Hawaiʻi congressional candidate Nathan Berning doesn’t live in Hawaiʻi, claims to be pro-choice, and yet works with an anti-abortion group that wants you to see dead babies. 

Berning is running against Democratic U.S. Rep. Ed Case in November’s general election for the 1st Congressional District, and is part of a national slate of third-party, anti-abortion activists who have been using their candidacies to air graphic images of mutilated fetuses on TV stations around the country, including in Hawaiʻi.

The group has been taking advantage of federal law that states TV stations cannot refuse or censor political ads paid for by legally qualified candidates.

Berning has already conceded he has no chance of winning the CD1 race, but that hasn’t stopped him from courting controversy in the islands. Before the August primary, he aired television advertisements depicting images of an aborted fetus and an AI-generated likeness of Haunani-Kay Trask, a Native Hawaiian activist and scholar who died in 2021, endorsing his campaign.

The backlash to using Trask’s likeness caused Berning to pull the ad and apologize, but in an interview with Civil Beat he said he intends to run more spots in the final two weeks of his campaign that are “essentially the same,” meaning that Trask won’t be included but the aborted fetuses will.  

“How did we end slavery? Well, we had to show people the victims, right?” Berning said. “And how do we prevent illegal, botched late-term abortions? We got to show people the victims.”

Case said he saw Berning’s initial ads and described his tactics as “disgusting.” 

“It has no place in politics,” he said. “There’s really nothing more to be said.” 

Berning is affiliated with Babies.Vote, a joint fundraising committee that’s backing anti-abortion candidates from Virginia, Illinois and New Jersey to Michigan, Arizona and Alaska. 

The group’s website includes dramatic photos from history — whip scars on an enslaved man’s back, the battered face of a suffragette, a pile of bodies at a Nazi concentration camp, the open casket of Emmett Till — to make the point: “Every successful social revolution showed images of victims.”

Among the candidates running on the Babies.Vote platform are Joan Andrews Bell, an anti-abortion activist who was pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2025 just two years after she was convicted of blockading a reproductive health care clinic in Washington, D.C., and Randall Terry, a prominent figure in the pro-life movement and chief architect of the group’s strategy. 

Terry has spent years trying to air graphic campaign ads to further his cause, including in 2012 when he tried to put images of aborted fetuses on TV during the Super Bowl and in 2024 when he ran for president as a member of the Constitution Party and forced his message on unsuspecting viewers of major network shows, such as “The View” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “ABC World News Tonight.”

This year he launched campaigns in at least three different states: Virginia, New Jersey and Hawaiʻi, where he ran as a nonpartisan in the 2nd Congressional District, but did not receive enough votes in the August primary to qualify for the general election.  

Christopher Terry is a media law expert and associate professor at the University of Minnesota who’s followed Randall Terry’s campaign advertising strategies. He said that because Terry and his cohorts, Berning included, are legally qualified candidates, federal law says TV stations cannot censor or edit their ads based on content even if it contains controversial material. 

Under the rules they also qualify for the “lowest unit rate,” he said, which can make airtime relatively inexpensive and allow them to stretch their funding even further. 

“This is a pretty standard play for them,” Christopher Terry said. “Terry’s group, which changes its name more often than I change my socks, does that basically every election cycle.”

For his part, Randall Terry said he has no intentions of stopping. In an interview with Civil Beat, Terry said that the laws that allows him to show graphic images of the victims of abortions is “one of the things the federal government got right.”

“This is literally the last bastion of free speech,” he said. “This is the only way that we can fully tell the American people what’s going on with these babies and the exploitation of women. The people who want us to not show these ads, they’re the collaborators. 

“If a man or a woman was in a concentration camp in Germany and got pictures or film footage of the atrocities and then got out to safety and refused to show what was happening, that person is by definition a collaborator because they are hiding the truth. We will not be collaborators. We will show this genocide.”

‘Always Been Pro-Choice’ 

What makes Berning’s candidacy stand out even more is the fact that he doesn’t live in Hawaiʻi, nor is he required to since the only residency requirement for congressional candidates is that they be an inhabitant of the state when elected. 

Berning, who has addresses in Florida and Indiana, said he purchased a one-way ticket to the islands on Nov. 2, the day before the election, and has yet to book a return flight.  

Even though Berning only received 977 votes in the Aug. 8 primary, the fact that he won more votes than Green Party candidate Jordan Conley allowed him to qualify for the general election ballot and continue running his ad campaign.

Berning is the former CEO of Let Them Live, a nonprofit he co-founded with his wife that promises to provide financial support to women who are considering abortions if they agree not to terminate their pregnancies. The nonprofit was the subject of a 2023 Business Insider investigation that found it didn’t always follow through on its commitments. 

He said he’s no longer working with the organization in part because he’s going through a divorce. 

Berning considers himself as an outlier in the anti-abortion movement and says he’s “always been pro-choice.” He argues that strict abortion restrictions do not address the underlying reasons women seek to terminate their pregnancies and that the government should instead help those facing financial hardship so that they can keep their babies.

His top policy priority, he said, is “right-to-keep” legislation which would provide economic support, such as housing, food, utilities and transportation, to pregnant women to try to reduce the number of abortions that occur due to lack of resources.

He focused his candidacy in Hawaiʻi, he said, because abortion is legal and the islands are the “epicenter of the financial crisis in America when it comes to affordability for young people.”

Berning is under no presupposition he’ll win in November and pegs his odds at 0.1%. Still, his campaign has already purchased ads for the stretch into the Nov. 3 election to help push his agenda and pressure his opponents into taking notice. 

“I would challenge my opponents to actually pay attention to my message because the message is for them; it’s not for everyone,” Berning said. “They need to understand how serious the financial crisis is in Hawaii. Something has to be done.”