Conservative causes get Bay State patron

Dover businessman backs abortion foes

Jill Stanek is an Illinois nurse whose antiabortion leanings turned into a mission a decade ago. That, she says, was when for 45 minutes she held a tiny, half-pound fetus with Down syndrome until it died after a second-trimester abortion. This past summer, when Stanek wanted to create an advocacy group opposed to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, she turned to retired Massachusetts businessman Raymond Ruddy for backing.

With a $350,000 check from Ruddy, as well as guidance from him, BornAliveTruth.com was founded. It ran an ad last month in Ohio and New Mexico featuring a woman who survived a botched abortion and castigating Obama for opposing an Illinois measure that abortion-rights proponents said would have undermined Roe v. Wade.

BornAliveTruth joins a list of undertakings that have made Ruddy a major funder of causes dear to the Christian right. The Gerard Health Foundation, which he created in 2001, has disbursed more than $7 million to groups that oppose abortion rights, support abstinence-only sex education, and stress abstinence and marital fidelity, rather than the distribution of condoms, to fight the spread of AIDS. The foundation's grants include at least $1.4 million to the abstinence-oriented Medical Institute for Sexual Health; $913,000 to A Woman's Concern, a Dorchester-based sponsor of abstinence-only sex education programs and antiabortion crisis pregnancy centers; and $635,000 to James Dobson's Focus on the Family.

As an individual, Ruddy contributed $327,000 in 2006 to Common Sense Ohio, which stirred controversy by using automated "push" polling in six US Senate races to steer voters to certain candidates by asking leading questions under the guise of conducting political surveys.

Ruddy, who is Catholic, lives in Dover and runs Gerard from a shingled building in South Natick. He founded Gerard after he retired in 2001 as chairman of the board of Maximus, a Virginia-based government services contractor. He headed its consulting group from 1989 to 2000. Ruddy spent a year visiting charities, before establishing Gerard. He declined to be interviewed or photographed for this story, but he answered questions by e-mail.

"I was not a pro-lifer. But around the same time I opened up the Gerard Health Foundation I viewed an ultrasound of my daughter's oldest son and realized without any shadow of a doubt that this was indeed a living person," Ruddy wrote. "So I became a pro-life advocate."

Last month, Gerard joined a coalition convened by the Illinois-based Pro-Life Action League to launch a nationwide campaign against Planned Parenthood. The league was a target of groundbreaking antiracketeering litigation filed by Planned Parenthood in 1985, an era of abortion clinic blockades and firebombings. The US Supreme Court ultimately overturned a jury verdict in favor of Planned Parenthood, but not before Congress had enacted a law limiting antiabortion protests.

In July, Gerard announced the creation of the $600,000 Life Prizes to recognize one or more individuals or organizations working against abortion, embryonic stem cell research, or related causes. The judges include Raymond Flynn, former Boston mayor and ambassador to the Vatican, and the Rev. Alveda King, a niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

To his supporters, Ruddy, 65, is a generous man who puts his wealth where his values are.

"He's experienced much of the American dream," said the Rev. John Ensor, the Baptist minister who founded A Woman's Concern in 1993. "After he retired I think he just began to feel the grace of God in his life and felt he needed to be dedicated this last season of his life to the most important things he could do: to save lives."

To his critics, Ruddy is a well-connected funder of questionable conservative causes.

"We certainly understand that people can differ personally and politically on reproductive health issues," said Andrea Miller, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts. "What's disturbing about the decisions he has made is that they reflect the most extreme viewpoints. It's beyond the grounds of appropriate discourse. It's dangerous and misleading information coming from organizations he provides core support to."

Ruddy brings a hands-on sensibility to his work. "He preferred that at least at the organizing part of the campaign that we work with him, make sure it was done right, lay solid groundwork, which we have done, then open up to the rest of the pro-life world for help," said Stanek.

In a 2007 article titled "The Abstinence Gluttons," which Ruddy's aide Jack Malloy terms "most inaccurate," the liberal magazine The Nation described a web of overlapping relationships among Maximus, Ruddy, and the Bush administration that benefited groups Ruddy supported and Maximus. The company, which grew as privatization of government functions grew, had 23 employees and $2 million in revenue when Ruddy joined it in 1984 and 4,825 employees and $487 million in revenue when he retired. In 2007, Maximus had revenues of $739 million and 6,120 employees. Ruddy is currently vice chairman of its board.

Claude Allen, President Bush's former domestic policy adviser, represents Ruddy's foundation in the newly announced campaign against Planned Parenthood. Ruddy, acting as an individual, has paid more than $1.3 million since 2002 to two powerful lobbying firms with strong Republican connections - Barbour Griffith & Rogers (Now BGR Holding LLC) and Stanton Park Group. In Massachusetts, Ruddy has paid lobbyist John Bartley, a former state legislator, $168,000 since 2005 to promote abstinence education on Beacon Hill.

In 2006, Ruddy and other conservative Christian leaders urged Congress to cut funding for the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS because it promoted condoms and provided what the group felt was insufficient support to faith-based organizations.

"People's lives are on the line, and we must tell them how they can best ensure preventing the spread of this deadly disease, Ruddy wrote in his e-mail. "Those that believe we can prevent a countrywide HIV/AIDS epidemic via condoms/pills/creams/counseling/etc. have not one single success to point to and are simply misguided."

Global Fund spokesman Jon Liden said the fund welcomes faith-based organizations and disputed Ruddy's assertions. "There is very little controversy outside the religious right in the US that you have to have a combination of widely available condoms, large information campaigns about the use of condoms combined with clear messaging about behavior," Liden said. "Abstinence alone has been shown to be highly ineffective wherever you promote it, whether in the US to prevent teen pregnancy or to prevent the spread of AIDS.

"Faithfulness alone is not adequate. You have situations in Africa where women have very little control over their sexual lives."

Last year Ruddy helped spearhead an unsuccessful campaign to persuade his alma mater, College of the Holy Cross, to cancel a conference on teen pregnancy that included representatives of Planned Parenthood and NARAL scheduled for rented space on the Worcester campus. The effort attracted support from Worcester Bishop Robert McManus, and Ruddy, in a letter to the college's president, offered to defray costs incurred by blocking the meeting. "We simply must pursue all possible avenues to prevent this evil event from taking place on the Holy Cross campus," he wrote.

Ruddy summed up his work in his e-mail: "I was blessed to receive significant funds from my work activities and wanted to pay back in terms of making life better for my children and grandchildren and for the world as a whole. Too often politics undermines common sense even when it comes to defending the lives of the most innocent among us, or saving the lives of those most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS."