Ethics

The Subtle and Far Reaching Tentacles of the Culture of Death 

Rev. Stephen F. Torraco, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Theology, Assumption College
EWTN Board of Experts, Catholic Questions and Answers, Moral Theology

 There are currently three difficult issues about which the Church’s Magisterium has not spoken. All three issues have to do with the beginning phases of human life. Two of the issues have directly to do with the status of human embryos; and two of them have to do with the use of stem cells and stem cell lines derived from a human person at the beginning of the human person’s life: in one case, from a human embryo, and in another case, from a human fetus. All three issues are difficult for three reasons. First, there is a “gray” or seemingly ambiguous set of circumstances that surround them. Secondly, with all three issues, it is possible to think of legitimate and even noble intentions for pursuing the practices involved in them. Thirdly, on all three issues, proponents of the practices involved appear to resort to apparently sound moral reasoning, especially in terms of the principle of cooperation. However, the fundamental problem afflicting the proponents of the practices connected with these issues is a dangerously narrow moral vision. More specifically, in the face of the long-term implications of modern technology, especially as it relates to human life, these proponents fail to weigh the long-term consequences of their proposed practices.

1. The first issue is about those human embryos that have been brought into the laboratory, usually for purposes of in vitro fertilization, but left unused. The question arises: what should be done with them? Of course, they never should have been brought into the laboratory in the first place. Human embryos belong nowhere except in their own mother’s wombs. Nevertheless, these human embryos are indeed in the laboratory, and a moral decision has to be made about them.

Some have proposed that, in order to save them from being destroyed or subjected to further manipulation, these embryos should be adopted by women in whom they could be implanted for the purpose of gestation and birth. The Magisterium has not spoken specifically to this matter, but has spoken to related matters that are grounded on a basic principle. The principle is that it is wrong ¾ indeed, intrinsically evil ¾ to implant human embryos in a genetically foreign womb. (Charter for Health Care Workers, n. 29) The Magisterium taught this in connection with “surrogate motherhood,” but it logically follows that it applies to this specific proposal as well.  This logical connection is easily lost within the context and/or under the influence of the culture of death, which numbs us to the evil of allowing human embryos to be anywhere other than in their mother’s wombs. Numbness to this evil alone explains how “adopting “ human embryos and implanting them in genetically foreign wombs could be viewed either as a morally good action or even as a morally neutral action that could be made morally distinct from “surrogate motherhood” by a good intention.

If “surrogate motherhood” is intrinsically evil, then, of course, one may not morally justifiably resort to this act in order to avoid a lesser evil, namely, the destruction or manipulation of human embryos. According to the principle of double effect, even in a moral dilemma the act in question must be good or at least neutral. One may not do evil in order to accomplish good. The end does not justify the means.

Besides, even if there is a good intention in adopting and implanting human embryos in a genetically foreign womb, a good intention cannot make an intrinsically evil act good. Moreover, the long term consequence of either denying the intrinsic evil of “surrogate motherhood” or claiming that a good intention can make “surrogate motherhood” morally justifiable is that, ironically and tragically, this ultimately plays into the hands of the culture of death, which seeks to manipulate human embryos. In other words, if “surrogate motherhood” can be morally justifiable in certain circumstances, why can’t the use of human embryos for medical benefits be morally justifiable, especially in the circumstances in which the human embryos will otherwise be destroyed? (Even if the latter is not necessarily justified by the former, there is the danger, on a societal level, that this is precisely how it would be viewed. In other words, the significant weakening of respect for human life would be inevitable.) Thus, this is why the late Cardinal Basil Hume of England, when faced by a “surplus” of human embryos in his own country, said that the human embryos, rather than being destroyed, and rather than being subjected to further manipulation and indignity, should be allowed to die, parallel to a person at the end of life, for whom further medical treatment would either be useless or upon whom further medical treatment would impose a burden that would outweigh the goal of that treatment.

2. The second issue is very much related to the first: the use of human embryos for the purpose of attaining stem cells for further research and experimentation, hopefully for a number of medical benefits. The Church’s Magisterium has clearly taught that the use of human embryos for this purpose, and more generally the reduction of human embryos to a means to an end, however noble the end may be, is intrinsically evil and cannot be morally justified for any reason or set of circumstances. In the specific case of the use of human embryos for attaining stem cells, the necessity of destroying the embryos is clearly morally unacceptable. All the more unacceptable is the creation of human embryos for the purpose of manipulating/destroying them.

However, the further question arises: can it be morally justifiable to use existing stem cell lines without any further destruction or manipulation of any human embryos? Recently, President George Bush has decided to federally fund research on 60 existing stem cell lines, while refusing federal funds for any further manipulation/destruction of human embryos. The Holy See, in an August 2000 declaration, has responded to this question in the following way: “The answer is negative, since: prescinding from the participation – formal or otherwise – in the morally illicit intention of the principal agent, the case in question entails a proximate material cooperationin the production and manipulation of human embryos on the part of those producing or supplying them.”

It is important to understand this notion of proximate material cooperation in a way that avoids a narrowed moral vision. One cannot apply the principle of cooperation to an issue of far-reaching implications, socially and historically, in the same way that one would apply it to the behavior of an individual human being. On a societal level, the application of this principle requires far greater rigor precisely because, when, on the basis of apparently sound moral reasoning, cooperation with evils such as the one at issue in this case is viewed as permissible, the evils, by becoming institutionalized, take on a life of their own and become part of the very fabric of society.  Thus, even if one does not either intend to be an accomplice in the destruction of human embryos in the past nor want to be instrumental to the destruction of human embryos in the future, the use of existing stem cell lines, even if not requiring in that use the destruction of human embryos, cannot be morally justified because, despite one’s intentions, the proximity of the use of the existing stem cell lines to the evil of past and future destruction of human embryos *risks* – if it does not *necessarily entail* – the institutionalization, within the very fabric of society, and therefore within the habits of mind of its members, of *an elicited act of the will* by which one wills the destruction of human embryos, past or future. An elicited act of the will, distinct from commanded acts of the will by which we move other parts and powers of ourselves in visible actions, is an act of “pure will” within one’s own soul that involves no bodily action whatsoever, and can be identical with passive acceptance. On its very own, an elicited act of the will is a human voluntary act that can be intrinsically good or intrinsically evil. Thus, this institutionalization would be or risk being accomplice, not only to the destruction or manipulation of human embryos, but also to the dehumanization of members of society through the significant weakening of their respect for human life. As Pope John Paul II explains in a number of ways in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, this kind of institutionalization is the very stuff of the “culture of death.”

Presumably, these are the reasons why the United States Catholic Bishops’ Conference president stated: “The federal government, for the first time in history, will support research that relies on the destruction of some defenseless human beings for the possible benefit to others,’’ Fiorenza said in a statement. “It allows our nation’s research enterprise to cultivate a disrespect for human life.’’

This kind of institutionalization is not morally justifiable also because there are alternatives: stem cells obtained from postpartum placental tissue and from adult bone marrow and tissue, although lacking the pluripotency of embryonic and fetal stem cells, are nevertheless scientifically promising and do not involve the destruction of human life. Seeking these alternative means instead of depending on the destruction and degradation of human embryos would not only avoid the issue of cooperation with evil entirely but also set a powerful example for other scientists to follow.

3. The third issue is very similar to the second: is it morally justifiable to use vaccines from cell lines derived from aborted fetuses? As in the case of the second issue, it is abundantly clear that direct abortion for the sake of using fetal tissue or cells for medical benefits cannot be morally justified. However, and likewise as in the second issue, the question arises: can vaccines derived from aborted fetuses be morally justifiably used if the use of the vaccines themselves does not require any further abortions?

Once again, the Church’s Magisterium has not spoken about this specific issue in a definitive manner, although the Magisterium has addressed related issues, as I shall indicate further on.  In the meantime, let us consider the arguments used by those who favor the use of the vaccines. The two basic points of these arguments are that 1) these vaccines are the only available alternative to the spread of the disease (hepatitus A, a viral infection of the liver); 2) the individual receiving the vaccine is not in immoral cooperation with the evil of abortion.

If you examine the two basic points made by the arguments for the moral justification of the use of these vaccines, you will notice that they are intimately related. 1) The first point (they are the only alternatives to treating the disease) is essentially a matter of arguing that they are morally justifiable because we need them. 2) The second point (the person receiving the vaccine does not will the abortion from which it is derived) is essentially a matter of arguing that, because the abortion at issue happened so long ago and that no further abortions are required for this vaccination, receiving the vaccination is morally justifiable.

