I'm still unclear what was the point of HR3. It seemed to be the same as the Hyde Amendment except for the 'forcible rape' thing which was removed in the end anyway. So what exactly did the final version do that the Hyde Amendment didn't do?
The Hyde Amendment itself is not law; it's a rider that is attached every year to the appropriations act for the Department of Health and Human Services, and it only applies to the Federal funds appropriated for the given year. As a result, the details of the exceptions to the abortion funding ban often change from year to year (IIRC, for the first few years, they didn't even make an exception for rape at all).
Theoretically, the Hyde Amendment could be entirely annulled just by Congress deciding not to amend the relevant appropriations bill that year, and each year runs the risk of being quietly amended (to be considerably stricter OR more lenient) just because the composition of a specific sub-committee skews far enough from the Congressional median on this issue. H.R. 3 ultimately just gives an unprecedented degree of permanence and consistency to the previously malleable and uncertain Federal guidelines regarding abortion funding. There's really no problem with the law if you don't have a problem with the Hyde Amendment (at least now that the "forcible rape" bit was been removed from the bill). However, if you don't like the Hyde Amendment from either side- say, if you think government absolutely shouldn't fund abortion in
any circumstance, or if you think that the government shouldn't restricting abortion funding at all- then it wouldn't really make sense to support H.R. 3, because it enshrines the status quo into explicit law and makes it a whole lot harder to change.
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