White House rivals face a matter of life and death
Republican candidates’ stance on abortion will be key to the result in today’s South Carolina primary
STANDING beside an ultrasound machine in a small room, Marco Rubio listened as the director told how the device was “saving lives” every day.
It helps to show the shape of the foetus – its hands and feet, “its little beating heart” – to the expectant mother, she said, because often that makes her change her mind about having the abortion.
Afterwards, Mr Rubio spoke to the staff of the pro-life Carolina Pregnancy Centre: “I don’t think you can come here and not be inspired. There are people today who are alive and thriving because of the work you are doing and have done.”
Housed in a nondescript grey bungalow off motorway 85 in South Carolina, this local Catholic organisation has become an unlikely destination on the campaign trail for Republican presidential hopefuls.
Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and the former contenders Carly Fiorina and Scott Walker have all walked the corridors lined with framed photographs of babies (some of whom, the centre says, it prevented from being aborted) for a photo opportunity with the staff.
This is in part a strategy to appeal to the large and powerful evangelical voting bloc that will today help determine the candidates’ fates in South Carolina’s primary election. And it is one they hope will damage the frontrunner, Donald Trump.
Earlier this month Mr Cruz’s campaign released an advert aimed at highlighting Mr Trump’s history of support for abortion rights. The fiveminute video uses a 1999 clip in which Mr Trump calls himself “very prochoice”.
He was accused by Mr Cruz of being the only “candidate in the race playing games with the sanctity of life”.
Mr Trump – who this week came under attack from the Pope – responded by saying his position had “evolved” and that he was firmly pro-life.
Primary race aside, the visits to the pro-life centre are also symptomatic of an angry debate raging on the national stage over the moral and religious direction of the US.
Even as the legalisation of same-sex marriage by the Supreme Court last year saw some heralding a liberal era, “values voters” on the religious Right have pushed back hard, fighting for a country governed by socially conservative principles.
Forty-three years after abortion was legalised, the practice is a key topic of the 2016 presidential election.
The flames of the argument were stoked last summer in a video by a pro-life group that claimed to show Planned Parenthood, the US’s leading women’s healthcare provider, illegally harvesting and profiting from the sale of aborted foetuses for medical research. Last month, the two activists from the Centre for Medical Progress who secretly shot the footage were indicted on charges of intent to defraud, after the videos were misleadingly edited.
Defenders of the practice say that while some scientists do receive foetal tissue for research from clinics, including Planned Parenthood, the consent of women having an abortion is required.
The reported sale price of $30 to $100 (£21-£70) per specimen is said to be only to cover costs.
None the less, the graphic videos present conservatives with what many see as their best chance in years to enact more restrictions on abortion.
Planned Parenthood provides everything from testing for sexually transmitted diseases to breast cancer diagnoses. Abortion amounts to approximately three per cent of the services, according to its data.
And as the primary race intensifies so have the promises from leading Republican presidential candidates for the clinics to be stopped from receiving federal funding.
Mr Cruz, the evangelical Texas senator, has called Planned Parenthood a “criminal enterprise” guilty of “multiple felonies”.
Mr Rubio pointed at the anger last year over the shooting of Cecil the lion to ask where the outrage was over the clinics and “dead babies”.
Republican candidate Ben Carson told The Daily Telegraph this week that the organisation had created a “culture of death”.
Democrats, including Hillary Clinton have, meanwhile, dismissed the debate over the ethics of using foetal tissue for research as a conservative attack on a “woman’s right to choose”.
The intense nature of the abortion debate is a reflection of competing opinions in American society.
A recent study by Gallup found that a candidate’s stance on abortion was now the single most important factor in determining how to vote, for a record number of Americans.
This was true for 21 per cent of voters, while another 46 per cent say that issue is one of many important factors they will take into account.
The vitriol stirred by the abortion debate has had tragic consequences.
In November Robert Lewis Dear, 57, opened fire on a Planned Parenthood centre in Colorado Springs, killing three people and wounding nine others in a five-hour stand-off with police. When he was arrested he reportedly said to investigators, “No more body parts.”
This was one of dozens of attacks against women’s healthcare providers that also perform abortions in America’s recent past.