The first point is flawed for a number of reasons. First of all, leaving it simply at saying that something is morally justifiable because I need it as a means to an end, and indeed, a good end  (preservation of one’s life) is absolutely identical with the Machiavellian principle that the end justifies the means (or, that evil may be done in order to accomplish good) and, thus, absolutely unacceptable and morally indefensible.  (A more sophisticated argument, based on the principle of double effect, might state that the degree of cooperating with the evil of abortion in order to attain the needed vaccines is morally justifiable in the face of the greater evil of suffering from the diseases that the vaccines would prevent. However, the principle of double effect applies only if there are no alternative solutions; and this is far from being true in this case.)

Secondly, precisely because this Machiavellian principle is morally indefensible, one needs to examine the very thing needed in this particular case ¾ cell lines from aborted fetuses. To say that one needs the cell lines of aborted fetuses to preserve one’s life is inseparable from saying that one needs the abortions ¾ intrinsically evil actions ¾ that make the cell lines available. And this is where the point of the first argument meets ¾ and betrays ¾ the point of the second argument.

To say that a person receiving this vaccination ¾ derived from a fetus aborted long ago ¾ does not will the abortion that makes the vaccination possible may well be true in the individual and isolated case of the person who does not know the origin of the vaccine. However, in keeping with the discussion in connection with the second issue above, one cannot base the moral argumentation for a practice intended for the entire population upon the ignorance of this person or upon the correct moral behavior of the individual recipient of the vaccine. In fact, the second argument in favor of the moral justification of the use of these vaccines not only very clearly presupposes the knowledge of the origin of the vaccine, but also advocates that society in general adopt the use of this vaccine. With that knowledge in place, and with the institutionalization of the vaccine within the very fabric of society in place, to say that a person receiving this vaccination ¾ derived from a fetus aborted long ago ¾ does not will the abortion that makes the vaccination possible is patently false. If I need the vaccine (and it is a need that can be satisfied only by an aborted fetus) and if I defend my need, I will the abortion. The person receiving the vaccination may well be living long after the fetus was actually aborted, and had no involvement in and may even have no knowledge of the particular and actual fetus that was aborted. However, the remoteness in time is not sufficient for arguing that there is no act of the will on the part of the recipient of the vaccine, even if, once again, only an elicited act of the will, institutionalized within societal practice and within the habits of minds of its members.

This immoral elicited act of the will, if for no other reason, is why the Holy See, in its “Charter for Health Care Workers,” teaches that “the fetus cannot be used for experimentation or transplant if the abortion was caused voluntarily. To do so would be an unworthy instrumentalization of a human life.” Even if the Holy See is referring to the fetus as such and not to cell lines from the fetus, the moral principle about elicited acts of the will still applies. Beyond the point about this elicited act, there is the further problem of the long-term consequences of allowing the use of these vaccines. On this issue, and so many like it, we desperately need to see more than a few feet in front of us. Thinking that we know what we need here and now does not necessarily mean that we do know or, therefore, that we should want it. This is why it would be wise in this particular matter to abide by the US Bishops’ directive forbidding the use of tissue from aborted fetuses, even for therapeutic purposes. Again, even if the bishops are referring to tissue of aborted fetuses rather than cell lines from aborted fetuses, the moral principle about elicited acts of the will still applies. This is also why it would be wise to heed the directive of the Holy See’s 1987 document, Donum Vitae (Gift of Life): “The corpses of human embryos and fetuses, whether they have been deliberately aborted or not, must be respected just as the remains of other human beings…. the moral requirements must be safeguarded, that there be no complicity in deliberate abortion and that the risk of scandal be avoided.”

Fr. Stephen F. Torraco
Father Torraco is currently Associate Professor of Theology at Assumption College, Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the Executive Director of the Society for the Study of the Magisterial Teaching of the Church (SSMTC). He is an instructor in Theology as well as Chaplain for one of SSMTC’s affiliates, the cyberspace based Regina Coeli Academy, and a member of the faculty of Catholic Distance University in Hamilton, Virginia. He also serves as a consultant for the Pope Paul VI Institute in Omaha, and for the Cardinal Kung Foundation in Connecticut. He is the author of various books and articles in moral theology, medical ethics, the social teaching of the Catholic Church and the spiritual life.

