In a commencement address at Southwest Baptist University, Rep. Roy Blunt (R., Mo.) argued for strengthening the Hyde Amendment:
For more than three decades Congress has continuously renewed the Hyde amendment, which keeps federal Medicaid funds from paying for elective abortions. The new health-care law gets around that ban by creating new funding streams to which the amendment does not apply, and new policies now use our tax dollars abroad to fund groups who promote abortion.
It is time to make the late Henry Hyde’s amendment permanent law and apply it to all operations of the federal government. It is the bare minimum that we should do to protect both unborn life and the conscience of American citizens who don’t want to be forced to facilitate the ending of a life.
Blunt, who is running for the U.S. Senate, used to be president of the university. Other portions of his talk dealt with religious liberty and the threats he believes it currently faces.