National Catholic Register
Volume 81 No. 33
Vatican News
Aug. 21-27, 2005
Vatican Issues Guidelines on Use of Abortion-Derived Vaccines
By
REGISTER STAFF
VATICAN CITY - The question of the morality of using
vaccines derived from tissues obtained through abortions is a delicate one. It
took more than two years for the Vatican to frame a reply to a request for
guidance from Debi Vinnedge, head of the Florida-based Children of God for Life
organization that campaigns against the use of such vaccines.
Now, the Pontifical Academy for Life has finally
delivered its opinion: Catholics are permitted — and sometimes may even be
obliged — to use such vaccines when no alternative exists.
But the new Vatican statement, entitled "Moral
Reflections on Vaccines Prepared From Cells Derived From Aborted Human
Fetuses," stresses that the failure of pharmaceutical companies and health
authorities to produce ethical, non-abortion derived alternative vaccines has
created "a context of moral coercion" that "must be eliminated as soon as
possible."
And, it says, Catholics parents and doctors have a
grave duty to pressure drug companies and health systems to develop ethical
vaccines that can be used instead. While human vaccines can be produced by other
means, pharmaceutical companies often rely on abortion-derived tissues because
of the relative ease of this form of production.
In the United States, according to Jameson Taylor,
author of America's Drug Deal: Vaccines, Abortion, Corruption, 11
commercially available vaccines for chicken pox, hepatitis, polio, rabies,
rubella, measles and mumps are currently propagated using two fetal cell lines,
known as WI-38 and MRC-5. Both cell lines were derived from babies aborted in
the 1960s.
Alternatives to some of the abortion-derived vaccines are
available, but no alternatives are currently available in the U.S. for
vaccination against rubella, chicken pox and hepatitis A.
What's Right?
The morality of using abortion-derived vaccines has
sharply divided American Catholics. A range of authorities — including the
Pro-Life Secretariat of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National
Catholic Bioethics Center — have said they can be used under some circumstances.
"Catholic moralists have concluded that individuals,
when they have no practical alternative, may use vaccines to protect their
health and the health of their loved ones without serious sin, even if the
vaccines were cultured in fetal cells that ultimately came from an elective
abortion," the Pro-Life Secretariat said in an August 2001 statement.
Other Catholic leaders disagree. Speaking to the
Register in February about a new flu vaccine being developed by Alabama-based
biotech company Vaxin using an abortion-derived cell line, Bishop Robert Vasa of
Baker, Ore., said, "It is not right to see good in this vaccine simply because
the good is far away from the abortion. Morally, all of the fruit of that
abortion is still poisoned fruit."
In Bishop Vasa's view, the Catholic consumer should
say," I want nothing to do with that vaccine. I do not want to benefit in any
way from abortions. My conscience binds me to fulfill the law of God."
Faced with this division of opinion among faithful
Catholics, Children of God for Life's Vinnedge wrote a letter to then-Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger in June 2003, asking the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith to clarify the matter.
The future Pope Benedict asked the Pontifical Academy
for Life to commission a study on the topic. This June, Bishop Elio Sgreccia,
president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, provided an English translation of
the study's findings to Vinnedge, who posted it on her Web site,
www.cogforlife.org on July 18.
Degrees of Evil
The Pontifical Academy for Life document
distinguishes between different degrees of cooperation with evil that result
from the manufacture and use of abortion-derived vaccines. All involvement in
"the preparation, distribution and marketing" of the vaccines is "morally
illicit, because it could contribute in encouraging the performance of other
voluntary abortions, with the purpose of the production of such vaccines," it
states.
Moreover, pharmaceutical companies and researchers
who fail to denounce as evil the abortions that gave rise to the fetal cell
lines that they are using to produce vaccines, and who "do not dedicate
themselves together to research and promote alternative ways exempt from moral
evil for the production of vaccines," are guilty of illicit "passive material
cooperation" with the evil of the original abortions, the document says.
In contrast, doctors and parents who consent to the
use of such vaccines, when no alternative is available, are involved merely in
"a form of very remote mediate material cooperation, and therefore very
mild" cooperation with the original act of abortion, the Pontifical Academy for
Life stated.
Such remote cooperation is morally permissible, the
document said. And in the case of a disease like rubella, where a failure to
vaccinate children can result in a sharply increased likelihood of a future
outbreak of an ailment that can have crippling effects on unborn children, the
Pontifical Academy for Life's experts said "we find, in such a case, a
proportional reason" favoring the use of such vaccines.
Target the Companies
However, after noting that situations do exist in
which Catholic doctors and parents have reason to use abortion-derived vaccines,
the Pontifical Academy for Life document stated that they also have a "grave
responsibility" to use ethical vaccines instead when they are available. In
such cases, it added, "[T]hey should take recourse, if necessary, to the use of
conscientious objection" in refusing to use the abortion-derived vaccine.
And where no ethical vaccines are currently
available, Catholics must seek to persuade drug companies to develop them, the
Vatican document states.
"In any case, there remains a moral duty to continue
to fight and to employ every lawful means in order to make life difficult for
the pharmaceutical industries, which act unscrupulously and unethically," the
document concludes. "However, the burden of this important battle cannot and
must not fall on innocent children and on the health situation of the
population."
(Register correspondent Steve
Weatherbe)
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