This piece is adapted from Amy Littlefield’s new book, Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights, published by Legacy Lit (Hachette) on March 10.

In 1974, an Internal Revenue Service attorney named Paul Haring pitched an idea to Catholic leaders that would shape the lives of millions of women for the next half-century.

A record of his plan, titled “Paul Haring’s Proposal,” details what then seemed like an improbable scheme. Haring, a devout Catholic with a history of anti-abortion activism and a flair for longshot legal maneuvers, wanted Congress to ban federal funding of abortion by passing an amendment to an appropriations bill.

Roe v. Wade had legalized abortion nationwide the year before, and Catholics were up in arms. But more Americans supported the ruling than opposed it, and an outright abortion ban wasn’t going to happen. So Haring and his allies came up with a new plan: a ban that targeted only poor women, a group far less popular than Roe, and did so through a backdoor, as a rider to an appropriations bill.

The Catholic church needed to endorse the idea—the same church that championed poor people in many of its teachings. The bishops weren’t ready. “The political strategists are sure this won’t work,” according to a memo shared with me by Sean Kelly, a scholar who discovered it in the bishops’ archives.

Unfortunately for generations of poor women, those strategists were wrong.

The policy Haring had failed to sell the bishops in 1974 would pass two years later and become the Hyde Amendment, a ban on federal Medicaid funding of abortion that will mark its 50th anniversary this year. As I researched my new book Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights, I came to see the Hyde Amendment as the key to understanding the anti-abortion movement’s gradual destruction, and eventual reversal, of Roe v. Wade.

The amendment was the first major, successful use of the movement’s incremental approach to undermining abortion rights. It was an early example of co-opting the rhetoric of the civil rights movement to demonize abortion, in this case by claiming they were saving poor, Black babies (or, as the policy’s namesake, Republican Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde, called them, “little ghetto kid[s]”).

More broadly, it marked an early collaboration between Catholic social conservatives and Republican fiscal conservatives, under the guise of protecting “taxpayers”—an alliance that has been one of the most defining in American politics. This age-old American idea—that white men should be spared the burden of paying for things that women of color needed to keep themselves and their children alive—was moving to the forefront of national politics in the 1970s, when conservative “revolts” against taxes foreshadowed the election of Ronald Reagan.

The Hyde Amendment was an opening salvo in two contemporary wars: on women and on the poor. On a material level, the funding ban shaped the lives of women and the abortion rights movement in ways we take for granted now. The right to abortion became a right only for those who could afford it. In the years since its passage, an estimated one in four women who would otherwise have obtained an abortion paid for by Medicaid have instead given birth.

Yet the history of the amendment is mostly unknown, often reduced to a single quotation from its namesake, a jovial Catholic congressman from the Chicago suburbs. “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman,” Henry Hyde famously said in 1977. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the . . . Medicaid bill.”

As I discovered in writing my book, Henry Hyde didn’t come up with the idea for the Hyde Amendment. Behind his actions, I found an assortment of mostly forgotten men, some infamous in their time, others obscure, a few still alive in their eighties. In my two years of digging and reading and listening, I also found a common motive that I never would have imagined. Many of these men seemed to share a genuine belief that by restricting abortion, they were earning something everlasting for themselves—a ticket to Heaven.

The Racist

The idea for restricting abortion for specific subsets of women originated with a Southern politician with a notorious mean streak. The late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina once refused to meet with the mother of a child who had died after contracting HIV from a blood transfusion because he believed HIV was just a gay disease that gay people deserved to die from. He tried to prevent Martin Luther King Jr.........

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