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Last Friday, the Hyde Amendment turned 35. From the Center for American Progress:

[Last week] the Hyde Amendment, which bans Medicaid coverage of abortion with few exceptions, turns 35 years old. Not even its sponsor, Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), could have imagined its unfortunate success. In its three and a half decades, the Hyde Amendment policy has crept into every government-run or government-managed program, including Medicare, the Indian Health Service, the Peace Corps, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, the military’s Tricare program, and federal prisons. And with the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, restrictions on abortion coverage crossed from the public into the private health insurance market as well.

While such restrictions have some effect on all women, poor women and women of color continue to bear the brunt of this cruel policy. Women enrolled in Medicaid—by definition those with the fewest resources—were the first targets of the Hyde Amendment, but two trends have converged to make them even more likely to need an abortion and less likely to be able to afford one.

The United States now has the highest number of people living in poverty since the Census Bureau started tracking the data in 1959. And 14.5 percent of women lived in poverty in 2010, up from 13.9 percent in 2009—the highest poverty rate for women in 17 years.

At the same time, poor women’s rates of unintended pregnancy are far outpacing those of more affluent women. The unintended pregnancy rate for women with incomes under the federal poverty level rose 50 percent from 1994 to 2006, while women with incomes at or above the poverty line saw their unintended pregnancy rate decrease by almost 30 percent. Poor women’s unintended pregnancy rates rose regardless of their education, race and ethnicity, marital status, or age.

Read the full piece here.

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