The Gentleman from Illinois
Henry Hyde, 1924-2007.
by Fred Barnes
12/10/2007, Volume 013, Issue 13
The first time I spoke to a pro-life group--it was the summer of 1993--I expected Illinois congressman Henry Hyde to be there. 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. But Hyde wasn't there. 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.
As luck would have it, when we were flying home and changed planes in Chicago, whom should we sit across from on the flight to Washington but Henry Hyde. We were thrilled. And Hyde, tall, stout, white-haired, and quite friendly, said he'd be glad to chat with us over coffee at Washington National Airport.
And he did, and told us a fascinating story. For several years, he had debated a liberal Republican from New Jersey named Millicent Fenwick on the House floor. She was a real character. She smoked a pipe. Her mother had died in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. Fenwick was an unswerving defender of a woman's right to have an abortion.
After an especially contentious debate, Fenwick confronted Hyde in a state of fury. She told him he shouldn't be talking the way he did about abortion. He was dividing the Republican party, even the country. He was stirring ugly passions. He must stop.
Hyde interrupted Fenwick's tirade to say he'd tell her a story he'd never told anyone in Washington, not even close friends. Then she'd understand why he believed so strongly in saving unborn children. His mother wasn't married when she'd gotten pregnant. But she didn't seek an abortion. And when he was a month old she'd left him on the doorstep of a family, who took him in and reared him. That, he told Fenwick, was why he opposed abortion.
Fenwick was thunderstruck. She walked away without saying a word and never debated the issue of abortion with Hyde again. At this point, Hyde paused in telling the story. He looked at me and then at my daughter. "Of course the story wasn't true," he said. He'd made it up on the spur of the moment. But it was for a worthy cause, and he had never regretted using it to silence Fenwick. We laughed and laughed and so did Hyde. My immediate thought--one that stuck with me up to the day Hyde died last week at 83--was simply, "What a wonderful man. What a great guy to have on your side."
Hyde was a cheerful politician with a great sense of humor and a wide range of interests. He once told me how much he enjoyed going to movies, usually on Saturdays, and listed all the movies he'd seen recently. I hadn't seen any of them.
He was a skillful legislator who got along with nearly everyone in Congress, including Democrats. This was true even after he led the effort, as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to impeach President Clinton. When he argued on the Senate floor for conviction, it was a historic moment. But his role in impeaching Bill Clinton wasn't Hyde's most important as a congressman.
Enacting, and later saving, the Hyde Amendment was. The measure was passed in 1976, two years after Hyde arrived in Washington, and is still the law of the land. It bars the use of federal funds to pay for abortions. The year before, there were 300,000 federally funded abortions. 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.
When Clinton became president in 1993, he urged repeal of the Hyde Amendment. His administration estimated that, absent Hyde's ban, federal funds would pay for 325,000 to 675,000 abortions annually. Only a shrewd concession by Hyde saved the ban.
Many pro-lifers insisted that any softening of the amendment should be strongly opposed. But Hyde found he didn't have the votes. 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. 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.
Hyde was an early convert to the pro-life movement. As a state legislator in Illinois--pre-Roe v. Wade--he'd been approached by a colleague to cosponsor a bill legalizing abortion. Hyde was inclined to back the bill. When he read it, however, he changed his mind. Hyde had never thought about the abortion issue. Once he did, rather than support the bill, he led the opposition in defeating it. When he won a House seat in 1974, he came to Washington an ardent pro-lifer.
I don't know whether Hyde was always eloquent on the moral imperative to save unborn children. But he certainly was when I first heard him at a platform hearing at the Republican convention in Dallas in 1984. The party had adopted a pro-life plank four years earlier, and Hyde argued for keeping it. Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut--another Republican in the Millicent Fenwick mold--urged it be dropped.
Until covering their debate, I'd paid little attention to the morality of abortion. I'd thought about abortion chiefly as a political issue or simply a medical procedure to be avoided if possible. But that wasn't what Hyde talked about. He said the Republican platform should oppose abortion without any exceptions, a position that seemed a bit extreme.
Hyde didn't run away from the hard cases: rape and incest. He said there was already one innocent victim in these cases, the pregnant woman, and abortion would only add a second. Aborting the unborn child would compound the horror of the crime that had been committed.
As I listened to Hyde, tears began streaming down my cheeks. This was embarrassing, unprofessional even, since I was sitting in the press section. I'd never thought of myself as a pro-lifer, but suddenly I did. A great man had persuaded me.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
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