Ellen McCormack, a self-described housewife and grandmother who ran for president as an anti-abortion candidate in 1976 and 1980, doing well enough to become the first woman to qualify as a candidate for federal financing and Secret Service protection, died on Sunday in Avon, Conn. She was 84.
Mrs. McCormack initially ran for the presidency to help focus national attention on abortion after the 1973 Supreme Courtdecision recognizing women’s right to the procedure. Her television commercials, partly paid for with federal campaign money, attacked abortion as the equivalent of murder.
In a 2007 column on the Web site Eagle Forum, Phyllis Schlafly, long a national leader in the fight against abortion, said Mrs. McCormack had played “a major role in the pro-life movement. Her leadership enabled the then-young pro-life movement to flex its muscles and demonstrate political courage, determination and perseverance.”
In 1976, Mrs. McCormack, who ran as a Democrat and campaigned almost solely on the abortion issue, raised a total of $525,580 in contributions of $250 or less from 20 states. That made her eligible for $247,220.37 in federal matching money for the primaries. The money went mainly for anti-abortion television commercials.
Her success prompted criticism that she had misused amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 that mandated matching money for presidential candidates. Critics said the amendments, adopted in 1974, were never meant to finance single-issue campaigns. Congress responded in March 1976 by requiring a candidate for a presidential nomination to receive more than 10 percent of the vote in two consecutive primaries to qualify for matching money.
Mrs. McCormack responded in 1980 by running as the presidential candidate of the Right to Life Party, qualifying for the ballot in Kentucky, New Jersey and New York and winning more than 32,000 votes. This time, she did not apply, nor was she eligible, for matching money.
In an interview with The New York Times in 1976, she said she saw slides of fetuses at the time and “was convinced it was a human life being taken.” Her political involvement started with her book discussion group and progressed to membership in the Pro-Life Action Committee. She never became a household name.
“We thought our legislators would take care of it,” she said of the abortion issue in an interview with The Times in 1978. “But they didn’t. We found very early that it’s in politics that the big decisions are made. So we decided to run our own candidates.”
Editor: A hero I'd never heard of. May her legacy live on.
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