Fiorina Campaign Denies 'Ambush' of Pre-Schoolers

Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign is brushing off accusations that the candidate hijacked a school trip to an Iowa botanical garden and turned it into an anti-abortion rally – including a large picture of a fetus in the background.

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina addresses the "Road to Majority" conference in Washington June 20, 2015.

As Fiorina entered a “right to life” forum at the Greater Des Moines botanical garden on Wednesday before about 60 people, she reportedly steered more than a dozen preschoolers to sit around her on a small stage, then discussed her opposition to abortion.


The father of one four-year-old in the group complained the candidate had “ambushed” the field trip. “The kids went there to see the plants,” Chris Beck, of Ankeny, Iowa, and the father of Chatham Beck, told the Guardian.

“Taking them into a pro-life/abortion discussion …  very poor taste and judgment,” Beck said of the former Hewlett-Packard CEO. “I would not want my four-year-old going to that forum – he can’t fully comprehend that stuff. He likes dinosaurs, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers.”
The Fiorina campaign said the incident wasn’t that nefarious.

"In Des Moines yesterday, a group of preschoolers along with their parents and teachers followed Carly right into the event she was speaking at for Iowa Right to Life," campaign manager Sarah Isgur Flores said in a statement. "Earlier, she'd run into the kids in the Botanical Gardens and watched the Koi with them for a while.

I guess the kids must have thought she was pretty neat because then their teachers and parents and the kids all followed Carly into the event complete with Carly stickers."

Fiorina is languishing in the low single-digits in polls in Iowa and nationally, with less than two weeks to go before voters caucus in the Hawkeye state.

With a renewed focus on abortion, Fiorina is harkening back to her best weeks of the campaign: In late September and early October, her numbers spiked after a passionate – if factually challenged – statement on “sting” by an anti-abortion group that purported to show a moving fetus after an abortion.

“I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes,” she said at the Sept. 16 Republican primary debate. “Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”

According to FactCheck.org, the video to which she was referring was spliced together from several sources, and it’s unclear if the video depicts what it describes.