Chris Mooney

Some pro-lifers have floated the idea of just such a demonstration ever since learning that the British firm Acambis Inc., which recently secured two hefty deals with the U.S. government to prepare smallpox vaccines, plans to use the MRC-5 cell line as a substrate to make 54 million doses, the amount required by its first contract (the second batch will use a different substrate). What makes MRC-5 so controversial? According to a 1970 article in the British journal Nature, the cell line was originally derived in 1966 from the lung tissues of a male fetus “removed for psychiatric reasons from a 27-year-old woman.” In other words, MRC-5 was created from an abortion. Thus, the use of it suddenly links the issue of bioterror preparedness to the question of fetal tissue research — and, inevitably, abortion politics.

The antiabortion group Children of God for Life has led the charge, seizing on a “24-hour on-line poll” conducted by the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com that showed “56% of the 3,335 respondents said they would refuse the vaccine if it used aborted fetal tissue.” Internet polls, of course, are notoriously susceptible to the efforts of well-coordinated interest groups. And it’s one thing to click through a Web poll and another to spurn a vaccine that could prevent an excruciating death. “I actually would find it hard to believe that someone, an antiabortionist, would refuse vaccination on those grounds when faced with a high probability of contracting smallpox,” observes Jonathan B. Tucker, a bioterrorism expert at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California.

It’s possible that even amid the unprecedented chaos of a nationwide vaccination, antiabortionists would get the chance to choose between offensive and less offensive vaccines. But the fact remains that at least some Christian conservatives say they would seriously consider boycotting any vaccine that uses the MRC-5 cell line. Carrie Gordon Earll, the bioethics analyst for Focus on the Family, has said that Acambis’s vaccine derives from a “tainted source.” On a discussion thread about the vaccine on the populist conservative Web site FreeRepublic.com, one poster added, “If a smallpox vaccine is made from this material (I can’t even say it) then I would reject the vaccine.” More important, Children of God for Life’s political tactics include promoting a “Campaign for Ethical Vaccines,” and calling on followers to send a drafted letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and Centers for Disease Control director Jeffrey P. Koplan.

Religious groups have long protested the use of vaccinations because of their controversial origins. In Arkansas, a woman is suing to exempt her children from chickenpox inoculation because she claims the vaccine was also prepared from the MRC-5 cell line, as well as another abortion-derived line known as WI-38. But from an ethical standpoint, it’s curious that anti-abortionists don’t seem to have considered that smallpox vaccine might present a unique case.

“Smallpox is a contagious and communicable disease that threatens everybody,” notes Ronald M. Green, director of the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College. By refusing to be vaccinated for smallpox, you could not only kill yourself but infect others with what is arguably the most horrible plague known to mankind. Antivaccine Christians frequently cite Catholic theology and ethics in order to argue that they shouldn’t take any action that renders them “morally complicit” with abortion, but shouldn’t they also be worried about abetting the transmission of smallpox itself?

“Moral complicity” is a trendy religio-bioethical concept at the moment, thanks to President Bush’s August compromise on stem cell research. Influenced by his bioethics adviser Leon Kass, Bush stipulated that surplus human embryos that have already been destroyed can be mined for stem cells, but no new embryos may be created for the purpose of research because moral complicity would ensue. But as Green notes, the same logic surely ought to apply to the use of MRC-5: With respect to the 1966 abortion that led to the creation of the cell line, “nothing is going to change the fact that this was already done.”

Objections to Acambis’s vaccine also take little account of the urgent need for new approaches to manufacturing smallpox vaccine. The Christian conservative thinker Marvin Olasky (Bush’s guru on “compassionate conservatism”) has denounced the World Health Organization’s campaign to eradicate smallpoxresulting in our current increased vulnerability to the diseaseas the product of a liberal “faith in man’s abilities to move us toward utopia.” Today’s health concerns greatly outweigh any religious objections to the old vaccine, now in dwindling supply, that was commonly used to inoculate schoolchildren in this country until the early 1970s. Known as Wyeth Dryvax after Wyeth Laboratories, which stopped making it in 1975, the vaccine was produced through infecting calves with cowpox virus (which Edward Jenner demonstrated in 1796 could inoculate humans against smallpox).

After the virus showed its symptoms, the animals were slaughtered and the pustular lesions on their bellies were scraped off and freeze-dried. But in a recent paper in the CDC publication Emerging Infectious Diseases titled “Developing New Smallpox Vaccines,” the authors observe that “this harvesting method  is prone to contamination with bacteria and other adventitious agents.” A well-known and widely used cellular substrate such as MRC-5, note the authors, would not only avoid contamination risks because animals wouldn’t have to be used but could greatly speed up the review process. The FDA has already licensed other vaccines prepared in MRC-5 cells — no mean consideration when we’re urgently trying to guard against a smallpox attack. (In the event of an attack, such urgency would also militate against antiabortionist attempts to pick and choose which vaccines they will and won’t take.)