Arson attacks and shootings have prompted many clinics to bulletproof their windows and install metal detectors at the entrance.
Some staff have even been issued bulletproof vests.
Among other precautions, employees in health clinics have been advised by a government agency never to put their name on a door bell or postbox of their residence.
The Colorado Springs clinic reopened this week but with much of the building still damaged from the shooting.
“This has been hard on everybody; on the community and the staff and on the patients,” Vicki Cowart, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood in the Rocky Mountains, the region that includes the Colorado Spring clinic, told The Daily Telegraph.
“Many staff across the country walk through groups of harassers screaming at them every day on their way to work. They scream at the doctors, at the nurses, at the receptionist, and at the UPS [postman]. And they scream at the patients.”
In South Carolina, protesters who are largely motivated by deeply religious beliefs have chosen a different mode of demonstrating: prayer.
Lynn Kubia, 57, has spent years protesting outside a healthcare centre in Greenville, that includes abortion in these services. Standing on a grassy patch on the clinic’s tarmac drive, beside a sign that said “Pray to end abortion”, she and two others tried to catch the eye of patients as they went inside.
“When people go in there we immediately go into prayer,” she said, insisting that often God answers her prayers. “We ask the Holy Spirit to give us the words. People change their minds.” Mrs Kubia held an image of a 10-weekold foetus. It had attached to it two tiny silver metal shapes of tiny feet, which she said, was a cast of the feet of a real aborted foetus.
Both her sons, she said, were boys she had adopted after their mothers decided at the last minute not to abort them.
Showing pictures of two strapping young men in their twenties on her phone, one of whom is in the US special forces, she said: “Both of them sometimes come out here and hold signs that say ‘This is what happens when you choose life’.”
Church networks in South Carolina have established “crisis pregnancy centres” – clinics that seek to convince pregnant women who are undecided about their pregnancy not to choose abortion.
While Planned Parenthood has been stripped of state funds by South Carolina’s conservative local government, some of the clinics are said to receive some financial assistance.
Critics have said that the clinics are intentionally misleading women to think they provide abortion services, and then trying to coerce them against the practice once they come to the clinic.
Alexia Newman, the director of the Carolina Pregnancy Centre – which
‘Mr Trump was accused by Mr Cruz of being the “only candidate playing games with the sanctity of life” ’
‘Many staff walk through groups of harassers screaming at them every day on their way to work’
has attracted so many Republican candidates – says she believes abortion is a sin but that she does not think it is right to judge others.
Instead she says, the clinic approaches the issue with “love” and supports women in finding alternative solutions to an unwanted pregnancy.
The centre has religious verses painted on the walls: “How beautiful are the feet who bring good news” and “Destiny is not a matter of chance. It’s a matter of choice”. Pamphlets proudly advocate no sex before marriage as a practical solution to avoiding sexually transmitted diseases. Others address abortion, warning women in bold letters of emotional trauma and health risks (“Do you really want to have an abortion?” reads one title).
The centre has implemented an “earn while you learn” programme, designed to help low income women with the goods and knowledge to help them care for their child and, as Ms Newman told Mr Rubio during his visit to “bring them into the church”.
The centre includes a boutique-style shop filled with baby clothes, nappies, books and toys, that parents can buy with “mummy money”, an internal funding system, whereby they receive vouchers in exchange for completing homework set by the clinic staff.
Reading a book about child-rearing, going to Bible study or attending church are all ways that participants can earn vouchers.
For people who have already had an abortion, the clinic offers a post-abortion Bible study, an eight-week course that mixes therapy with the reading and interpretation of scripture.
“Sure we are looking out for the baby, but we are also want to help women,” said Ms Newman. “We want people to leave with more life than they came in with.”
After thanking staff for their work during his visit, Mr Rubio sought to outdo Mr Cruz, his arch rival for the evangelical vote in South Carolina.
In the speech delivered hours before residents were set to go to the polls, he told his audience that despite attention given to legislative debates in Congress, it was people like them, people working in the background who would likely never end up on the front page of a newspaper, that were making the real difference.
You “keep doing what you are doing”, he said, because “nothing is more precious than life”.