Judy Culpepper
St. Lucie County, FL 

Contents

Judy Culpepper Works to Block Fifth Term For Green

Jeff Bloch Herald Staff Writer
30 Oct 1982
The Miami Herald, Section: Indian River, Page: 1b

Judy Culpepper said she is running for the County Commission District 2 seat to get things moving.

"The opportunities we have here, that have been lying fallow, are everywhere," she said. "We have a super area that we just aren't doing anything with."

Plans to deepen the port and attract new industry to the county are in the works, but Culpepper said the projects need to move faster and get more leadership from the County Commission.

"Business as usual with 18 per cent unemployment just isn't good enough," said Culpepper, a 31-year-old Republican Realtor and native of St. Lucie County.

Democrat E.E. Green, whom Culpepper is trying to prevent
from winning a fifth four-year term on the County Commission, said he has accomplished much on the commission and the county needs experienced commissioners.

"It's a big business," said Green, a 61-year-old retired water systems businessman and native of the county. "It's no place for on-the-job training.

"Experience is the key word," Green said. "It's something you cannot buy. You cannot get it out of a book."

Green's biggest role on the commission in the past two years has been in the fight against massive high-rise developments on Hutchinson Island. Through all the recent long debates about how many people the island can hold, Green, who previously voted for most of the early high-rises, stubbornly has voted against every recent high-rise project on the barrier island.

On the Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council earlier this year, Green joined the majority in asking the state to study imposing state zoning rules on the island.

"That was the only step at the time," Green said, adding that he thinks commissioners will agree to limit development on their own, without having the state step in.

Even if a new bridge is built, Green said, he wants to impose lower density limits on the island permanently to preserve beaches and ensure the safety of island residents.

Culpepper said the number of future residential units should be limited through building height limits for fire safety and stricter environmental controls that would prevent developers from destroying wetlands. If those measures had been enacted several years ago, Culpepper said, the current controversy might have been avoided.

"I don't want to pave the island," Culpepper said. "I'm not going to go against the will of the people."

Both candidates said the moratorium on island site plans, scheduled to end Dec. 7, should be extended if necessary while zoning recommendations from a consultant's study are being implemented. Both candidates also support the proposed $10- million bond issue to buy and improve beachfront that voters will decide Tuesday.

Culpepper said St. Lucie County needs to attract new industry, but will lose out to surrounding communities unless the county provides an attractive place for businesses to locate. Streets and parks should be kept cleaner and businesses should be required to provide more attractive landscaping, she said.

"People have been griping for years about how we seem to get a lesser human here," Culpepper said. "I care too much about this area to allow that to happen."

JUDY CULPEPPER

Commissioner Judy Culpepper Clears The Air About Her Plans

29 Nov 1989
The Miami Herald, Section: Trsr Coast, Page: 1b

St. Lucie County Commissioner Judy Culpepper announced Tuesday that she will seek re-election next year, putting to rest yearlong rumors that she would retire from public office.

Culpepper, a Republican, was elected to the commission in 1986 and recently served as chairwoman. Some thought she would leave office at the end of her four-year term, possibly to run for the state House of Representatives or work as a business consultant, as she did before she was elected.

Her enrollment in September at the University of Florida, where she expects to complete a bachelor's degree in business management by June, fueled the rumors she would quit.

But at a short press conference Tuesday, Culpepper revealed that her husband, Brett Culpepper, 40, a partner in the Fort Pierce engineering firm Culpepper & Terpening, was diagnosed in March 1988 as having a degenerative nerve disease. That led her to consider career options that might provide more income for the family, she said. The couple has three daughters, ages 7, 10 and 13.

Between a slowing of her husband's disease through medication and a settling of the family's finances, Culpepper said, "I can afford, quite literally, to commit to another four years in a job that has a set salary."

Completing her degree, she said, will allow her to seek other employment later on if necessary. But she was upbeat about the possibility of serving four more years in county government.

"We'll be over this hurdle soon enough," she said.

Judy Culpepper, A Loyal Republican, and 'Hostage' of Abortion Politics, Battles GOP

Joins With Others To Overturn Ban on Funding for Research on Transplants Using Fetal Tissue from Abortions. Believes Transplant Could Help Save Her Husband's Life.

By Christopher Scanlan, Knight-Ridder Newspapers
7 Oct 1991
Beacon Journal, Page: A2

After 16 years as a loyal Republican, stuffing envelopes, hanging campaign signs and running for local office, Judy Culpepper finds herself in an unlikely contest this fall.

She's fighting her own political party to save her husband's life.

For her, the frontiers of science have collided with the politics of abortion.

In 1988, the Reagan administration banned federal funding for research on transplants using fetal tissue from abortions, a policy continued by President Bush. Although overshadowed by the public clashes over abortion rights, the federal ban poses an even more complex -- and painful -- dilemma.

Abortion opponents fear that using tissues from aborted fetuses could lead to fetal harvesting clinics and tissue banks.

Yet advocates of the still-experimental transplants consider them the best hope for millions of Americans, among them Culpepper's husband, Brett, a once- athletic civil engineer with Parkinson's disease.

Like George Bush, Judy Culpepper believes abortion is wrong. But, she says, ' two wrongs don't make a right. We either use this tissue to save the living or we pitch it in the trash.'

`What we are doing as a Republican Party is saying that scientific research may not proceed because we don't like the source of the research material,'
she says. `And when we do that, what we are doing -- and I cannot put it in kinder terms because I am watching my husband on a daily basis -- is sentencing people to death.'

Fearful future
`Dad, will you sign this for me?' 9-year-old Wendy Culpepper asks, handing her father a sheaf of school papers.

It's the kind of mundane chore a parent would normally dispatch with a hasty scrawl. But Parkinson's disease, a degenerative neurological disorder, leaves its victims trapped in a cycle of tremors and paralysis. Culpepper takes a pen, carefully positions it on the page and, gripping it so tightly his knuckles whiten, laboriously writes his name.

It's a minor triumph for Culpepper, a boyish 42, who fears he may be in a wheelchair when his daughter graduates from college -- if he's still alive.

In 19 years of marriage and hard work, the Culpeppers have built a sweet life in the southeastern Florida coastal community of Fort Pierce. Three bright daughters. His thriving engineering practice. Her political career as a local Republican leader and two-term county commissioner. A roomy new house with a fenced-in pool overlooking a fish-stocked pond.

Then in 1987, the first hints of disaster. Brushing his teeth, Culpepper watched his right hand freeze. He needed both hands to finish. `I thought I suffered a small stroke,' he says. `I had no idea it was the beginning of something that would only get worse.'

An estimated 1.5 million Americans have Parkinson's disease. While the typical victim is elderly, about 50,000 are stricken in their 20s, 30s and 40s. The youngest victim is 2.

Even with drug therapy, Parkinson's takes victims on an inexorable slide that robs their ability to walk, talk, get around.

Ethical questions
Baby M. Test-tube babies. Nancy Cruzan and the right to die. From surrogate mothers and in vitro fertilization to suicide machines and life-support technology, scientific advances and shifting attitudes have forced society to rethink the very definitions of life and death.

Should someone with a terminal disease be allowed to end his or her own life? Is it moral to have a baby for someone if the price is right? Can a daughter become pregnant and have an abortion, simply to donate the fetal tissue to treat her sick parent's illness?

As lawmakers, judges and philosophers grapple with these difficult questions, individual Americans caught in a web of conflicting interests are forced to make up their own minds.

Consider Guy Walden, a Baptist minister from Houston, and his wife, Terri. Fervent foes of abortion, they were offered a chance to save their unborn child from a rare genetic disorder that had claimed two of their children. But the pioneering, in-the-womb transplant depended on tissue from an aborted fetus.

The couple agreed, taking guidance from fellow Christians, lawyers and the Bible, including the account of Eve's creation from Adam's rib. After all, says Walden, `God performed the first transplant from one human being to another.' Doctors are still studying their son, Nathan, now 11 months old, to judge the transplant's ultimate success.

Debate rages
The chief objection of fetal transplant critics is that women considering an abortion, especially those with ambivalent feelings, would be influenced knowing that their fetus could help someone with an incurable disease.

`It will tip the balance for some women, and they would have abortions that might not otherwise occur,' says James Bopp Jr., general counsel for the National Right to Life Committee.

Supporters say there's no evidence to support that argument. They point out that abortions have not increased in Sweden, where fetal tissue transplants are more common.

And so the debate rages:

+ Abortion opponent Bopp: `If (Culpepper) needed a kidney, would we be free to pick out some homeless person? Absolutely not. We don't victimize one person for the benefit of another.'

+ Elaine Brennan, a Culpepper family friend and Roman Catholic: `I'm opposed to abortion, but this is not going to stop women from having them. How can you shut the door on these people?'

+ Pastor Walden: `Nothing that we can do is going to bring back that child that was aborted. But we have an opportunity to save the life of another child. I have a real hard time understanding why it's better to let two children die.'

+ The Rev. Robert Garment, a Fort Pierce abortion foe: `There are limits that a civilized society must draw, even in pursuit of so noble a goal.'

+ Judy Culpepper: What they're saying is, `I'd rather see you die instead. That's what it boils down to.'

Drugs vs. transplant
Today, Brett Culpepper's symptoms are checked partially by medication that mimics the effects of dopamine, the neurochemical vital to coordinate movements and no longer produced by patients with Parkinson's disease.

He can still work on his computer, but he's had to give up softball, and his golf clubs sit unused in the garage.

And eventually, even the drugs will lose their power or cause side effects as bad as the disease.

At that point, Culpepper would be a likely candidate for a fetal tissue transplant, if the still-experimental research is successful.

Cells from fetuses are considered preferable to other tissues because they seem less vulnerable to rejection, which dooms many transplants.

In the last few years, doctors in Sweden and Colorado have reported encouraging improvements in Parkinson's patients after implanting fetal nerve cells in the part of their brains -- known as the substantia nigra -- that produces dopamine.

In similar fashion, insulin-producing cells from fetuses have been implanted into diabetics with promising results.

