(LifeSiteNews) — DuPage County, Illinois, will remove the name of deceased pro-life Catholic congressman Henry Hyde from a courthouse because he opposed abortion.
The county voted recently on a resolution brought by pro-abortion board member Deb Conry to remove Rep. Hyde’s name from the courthouse. The county also voted to remove its permission for a monument to Hyde.
Hyde is the author of the Hyde Amendment, a longstanding rider on congressional appropriations that prohibits direct funding of elective abortions by the federal government. He represented the county for years in Congress as a Republican representative.
“My father didn’t so anything to deserve being canceled, and that’s what this resolution aims to do,” Hyde’s son Anthony said on Tuesday during a public meeting. “It’s an attempt to erase and rewrite history. As elected officials, you have to be better than that.”
Chair Deb Conroy, a pro-abortion Democrat, brought the resolution for a vote. It passed 10-5.
“It something that I was asked during my campaign, and I said that, yes, I would do that,” Conroy said, according to ABC 7.
Conroy is a firm supporter of women being able to kill their innocent preborn babies in the womb. As a state representative, she regularly voted to make it easier for Illinois residents, and others, to kill their babies. For example, she voted for a law that made abortion legal through all nine months of pregnancy and also voted to repeal the state’s parental notification law.
The cancellation of Hyde drew criticism from both conservatives and President Barack Obama’s chief campaign strategist.
“I disagreed w/Hyde but he was an honorable man; a WW II vet who devoted his life to service,” former Obama strategist and longtime Democratic consultant David Axelrod wrote on X. “Regrettable move.”
A county board in IL voted to strip to strip Rep. Henry Hyde’s name from courthouse because of ’80 law he wrote limiting fed funds for abortion. I disagreed w/Hyde but he was an honorable man; a WW II vet who devoted his life to service.
Regrettable move. https://t.co/K5n3NpKP3q— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) February 11, 2025
Pro-life conservative commentator Dan Proft also criticized the decision.
“The New Marxists who took over DuPage Country from the Surrender Republicans are doing what they do: tearing things down, eliminating history, canceling figures they deem objectionable,” he wrote prior to the vote.
Former state representative Jeanne Ives, who represented DuPage County in the state house, criticized the decision. She said the board blocked the public, including her, from speaking at the meeting.
“Deb Conroy disgraced herself today. Stopped public comment,” Ives wrote on X. “Voted on her single issue of abortion to cancel Henry Hyde who was much much more than just his namesake amendment.”
Ives posted her prepared statement on X.
It stated in part:
The very thing that Henry Hyde is most well-known for is the very reason these Leftist Democrat women want his name stricken from memory.
His defense of the unborn and his namesake amendment that restricted federal taxpayer money from being used for abortion is too much for County Board Chairwoman Deb Conroy. She wrongly calls abortion healthcare and specifically thinks poor women should be helped along in aborting their babies.
No one should be surprised by this. It’s not enough that in 2017, Conroy voted for taxpayer funded abortion in Illinois, she and her colleagues now feel they must cancel Hyde whose very popular amendment has stood for nearly 50 years through both Democratically controlled Congresses and White Houses, an amendment that even Barack Obama acquiesced to including in the Affordable Care Act.
The decision drew criticism from the Chicago Republican Party, which called the leaders behind the decision “petty & mean-spirited.”
“Henry Hyde was a statesman & example of what an #Illinois legislator should be, like Sen Dirksen & Abe Lincoln,” the Chicago GOP wrote.
Hyde died in 2007 at the age of 83.
As previously reported by LifeSiteNews, he stressed that his Catholic faith and his opposition to abortion were deeply entwined, once giving a speech titled “When the Time Comes” about a person’s final judgement before God and his or her opposition to abortion.
He said:
When the time comes as it surely will, when we face that awesome moment, the final judgment, I’ve often thought, as Fulton Sheen wrote, that it is a terrible moment of loneliness. You have no advocates, you are there alone standing before God and a terror will rip through your soul like nothing you can imagine. But I really think that those in the pro-life movement will not be alone. I think there will be a chorus of voices that have never been heard in this world but are heard beautifully and clearly in the next world and they will plead for everyone who has been in this movement. They will say to God, “Spare him because he loved us,” and God will look at you and say not, “Did you succeed?” but “Did you try?”
He also criticized the Church hierarchy for not speaking out more against Catholic politicians who supported abortion.
“If the Church doesn’t come out strong and condemn those who want to receive Holy Communion while not in the state of sanctifying grace, then the Church has lost its moral authority, and that is tragic,” he said.