All these considerations make the prospect of a smallpox vaccine boycott appear shrill indeed. But then, perhaps the point was never to lay out a strong ethical case for such an action. “What the abortion debate is about at this point is not so much ethics as it is politics and symbols,” observes Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. “And it gets your attention when somebody says, ‘I’d rather die of smallpox than use data tainted by the murder of fetuses.’”

Still, there’s another ethical concern that ought to bother antiabortionists: If pro-lifers are killed off in large numbers by smallpox because they don’t get inoculated, then who’ll be left in this country to picket abortion clinics and try to prevent the murder of the unborn? Would antiabortionists not then be “morally complicit” in the severe weakening of their own movement? Faced with this dilemma, it’s not difficult to imagine what side followers of Children of God for Life would have to come down on.

“Mrs. Flounders explained that she had selected the landmark tavern as the site for the reception ‘because they, too, were once bombed,’ she said, referring to the 1975 bombing by a Puerto Rican nationalist group in which four died and more than 60 were injured.”

This, as it happens, was one of the few post-Sept. 11 media references to the United States’ long history of grappling with Puerto Rican terrorism. That’s baffling, considering that as recently as August 1999, President Clinton offered to commute the sentences of 16 members of the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN (a Spanish acronym for the Armed Forces of National Liberation). It was FALN that was responsible for the Fraunces Tavern attack, as well as over 100 bombings during the 1970s and 1980s, largely in New York and Chicago.

Clinton’s move set off a firestorm at the time, leading the first lady, then running for the Senate in New York, to distance herself from her husband. It also ultimately resulted in a 95-2 Senate measure that condemned the clemencies and called them “deplorable.” Nevertheless, 11 former FALN members were freed soon afterward, and they returned to their homes in Chicago and Puerto Rico.

For once and future Clinton bashers, the subject of the FALN clemencies could hardly be more fruitful. Indeed, even as evidence mounts with each successive New York Times or Washington Post installment of what went wrong in fighting terrorism during the Clinton administration, Clinton’s detractors have overlooked a key piece of evidence. The former president’s behavior on the FALN issue almost certainly adds evidence that he was “soft on terrorism,” as well as revealing a breed of pre-Sept. 11 liberal-left politics that demanded the exculpation of former terrorists who were labeled “political prisoners.”

Those who lobbied for the clemencies have little interest in defending them today. Clemency supporters who did not return calls for this article include the Democratic Puerto Rican representatives Nydia Velázquez and José Serrano of New York and Luis Gutierrez of Chicago, who both acted as Washington proxies for nationalist-leaning Puerto Rican activists in the FALN furor and even pushed for unconditional pardons. (Clinton at least required that the prisoners renounce violence — and some would not, and were therefore denied clemency.) Collectively, Velázquez, Serrano and Gutierrez bowled over Puerto Rico’s single nonvoting representative to the U.S. Congress, the pro-statehood resident commissioner Carlos Romero-Barceló, who repudiated talk of the FALN members as “political prisoners” and opposed pardons outright, though he later accepted conditional clemency.

Ethnic one-upmanship appears to to be a factor in support for the FALN among Puerto Ricans. As one influential Puerto Rican, who asked not to be named, puts it, “Within the Puerto Rican or Hispanic context in the continental United States, to be in favor of independence and these people who were incarcerated is to place oneself on the most authentic left in your community. Which means you are the loudest mouth on ethnic matters. No one can accuse you of being insufficiently Puerto Rican.”

The ties between Puerto Rican identity politicking and the island’s often militant independentista movement dates back to the 1920s and 1930s, several decades after Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States at the close of the Spanish-American War. Those years saw the founding of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party under the leadership of the fiery, Harvard-educated orator Pedro Albizu Campos, an FALN role model who ultimately advocated Puerto Rico’s liberation from the United States by violent means.

In the 1960s, Puerto Rican nationalists forged enduring ties with the anti-Vietnam War left in the continental United States, and the cause of Puerto Rican independence became wedded to feminism, socialism and the sexual revolution. Today the Puerto Rican Independence Party wins just 4 percent of the vote in Puerto Rico, but independentistas are disproportionately represented among the island’s intelligentsia and cultural elite. And many of those leftists had no qualms about dubbing the FALN members “political prisoners” because in doing so, they were allying themselves with individuals who had been jailed for taking on that imperialist oppressor, the United States, and thereby dedicating their lives to Puerto Rican autonomy, cultural homogeneity and independence. Never mind the terrorism.

