A Pro-Life Woman for President

Terrisa Bukovinac will not be elected president in 2024. If you did not know that she was running, you can be forgiven. But run she did, receiving over 14,000 votes in the New Jersey Democratic presidential primary and 101 in New Hampshire, the only ballots on which she appeared. Bukovinac is a secular, progressive pro-lifer. Her realistic goal was not winning the White House, but pricking hearts and minds. 

Bukovinac, who aligns with Bernie Sanders on most issues other than abortion, emerged from an activist background to push what was once “the party of the little guy” to reconsider its antipathy to the smallest among us.

She follows a trail blazed by Ellen McCormack, who ran for the Democratic nomination in 1976 and set in motion a series of events that have shaped abortion politics and party platforms up until the present day. McCormack was a Long Island homemaker married to a policeman. She became active in the Pro-Life Action Committee (PLAC) after New York liberalized abortion access in 1970 under Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller. McCormack wrote a pro-life newspaper column and organized the Women’s March for Life in New York City, drawing over 10,000 to the streets in 1971. PLAC’s efforts led to a repeal bill that passed the New York legislature in 1972, but was vetoed by Rockefeller. Roe then changed everything in 1973.

In those fluid days leading up to the first post-Roe presidential election, most Democratic presidential contenders danced around abortion in a big tent party that included both bra-burning feminists and McCormack-style working-class Catholics who had beaten back a pro-abortion rights platform proposal in 1972. PLAC explored fielding a candidate to provide a clear pro-life position that included support for constitutional amendment. The telegenic McCormack eventually took up the cause. (Fellow activist Jane Gilroy, herself a candidate for governor of New York in 1970, chronicles the grassroots campaign of her late friend in A Shared Vision.)  

In a pre-internet time when a loaf of bread cost 35 cents, McCormack’s campaign raised over $280,000, mostly from small donors linked by church connections and Christmas card lists. The campaign hoped to double the amount through federal matching funds, producing howls from pro-abortion groups like NOW and NARAL. Congress and the Federal Election Commission even changed the matching fund rules in the middle of the campaign—but not before McCormack qualified for more than $244,000. Much of the money then went to produce and place television commercials focused on unborn life and death. The ads effectively elevated abortion as an issue and McCormack as a candidate. 

McCormack would garner over 200,000 votes in 18 primaries, sometimes outperforming professional politicians. She went to the Democratic National Convention with three pledged delegates and emerged in the end with 22—more than several senators and governors who also received convention votes. Despite McCormack’s efforts, the Democrats’ platform ultimately took a position against a right to life amendment. Jimmy Carter, the nominee, was content to run on his personal convictions against abortion and his support of the new Hyde Amendment banning direct federal funding of abortions. Those gestures were not enough to garner an endorsement from McCormack, especially after the Carter campaign engineered inclusion of a pro-Roe platform plank and kept her off the convention stage. 

Republican Senator Bob Dole reached out to the McCormack campaign seeking to make common cause with the disgruntled pro-lifers. The Kansan was still a senator partly because he played the abortion card against an opponent, a doctor who performed them. Dole was soon to become President Ford’s vice-presidential nominee, replacing the sitting vice-president Nelson Rockefeller, whose pro-abortion actions as governor had originally helped to propel McCormack’s activism. Despite Ford’s personal pro-choice views and First Lady Betty Ford calling Roe a “great, great decision” on 60 Minutes, the GOP platform emerged indirectly supportive of a life amendment. It favored a “continuance of the public dialogue on abortion” while also “supporting the efforts of those who seek enactment of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.” 

The party platforms of 1976 sent the GOP down a sometimes bumpy road (think Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter) as the anti-Roe party, and put the Democrats on a long path toward pro-abortion absolutism.

Bukovinac, following the McCormack playbook, has used election laws as a pathway to the television airwaves. McCormack’s 1976 spots focused on the humanity of preborn children and highlighted the tools of their demise. Bukovinac’s bluntly showed the damage done. Her ad aired in the New York City media market and highlighted five children killed at a D.C. abortion clinic that performs late-term abortions, killings exposed by the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU), a group that Bukovinac has helped to lead. 

In March 2022, Bukovinac and her colleagues at PAAU were given a box which contained the bodies of five babies by a driver for the clinic’s medical waste removal company. This was just one of many sealed waist-high boxes regularly hauled away. Despite support from several members of Congress, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, no autopsies have been performed nor any arrests made in connection with the deaths. Around the same time that #JusticeForTheFive earned media attention, other PAAU members were indicted for prior sit-in protests at the clinic. Recently, those activists received federal prison sentences of up to four years and nine months for violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act. 

Bukovinac is a real Democrat and her activism is not wrapped in religion. Instead, she took up the cause of the unborn after losing her faith in God. Her well-produced campaign spot forces those who come upon it to face the brutal realities of abortion, realities that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump seem eager to evade. 

Trump wants pro-life votes based on his role in overturning Roe, but the GOP is poised to endorse a platform at the upcoming Republican National Convention that does not include pro-life planks that have been standard since the days of Ford and Reagan—such as support for a constitutional amendment against abortion. The draft platform is more clear about “defend[ing] the right to mine Bitcoin” than defending the unborn. The GOP’s marginalization of pro-lifers is similar in some ways to what Democrats did in the 1970s, and a single-issue champion like McCormack or Bukovinac may soon be needed to keep the unborn in clear view. 

John Murdock is an attorney who writes from Texas.

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Image by Elise Ketch, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.