For the first time in 45 years, House appropriators have not included the Hyde Amendment in a key spending bill. The House Appropriations labor and health and human services subcommittee advanced the Department of Health and Human Services funding bill to the full Appropriations Committee on Monday, excluding the ban on federal funding for abortions. This fulfills a promise by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, to remove the decades-old restriction.

“I know this is an issue on which many of us disagree,” DeLauro said during the committee hearing passing the bill. “But regardless of the original intent of Hyde, it has disproportionately impacted women of color, and it has ultimately led to more unintended pregnancies and later riskier, and more costly abortions,” she added. “We are finally doing what is right for our mothers, our families, our communities by striking this discriminatory amendment, once and for all.” Hyde allows abortion only under the most restrictive of cases, when continuing the pregnancy will endanger the patient’s life, or when the pregnancy results from rape or incest.

This follows the Biden administration’s decision to drop the Hyde Amendment from its proposed 2022 budget. The amendment has disproportionately hurt women of color and their families because those are the populations disproportionately covered by the federal health programs that can’t provide abortion care. That includes Medicaid (though states can opt to cover it under their portion of the joint funding). Thirty percent of Black women and 24% of Hispanic women are enrolled in Medicaid, compared to 14% of white women. The other programs with the ban include Indian Health Services, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, as well as the military’s TRICARE program, federal prisons, the Peace Corps, and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.

That means federal employees and their families, military personnel and their families, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives, and inmates in federal prisons are forced to pay out of pocket in order to access a safe and legal medical procedure, on top of all the other hurdles so many face in obtaining care. This appropriation bill only affects the programs under HHS—Medicaid, Indian Health Service, Medicare, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Kaiser Family Foundation analysis finds that “on average in 2014 an abortion cost between $500 at 10 weeks gestation, while at 20 weeks gestation, costs soared to $1195 or more.”

KFF estimates that, if the ban had been lifted in 2019 “it could have provided federal support for abortion coverage for 13.9 million reproductive-age women enrolled in Medicaid, as well as millions of others in similarly restricted federal programs.” That’s a forced birth mandate on millions of women in 33 states, plus the District of Columbia.

Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement that her organization was “thrilled” that the provision was finally dropped. “For far too long, the racist and sexist Hyde Amendment has put the government in control of a personal health care decision for many people with low incomes. And its extension to our federal prison system is cruel and unjust. Your ZIP code, financial situation, whether you’re incarcerated or the type of health insurance you have should never determine what kind of essential health care services you can access, including abortion,” she wrote.

“This is a historic victory for reproductive freedom and this moment has been decades in the making,” NARAL Pro-Choice America’s acting president, Adrienne Kimmell, said in a statement following the committee’s action. “We extend our deepest gratitude to our partners in the reproductive justice movement and to the women of color who have led the fight to end these harmful bans on coverage of abortion care.”

That includes President Biden. “If I believe heath care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s zip code,” he said about leaving Hyde out of his budget. “I can’t justify leaving millions of women without access to the care they need and the ability to exercise their constitutionally protected right.”

Unfortunately, that might not hold getting the appropriations bill through the Senate. Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat who will be responsible for the HHS bill in her committee, probably won’t have the votes to keep the Hyde Amendment out. “Well I support [dropping] it,” she said. “But I have to have the votes and that’s what we’re looking at.” That doesn’t make the fact that the House left it out and that the president left it out any less momentous. It’s bending the curve in the right way.