What's more, even women who don't live below the poverty line or work for the government are now enrolling in Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which allows people making up to 138% of the federal poverty level to qualify. The Guttmacher Institute reports that the share of women of reproductive age without health insurance dropped from 17.9% to 13.9% between 2013 and 2014 — great news, except for the fact that to push the ACA through Congress, Obama was forced to sign an executive order pledging that expanded coverage would play by Hyde rules. Every year since, creative new restrictions on women's ability to access abortion care (such as mandatory delays between counseling sessions and the actual abortion, which can indirectly drive up the procedure's cost) have amplified the toll the amendment exacts.Especially given that women denied an abortion are three times as likely as other women to have dropped below the federal poverty level two years later, let's call the Hyde Amendment what it is: structural violence against the most vulnerable women in America. "We must never forget that Hyde was created because low-income women were seen as easy targets, and it has persisted because of a pernicious disregard for the needs of low-income people," says Jessica González-Rojas, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.Since poverty rates among black and Hispanic women soar above the national average , the amendment is especially destructive to women in those groups. "For nearly four decades, this policy has wrought its damage on the lives of Latinas," González-Rojas continues, "going back to Rosie Jimenez , a Latina mom and teaching student who died because the Hyde Amendment denied her a safe and legal abortion."