Carly Fiorina has made outraged, manufactured opposition to abortion one of the key themes of her presidential campaign. But—surprise, surprise—she may not always have been such a hardliner. Fiorina was paid at least $83,000 to serve on the board of pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. from 1999 to 2000, a time period when Merck was manufacturing vaccines using stem cell lines from aborted fetuses and when at least one anti-abortion group was calling on Merck to stop that practice.
The big question is whether Fiorina the anti-abortion warrior was actually opposed to using stem cells from aborted fetuses for vaccines.
Fiorina has been openly supportive of vaccines derived from fetal stem cells at least since her California Senate run in 2010. According to the Los Angeles Times, Fiorina clarified that, “It is when embryos are produced for the purposes of destruction, for the purposes of stem cell research that I have a great deal of difficulty.”
Well, the Merck vaccines “originated from two legal abortions in the United Kingdom and Sweden in the 1960s. These abortions were not undertaken with the intent of producing vaccines.” The question for the Fiorina of today, the woman who gave a vivid description of a nonexistent video scene showing “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,” is what she’d say about Merck’s vaccines now, in the context of her presidential campaign. Is the woman who abandoned her alma mater to pander to Iowa sports fans going to stand firm on this one?