LI political activist Ellen McCormack dies

Ellen McCormack, a political activist and abortion opponent from Long Island who was twice a candidate for president of the United States, died Sunday of congestive heart failure at her assisted living residence, River Ridge, in Avon, Conn. She was 84.

In 1976, McCormack and a group of Long Island women opposed to legalized abortion formed the Pro-Life Action Committee. To highlight their issue, the group ran the Merrick homemaker for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

In a Newsday interview in April of that year, McCormack said she didn't expect to get many votes.

She won 22 first-ballot delegate votes at the Democratic National Convention in New York City, where Jimmy Carter won the nomination.

"She was a wonderful person," said her friend Jane Gilroy of Merrick, who was vice chairman for her 1976 campaign and treasurer for McCormack's 1980 run. "She also was the only woman who ever got matching [federal] funds for a presidential try."

McCormack became chairwoman of the NY State Right to Life Party and its candidate for lieutenant governor in 1979. She had made such an impression with her 1976 campaign that critics pushed through a change in the matching funds law that prevented McCormack from getting money in 1980. She ran again, anyway.

"She was a trailblazer in many ways, but first and foremost she was a proud mother and wife who had a personal mission to save the unborn," said Merrick's Democratic County Legis. David Denenberg, who said he had talked with her on several occasions over the years.

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McCormack's daughter in Connecticut, Kathleen Batterson of Farmington, with whom she had lived the past five years until the recent move to River Ridge, said her mother saw the world "through the eyes of the unborn."

Born Eleanor Rose Cullin, she married Francis McCormack in 1949. Her husband rose to deputy inspector with the New York Police Department. He died in 1993.

Survivors include two other daughters, Anne McCormack of Sag Harbor and Ellen Stapleton of Holbrook; a son, John McCormack of Yardley, Pa.; two sisters, Betty Taffner of Commack and Mary Mitchell of Lexington, Ky.; 11 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

A funeral Mass is at 10 a.m. Saturday at Cure Of Ars Roman Catholic Church, Merrick. Burial will follow at Mount St. Mary's in Flushing, Queens.