Researchers hope fetal transplants could ultimately help those afflicted with epilepsy, aplastic anemia, leukemia, spinal cord injury as well as more than a hundred genetic and developmental problems of unborn children like Nathan Walden, thus reducing the 12 percent of abortions now performed for medical reasons.

GOP opposition
While promising, the research is a long way from a miracle cure. `There's an enormous amount more work to be done,' says Dr. Walter Bradley, chairman of the department of neurology at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center.

Judy Culpepper wants to make sure that `when the inevitable comes,' the procedure is `widespread and available and almost routine.'

First, she has to break down her party's opposition. On March 22, 1988, the DAY, before her husband was diagnosed, the Reagan administration shut off money for transplant research using aborted fetuses. The decision disregarded the recommendations of two scientific panels that called for continued funding, with strict guidelines to curb abuses.

Almost no research
In an age when little elaborate scientific research is done without government money, the funding ban has slowed fetal tissue transplant research in this country nearly to a halt. Of the 600 fetal tissue transplants performed around the world, only 38 have occurred in the United States.

`We're hostages of abortion politics,' complains Joan Samuelson, 41, a California lawyer who founded the Parkinson's Action Network to fight for legislation lifting the federal ban.

This fall, as Culpepper's husband copes with fatigue, hands that shake or refuse to move, and gnawing fears about the future, Judy Culpepper is making speeches, working the phones, lobbying Republican senators, sending letters to newspapers in support of Democratic legislation that would lift the funding ban.

A bill passed the House in July and may reach the Senate later this year.
Even if it passes, Republicans are confident of a presidential veto.

Clinton Cancels Ban On Research Using Tissues Of Aborted Fetuses Transplant Pioneer, Parkinson's Patients, including Brett Culpepper, Cheer Move

By Christopher Scanlan - Knight-Ridder
23 Jan 1993
Buffalo News
FINAL, Page A3

With a stroke of a pen, President Clinton lifted a five-year Republican ban on medical research using tissue from aborted fetuses and gave hope Friday to millions of Americans with incurable diseases.

"It may make the difference whether my life is saved or not," said Joan Samuelson, 42, a lawyer from Santa Rosa, Calif., with Parkinson's disease. She founded a network of patients to lobby against the ban imposed by former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, who had argued that paying for fetal tissue research would encourage women to have abortions.

"We must free science and medicine from the grasp of politics," Clinton said as he ended federal funding restrictions for experimental research that abortion foes had likened to "baby harvesting for spare parts."

"The federal government is no longer standing in the way," transplant pioneer Dr. Eugene Redmond of Yale University cheered from a car phone as he sped to catch a plane for the signing ceremony in the Oval Office. Using private funds, Redmond and another transplant team in Denver have reported significant improvement in Parkinson's patients who received fetal nerve cells.

Anticipating Clinton's decision to lift the ban, transplant teams are already scrambling to complete applications to meet a Feb. 1 deadline for funding from the National Institutes of Health. When the ban was in effect, they had to rely on private money or wealthy patients. Other researchers abandoned plans to pursue research.

Patient advocates and scientific organizations said they would push Institutes of Health to make funds available immediately. One source: an estimated $21 million Bush set aside last year to set up storage banks for fetal tissue obtained from miscarriages or tubal pregnancies. Bush called the banks "pro-research, pro-life." To critics, they were unworkable and unsafe.

Raymond Scalettar, a doctor and spokesman for the American Medical Association, hailed Clinton's action. "It would be tragic not to explore the science since a breakthrough could affect tens of thousands of lives," he said.

Lifting the ban, researchers said, could lead to effective treatment for Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, leukemia and epilepsy, incurable ailments that afflict more than 10 million Americans. Still, they cautioned patients not to expect overnight cures or even an immediate increase in the number of experimental transplant operations.

"We would be prepared to operate on perhaps a dozen patients per year. It's still not going to be hundreds of patients," said Dr. Curt Freed, the Denver neurosurgeon who performed the first fetal tissue transplant in a Parkinson's patient in the United States in 1988.

The results have been dramatic. Freed's patients, afflicted with the degenerative neurological disorder that leaves its victims trapped in a cycle of tremors and paralysis, have resumed walking without falling, talking intelligibly, even getting their driver's licenses back.

But advocates expect continued opposition from abortion rights opponents.

Wanda Franz, president of the National Right to Life Committee, predicted that lifting the ban will increase the number of abortions, now 1.6 million a year.

Dr. Thomas Freeman, a transplant researcher at the University of South Florida in Tampa, said he believes the major effect of Clinton's action is a psychological one.

"I get asked once a day, 'So is what you're doing now legal?' It was never illegal. All that will happen is that the stigma attached to this research will melt away."

For disease victims and their families, word of Clinton's action brought relief and hope.

"I've been banking on the fact that these were promises that were going to be kept," said Judy Culpepper , a Republican county commissioner in Fort Pierce, Fla., whose husband, Brett, has Parkinson's disease. The ban had led both to vote for a Democrat for president for the first time.

"Long time coming, but good news to hear," said Brett Culpepper. "I just hope it hasn't come too late."

Culpepper Ancestry. Judy's husband, Brett, is the son of Robert Lee Culpepper (#11092), son of Charles Benjamin Culpepper.