The Puerto Rican community in the continental United States also nourishes a culturally nationalist element, so it’s little surprise that other FALN clemency supporters who did not return calls for this article include former Bronx Democratic Party chairman Roberto Ramirez, and Jose Rivera, a former New York City Council member recently elected to the state Assembly. One person I did manage to speak with was Michael Deutsch of the Chicago-based People’s Law Office, who represented and continues to represent the 11 freed FALN members. Deutsch told me his clients were living “public, peaceful, law-abiding lives” and would not wish to comment, though he did say, “I don’t see any contradiction between what happened on Sept. 11 and their release prior to that,” he explained. “In my view, it’s kind of mixing apples and oranges.”

In one sense, Deutsch has a point. None of those offered clemency by Clinton had ever been directly implicated in any FALN attacks resulting in injuries or deaths. And FALN was never even close to being in the same league as al-Qaida (the Fraunces Tavern attack was an anomaly for the group, because civilians were victims). As Juan Manuel Carrión, a professor of sociology at the University of Puerto Rico, explains, “In Puerto Rico, we don’t really have a tradition of terrorism like in the Middle East, where you place bombs with nails to have the largest number of people hurt.”

Still, the individuals Clinton released were clearly core FALN members who were guilty of serious crimes including seditious conspiracy, armed robbery, weapons violations and unlawful storage of explosives, all committed to support terrorism. So what makes them so radically different from Zacarias Moussaoui, who allegedly helped conspire to commit the Sept. 11 attacks but was not directly involved?

Deutsch counters that his clients “had renounced violence years prior to their release.” But Sen. Clinton, for one, felt otherwise, announcing that the prisoners had not renounced violence quickly enough after President Clinton offered to commute their sentences. She then left her husband standing alone to defend them. Furthermore, under sentencing guidelines concerning “relevant conduct” (i.e., membership in a terrorist organization), which went into effect after the FALN members’ convictions in the late 1980s, a judge could have given them life imprisonment.

The contemporary outrage over the Clinton clemencies was thoroughly bipartisan in nature. At the time, the majority of elected Democrats, from Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, bitterly opposed Clinton’s decision, claiming, among other things, that it ignored the perspectives of FALN attack survivors and the families of FALN victims. Clinton’s move was even challenged from within his administration by FBI and Justice Department officials. All in all, a similar granting of clemency would have prompted something on the order of impeachment today. What the FALN members did has not changed; but the seriousness of their crimes in the minds of Americans has changed immensely.

Today, perhaps Clinton’s only remaining defenders on the FALN matter are that vocal minority of culturally nationalist Puerto Ricans, particularly the island’s independentistas, who operate at a significant political and cultural remove from most U.S. citizens — including Puerto Ricans. Indeed, in Puerto Rico before Sept. 11, according to the University of Puerto Rico’s Carrión, “pro-American people were claiming that they felt threatened in any attempt to show the American flag. Now they are showing it in pride.” The Puerto Rican left is, however, disproportionately represented in elite island circles such as academia and the media.

Puerto Rican nationalists and independentistas cite the strong resentments created by the United States’ century-old territorial relationship with Puerto Rico as justification for turning the “political prisoners” loose. The logic is well limned by Angelo Falcón, a senior policy executive at the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy in New York, who argues that the FALN controversy represents “an internal problem [for the U.S.] in terms of having a colony.” Representatives Velázquez, Serrano and Gutierrez all supported a similar view, at least tacitly, in their push for clemency for the FALN members. So, for that matter, did the Washington-based National Puerto Rican Coalition.

Now, of course, the equation of “terrorist” with “freedom fighter” (and “political prisoner”) seems completely out of touch. Juan Duchesne, a formerly pro-independence professor of Spanish at the University of Puerto Rico who has since supported statehood (a traditionally conservative option), claims that Puerto Rican elites refuse to confront a tradition of sometimes virulent anti-Americanism. Duchesne and a group of supporters recently published a Spanish-language article in the December issue of the university’s monthly newspaper, Diálogo, arguing that the island’s media had presented thoroughly skewed coverage of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

“There is a very anti-American line,” he explains. “It’s not just anti-American, it’s very reductive in its arguments concerning terrorism. So we claimed in the article that nobody is really talking about the true threat of fundamentalists or Islamic terrorism.”

Clinton does have one (at least presumptive) remaining supporter besides Puerto Rican leftists: Jimmy Carter. During his presidency Carter pardoned four Puerto Rican nationalists who in 1954 shot up the U.S. Congress, injuring five lawmakers; he also pardoned a nationalist convicted of plotting to kill President Truman in 1950. Carter approved of the Clinton FALN clemencies, as did, among others, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. But so far they, like Clinton, have managed to avoid the harsh judgment of hindsight.