HARLESTON, S.C. - In 1992, Senator John McCain agonized over the choice of maintaining his unblemished antiabortion voting record or doing a favor for a friend. He followed friendship, and the consequence is that McCain's votes to allow research on fetal-tissue transplants have come under fire in his presidential campaign.
South Carolina Citizens for Life aired radio ads urging voters to oppose McCain in the primary on Saturday because, the ads said, the Arizona Republican had ''flip-flopped'' on a promise to maintain the ban on federal funds for research ''that uses the body parts of aborted babies.''
Last week, the National Right to Life Committee and Citizens for Life, its South Carolina affiliate, endorsed McCain's rival, Texas Governor George W. Bush, in the hot South Carolina contest.
There's no disputing that McCain was inconsistent on the fetal-tissue issue, and that the candidate who rails against special interests listened to a lobbyist who championed fetal-tissue therapies. The lobbyist was Anne Udall. Her father, former Representative Morris K. Udall of Arizona was in a Veterans Administration medical center, wasting away from the Parkinson's disease that would kill him in December 1998 at age 76.
''I can still remember John sitting in his office, not only listening to me on fetal tissue but also talking about what my dad meant to him,'' Anne Udall said. ''It was very powerful. And he said, `If it is the right thing to do, I will do it.'''
First-term Representative Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, says the bond between his father, a liberal Democrat, and McCain, a conservative Republican, transcended ideology and geography. ''I think it was very personal for McCain, a former prisoner of war, to see my father just wasted by this terrible disease and, over eight years in a VA hospital, becoming half the man he was.''
McCain said ''the spectacle'' of Udall's illness had caused his change of heart. ''I'm not supporting abortion to provide'' fetal tissue, McCain said in a television interview. ''But the fact is, I've been convinced that it is a promising way to find a cure for a terrible, terrible disease.''
In the early 1990s, preliminary research on the use of fetal-tissue transplants showed promise in treating incurable diseases like diabetes and Parkinson's. The hope was that new, young cells injected into a diseased part of the body would generate healthy tissue. The problem was that the primary source of the cells is induced abortions, and antiabortion activists demanded Congress discourage the procedure.
In a January 1992 letter to the director of Arizona Right to Life, McCain said the group could count on his being ''steadfast'' against abortion. ''I have no intention of supporting the use of fetal tissue'' from abortions, McCain wrote.
Three months later, McCain voted in favor of a Senate bill authorizing funds for the National Institutes of Health that included a provision to lift the federal-research moratorium that presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush had imposed on fetal-tissue transplants.
''I have lost sleep struggling with this,'' McCain wrote to a constituent in May 1992. ''My abhorrence for the practice of abortion is unquestionable. Yet my abhorrence'' for Parkinson's and juvenile diabetes ''and the suffering they cause is just as strong.''
Joan Samuelson, who has Parkinson's disease, trooped from office to office on Capitol Hill with Anne Udall in early 1992 and persuaded some Republicans, including senators Bob Dole of Kansas and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina (a backer of Governor George W. Bush), to defy the antiabortion lobby and cast what she called ''an equally pro-life vote'' in favor of fetal-tissue research.
''I remember McCain was very tortured by this,'' said Samuelson, who is president of the Parkinson's Action Network. ''He was a very, very hard sell.''
But Anne Udall also knew how McCain felt about her father. ''Mo'' Udall, a longtime committee chairman in the House, could have ignored, even needled the cocky Republican from Phoenix when he arrived as a freshman congressman in 1982. Instead, Udall mentored, befriended, and included McCain in Arizona decision-making. Udall also offered a model of the kind of politician McCain would grow to be, a reform-minded maverick with a sense of humor.
''I see my dad in McCain - not in their ideologies, which are very different - but in the way McCain seems willing to stand up for what he believes and take on tough issues, like campaign-finance reform,'' said Anne Udall, who is a school administrator in Charlotte, N.C. ''He also seems like he can stand back and laugh at himself and have a good time.''
The Udall children said McCain repaid his political debt in his dedication to their ailing father. For eight years, Mark Udall said, McCain faithfully visited Udall at the VA medical center in Washington, even when his father was unable to make conversation or respond. When Udall died, McCain delivered a moving eulogy at his memorial service.
McCain also kept his commitment to the Udall family on fetal-tissue research. He was the chief sponsor of a bill, enacted in 1997 and bearing Udall's name, that provides $100 million a year for finding a cure for Parkinson's disease, a progressive neurological disorder that afflicts about 1 million Americans. He opposed an amendment that would have banned research on fetal-tissue transplants.
In laboratories, fetal-tissue transplantation has not proved as practical or promising as once promoted, and many researchers now call the political debate moot. ''No one feels it provides any long-term solutions,'' said Dr. J. William Langston, president of the Parkinson Institute in Sunnyvale, Calif. ''The science is taking us in a very different direction.''
One of those directions is research on transplanting human embryonic cells, or stem cells. Because harvesting stem cells usually requires destruction of embryos left over from in vitro fertilization procedures, antiabortion groups oppose it vigorously. Earlier this month, McCain joined 19 other senators in asking the National Institutes of Health to withdraw its new proposals to fund federal embryonic-cell research.
Cyndi Mosteller of Charleston, S.C., a McCain adviser on family issues and a longtime antiabortion activist, said the senator's positions are consistent: He would support nonembryo stem-cell research, just as he supports fetal-tissue research, which does not ''destroy a human being.'' Mosteller said the antiabortion group's ads against McCain are ''disingenuous'' and aimed less at his voting record than at his push to overhaul the campaign-finance laws.
In 1996, South Carolina's Citizens for Life ran newspaper ads calling Patrick J. Buchanan, Alan Keyes, and Bob Dole ''acceptable'' choices for primary voters, even though Dole, like McCain, supported federal fetal-tissue research.
''It's McCain's flip-flops. He says one thing on the West Coast and then comes east and blows into the ear of Christian conservatives and calls himself pro-life,'' said Holly Gatling, executive director of the South Carolina Citizens for Life political action committee. ''Bush's record as governor of Texas is solidly pro-life.''
At two McCain town meetings in the Charleston area last week, nobody asked about abortion, and women who voiced their opinions afterward seemed to agree that the issue is personal.
One of them, Peggy Ferro, an X-ray technician from Summerville, S.C., has two adopted children and a very negative view of abortion. But because her husband is a disabled veteran, she is much more interested in McCain's proposals to expand veterans' benefits than in the ''very old'' debate about fetal-tissue research.
Nancy Wells of Ladson, S.C., the mother of two teenagers, offered this: ''What I don't like is for Washington to pass laws that are `morally correct.' I believe abortion is a personal and family choice.''
