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Antiabortion Movement———37

U.S. senators, Tom Daschle and Patrick J. Leahy; news have held war games and training exercises simulating
anchor Tom Brokaw at NBC in New York City; and the biowarfare attacks. The war games have demonstrated
New York Post. that responding to a large-scale attack would be over-
The first case of anthrax attributed to the mailings whelming and that such attack would likely cause the
was that of a 63-year-old photo editor at the Sun news- complete collapse of emergency response and public
paper in Florida, who died on October 5, a day after the health systems.
case was made public. One of his colleagues also fell -
ill, but recovered. Six cases involved media workers in See also ARMY OF GOD; AUM SHINRIKYO; BIOLOGICAL
TERRORISM; SADDAM HUSSEIN; WEAPONS OF MASS
New York, but the majority of cases (10, including three
DESTRUCTION
deaths) involved postal workers. The other four cases
were an infant who had visited a media office in Further Reading
New York, two women in New York and Connecticut,
and a bookkeeper who worked near Hamilton, New Alibek, Ken, with Stephen Handelman. Biohazard.
Jersey. The last three cases were thought to have New York: Random House, 1999.
resulted from cross contamination of mail. Dixon, Terry, Matthew Meselson, Jeanne Guillemin, and
Philip C. Hanna. “Anthrax” (review article). New England
The spores in each envelope were of the same
Journal of Medicine, Vol. 341, No. 11, 1999, 815-826.
strain of anthrax and were in the form of a very fine
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/341/11/815.
powder—minute enough to be inhaled into the deep-
Guillemin, Jeanne. Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly
est parts of the lungs. Each envelope had been tightly
Outbreak. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
sealed, but spores leaked out through pores in the Inglesby, Thomas V., et al. “Anthrax as a Biological
paper. The jets of compressed air that are routinely Weapon.” Journal of the American Medical Association,
used to clean mail-sorting machines were powerful Vol. 281, No. 18, May 12, 1999, 1735-1963. http://jama.
enough to resuspend spores on the machines into the ama-assn.org/issues/v281n18/ffull/jst 80027.html.
air. These resuspended spores are thought to have Jernigan, John, et al. “Bioterrorism-Related Inhalational
infected the postal workers. The anthrax strain used Anthrax: The First 10 Cases Reported in the United
was not antibiotic resistant. Demand soared for both States.” Emerging Infectious Diseases, Vol. 7, No. 6,
respirators and ciprofloxacin—the only antibiotic November-December 2001, 933-944. http://www.cdc.
gov/ncidod/EID/vol7no6/jernigan.htm.
approved by the Federal Drug Administration at that
Lipton, Erik, and Kirk Johnson. “The Anthrax Trail:
time for treating anthrax.
Tracking Bioterror’s Tangled Course.” New York Times,
As yet, no one has been charged with the anthrax
December 26, 2001, A1.
attacks, and the source of the anthrax is unknown. The
Miller, Judith, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad.
2001 cases demonstrated that early treatment with Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War.
modern antibiotics such as doxycyline and cipro- New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
floxacin, combined with supportive medical proce-
dures, can successfully treat inhalation anthrax.
Anthrax hoaxes followed the actual cases. At least ANTIABORTION MOVEMENT
250 abortion clinics and gynecological offices
received letters containing a harmless white powder in
the mail; another 200 or so received powder in FedEx In the years following Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case
packages. The mailed letters contained the statement that brought before the Supreme Court the issue of
“you have been exposed to anthrax” and were signed legalizing abortion, antiabortion terrorism has stalked
by the “Army of God.” Anthrax hoaxes were not new; abortion providers throughout the United States. The
in 1999, the FBI had been receiving between two and FBI considers militant antiabortionists, like radical
three reports per day. animal rights and environmentalist groups, to be
The 2001 anthrax attacks were deadly, but much “special interest” or “single issue” terrorists, whose
smaller in scale than had been feared by bioweapon adherents use violence to achieve one end—abolish-
experts. A typical scenario imagined a release of mas- ing legal abortion.
sive amounts of a deadly agent into the air over a city, Antiabortion direct action in the United States dates
resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths and mas- to 1975, when six women were arrested for the first
sive panic. A number of cities in the United States clinic sit-in, in Rockville, Maryland. Although violent