots, barring the use of federal funds to pay for abortions except to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape or incest.

"Abortion is a lethal assault against the very idea of human rights and destroys, along with a defenseless, little baby, the moral foundations of our democracy," Hyde said on the House floor.

Over the past 45 years – and through eight different administrations (five Republican and three Democratic) – the Hyde Amendment has held firm, serving as a veritable seawall against the floodwaters of unlimited abortions performed at taxpayer expense.

Until now, that is. And the culprit who may be guilty of breaching the bulwark that has protected so many preborn babies for almost a half-century is none other than President Donald J. Trump.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Since being elected to his first term in 2016, President Trump has delivered on one pro-life promise after another. He has appointed three pro-life justices – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett – to the United States Supreme Court. He also reinstated the Mexico City Policy, a U.S. government policy that requires foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to certify that they will not "perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning" with non-U.S. funds as a condition for receiving U.S. global family planning assistance.

President Trump has also pushed to prevent Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, from receiving federal funds.

All of which makes it hard to fathom why President Trump told congressional Republicans last week that they were going to have to be “a little flexible on Hyde.”

“I almost fell out of my chair,” said one House Republican who was in attendance at the GOP retreat where President Trump made the comment.

To suggest that the Hyde Amendment – the only barrier standing between Americans and the Democrats’ ultimate dream of unlimited taxpayer-funded abortions – is negotiable after almost five decades set off alarms throughout the conservative movement.

“I’m not flexible on the value of every single child,” Senator James Lankford (R-OK) said. “Every single child is valuable. There aren’t some children that are disposable, and some children that are valuable. Every child is valuable. And so, that’s not an area that I’m flexible on.”

“That’s a red line I’m not going to cross,” Sen. Lankford reiterated.

“The VA doesn’t do abortions,” Lankford pointed out. “DOD doesn’t do abortions. [Native American] health care doesn’t do abortions. We don’t do abortions with Medicare, Medicaid. We should not have it anywhere.”

“The only place that abortion funding for elective abortion exists,” Lankford said, “is in Obamacare… and that needs to go away.”

Sorry, Mr. Trump, but it doesn’t sound like Sen. Lankford is willing to give an inch for the sake of reaching an agreement with the Democrats on Obamacare subsidies. Neither is Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ).

“‘We need to be flexible?’” Rep. Smith repeated. “What does that mean?”

“These are children who are about to be exterminated in a very painful way, especially through dismemberment, [or] starved to death through the abortion pill [which is] very dangerous to women. Based on the most recent data that came out last April, [there’s] a complication rate of 11%, when they advertised that it’s less than one-half of 1%. So women are suffering. Babies are suffering. We need to reassert our commitment to the most defenseless group of people on earth: unborn children.”

Polls show that 83% of Republicans reject the idea of taxpayer-funded abortions, so please stick to your guns, Mr. President. Continue to defend the lives of precious preborn babies by telling Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and the rest of the bloodthirsty Democrats who want to sacrifice our children on the altar of personal convenience that we will not budge, we will not compromise, and we will not allow a single crack to form in the Hyde Amendment.

Editor’s Note: The first warning signs of President Trump’s apparent willingness to negotiate on abortion was the 2024 Republican Party Platform. Since Ronald Reagan, every GOP platform has contained bold and unambiguous language proclaiming the personhood rights of preborn children. Unfortunately, President Trump instructed the RNC to slash the platform’s pro-life language from more than 1,300 words in 2020 to a mere 90 very vague words in 2024.