The Gentleman from Illinois
BARNES, FRED
The Gentleman from Illinois Henry Hyde, 1924-2007 BY FRED BARNES The first time I spoke to a prolife group—it was the summer of 1993—I expected Illinois congressman Henry Hyde to...
...A great man had persuaded me...
...He was stirring ugly passions...
...Hyde was an early convert to the pro-life movement...
...But he certainly was when I fi rst heard him at a platform hearing at the Republican convention in Dallas in 1984...
...He looked at me and then at my daughter...
...Fenwick was thunderstruck...
...Hyde interrupted Fenwick’s tirade to say he’d tell her a story he’d never told anyone in Washington, not even close friends...
...The year before, there were 300,000 federally funded abortions...
...Fenwick was an unswerving defender of a woman’s right to have an abortion...
...She told him he shouldn’t be talking the way he did about abortion...
...That, he told Fenwick, was why he opposed abortion...
...Enacting, and later saving, the Hyde Amendment was...
...When he read it, however, he changed his mind...
...And Hyde, tall, stout, white-haired, and quite friendly, said he’d be glad to chat with us over coffee at Washington National Airport...
...A conservative estimate is that the amendment has saved at least a million lives over the past three decades, but the number could be higher...
...Only a shrewd concession by Hyde saved the ban...
...He was a skillful legislator who got along with nearly everyone in Congress, including Democrats...
...By altering it to permit federal funds for abortions in cases of rape and incest, Hyde peeled off enough House members to preserve the amendment...
...She was a real character...
...Hyde was a cheerful politician with a great sense of humor and a wide range of interests...
...And when he was a month old she’d left him on the doorstep of a family, who took him in and reared him...
...She smoked a pipe...
...Once he did, rather than support the bill, he led the opposition in defeating it...
...Her mother had died in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915...
...What a great guy to have on your side...
...I don’t know whether Hyde was always eloquent on the moral imperative to save unborn children...
...It was a victory that shocked the pro-abortion lobby, spurred opposition to Clinton’s health care plan (which would have paid for abortions), and prompted the defeat of the Freedom of Choice Act...
...Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...I had brought my daughter Sarah with me and I was disappointed she wouldn’t get to hear Hyde, the great pro-life orator and the nation’s leading defender of the unborn...
...I’d never thought of myself as a prolifer, but suddenly I did...
...Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut—another Republican in the Millicent Fenwick mold—urged it be dropped...
...I was speaking in Milwaukee at National Right to Life’s annual convention and my assumption was that when a major anti-abortion group gathered, Hyde’s presence was required...
...He’d made it up on the spur of the moment...
...This was embarrassing, unprofessional even, since I was sitting in the press section...
...He once told me how much he enjoyed going to movies, usually on Saturdays, and listed all the movies he’d seen recently...
...Many pro-lifers insisted that any softening of the amendment should be strongly opposed...
...But it was for a worthy cause, and he had never regretted using it to silence Fenwick...
...But she didn’t seek an abortion...
...Hyde didn’t run away from the hard cases: rape and incest...
...His mother wasn’t married when she’d gotten pregnant...
...And he did, and told us a fascinating story...
...Hyde was inclined to back the bill...
...Aborting the unborn child would compound the horror of the crime that had been committed...
...I’d thought about abortion chiefl y as a political issue or simply a medical procedure to be avoided if possible...
...My immediate thought—one that stuck with me up to the day Hyde died last week at 83—was simply, “What a wonderful man...
...I hadn’t seen any of them...
...Hyde had never thought about the abortion issue...
...As luck would have it, when we were fl ying home and changed planes in Chicago, whom should we sit across from on the fl ight to Washington but Henry Hyde...
...This was true even after he led the effort, as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to impeach President Clinton...
...After an especially contentious debate, Fenwick confronted Hyde in a state of fury...
...Of course the story wasn’t true,” he said...
...The measure was passed in 1976, two years after Hyde arrived in Washington, and is still the law of the land...
...For several years, he had debated a liberal Republican from New Jersey named Millicent Fenwick on the House fl oor...
...As a state legislator in Illinois—pre-Roe v. Wade—he’d been approached by a colleague to cosponsor a bill legalizing abortion...
...But Hyde wasn’t there...
...But that wasn’t what Hyde talked about...
...When he won a House seat in 1974, he came to Washington an ardent pro-lifer...
...We laughed and laughed and so did Hyde...
...When Clinton became president in 1993, he urged repeal of the Hyde Amendment...
...He said there was already one innocent victim in these cases, the pregnant woman, and abortion would only add a second...
...At this point, Hyde paused in telling the story...
...Until covering their debate, I’d paid little attention to the morality of abortion...
...When he argued on the Senate fl oor for conviction, it was a historic moment...
...As I listened to Hyde, tears began streaming down my cheeks...
...His administration estimated that, absent Hyde’s ban, federal funds would pay for 325,000 to 675,000 abortions annually...
...The party had adopted a pro-life plank four years earlier, and Hyde argued for keeping it...
...The Gentleman from Illinois Henry Hyde, 1924-2007 BY FRED BARNES The first time I spoke to a prolife group—it was the summer of 1993—I expected Illinois congressman Henry Hyde to be there...
...But his role in impeaching Bill Clinton wasn’t Hyde’s most important as a congressman...
...Then she’d understand why he believed so strongly in saving unborn children...
...She walked away without saying a word and never debated the issue of abortion with Hyde again...
...He said the Republican platform should oppose abortion without any exceptions, a position that seemed a bit extreme...
...But Hyde found he didn’t have the votes...
...He must stop...
...It bars the use of federal funds to pay for abortions...
...We were thrilled...
...He was dividing the Republican party, even the country...
Vol. 13 • December 2007 • No. 13