Read More of  Fr.Torraco’s Work:   EWTN Catholic Questions and Answers 

The Morality of using Vaccines Derived from Fetal Tissue Cultures: A Few Considerations

“A Vaccine That Infects?”
THE CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT
February 1996, pages 43-45

(Excerpts from the article on the chickenpox vaccine)

For decades now, vaccines have been produced by using fetal cell lines, and Merck’s Varivax is no exception. A cell line, according to Dr. Chris Kahlenborn, a Pittsburgh physician, “is a group of cells taken from an animal or human being and put on a petri dish. You usually have to add mitogens – chemicals that stimulate their division.” The cells divide again and agina, and the resulting cultures are kept in stock at the American Type Cultrue Collection, a nonprofit, private organization in Bethesda, Maryland, which provides them to researchers.

The abortions that produced the material for the two cell lines WI-38 and MRC-5 were, according to Dr. Shaw, performed “under medically legitimate circumstances.” He insists that it is incorrect to “draw a cause-and-effect relationship between abortions and vaccine manufacturers… None of the vaccine manufacturers had anything to do with these abortions,” he maintains.

But Dr. Kahlenborn, medical consultant for People Concerned for the Unborn Child, thinks that “each time cells are used from an aborted child, it gives the abortion industry one more ‘reason’ for proclaiming the benefits of abortion.”

It is not morally permissible to reap the research benefits from a deliberately induced abortion without, in some sense, being an accomplice to that abortion, according to Dominican Father Albert Moraczewski, of the Pope John XXIII Center for Medical-Moral Research in Braintree, Massachusetts.

Benefiting from a fetal cell line like MRC-5 “involves a complicity with the induced abortion from which the cells were obtained,” he added. “We could grant that the use of cell lines from induced abortions is several steps away from the abortion itself,” he admitted, but that doesn’t break “the chain of complicity.”

When it comes to using a cell line from an aborted baby, researchers “know the source of the tissue – unless they deliberately blind themselves to it” said Father Moraczewski, editor of ETHICS AND MEDICS. “It doesn’t appear spontaneously in a lab dish.” Turning an abortion into a vaccine, he concluded, means “being an accomplice to the act of the abortion.”

Countered Dr. Shaw, who was on the team that developed the vaccine: “I don’t buy that at all.” The abortions behind the MRC-5 and WI-38 cell lines, he said, “would have taken place regardless.”

By this reasoning, however, one might also justify using tissue from Auschwitz victims – whose deaths would have taken place regardless – for medical research.

The British bishops have already had to deal with this moral dilemma. In 1994, the United Kingdom’s department of health decided to vaccinate 5- to 16-year-olds with a rubella vaccine developed from MRC-5.

In the end, the bishops decided that the judgment is left to the individual parents. “It becomes a matter of prudence.”

But the world has seen medicine that sucks life from the death of innocents before. “Anyone who receives medical treatment for hypothermia,” the (British) document said, “is likely to benefit from knowledge gained from wicked experiments carried out by Nazi doctors.” Of course there is a world of difference between the two cases.

The British document said, “They (the researchers) did not require that the cell line they used should come from an aborted baby.”

Then who DID demand that cell lines be developed from the tissue of aborted babies? Why couldn’t a researcher develop a vaccine with a cell line originated from a spontaneous abortion – a miscarriage? The existence of such a vaccine could free doctors and their patients from the moral risk of complicity in abortion.

“In principle you could,” Dr. Shaw, who helped develop a vaccine based on WI-38 and MRC-5, responded, “but in practice you couldn’t …a spontaneously aborted fetus is immediately suspect. There is a REASON for a spontaneous abortion.” Researchers are looking for cell lines that are free of any physical defects; a miscarriage in itself is a sign of some medical weakness.

But the defect that causes the miscarriage is not always the “fault” of the fetus, Dr.Kahlenborn points out. The medical problem may be within the mother’s body; the unborn child could be completely healthy. (For example: “if a woman has a torn placenta, that’s the problem, and the baby is perfectly normal.”)

He suspects that the real reason researchers favor fetuses from induced abortions is because “it’s easier for them to go to an abortion clinic…it’s much more difficult to get a baby from a miscarriage.”

The MRC5 cell line has been well known since at least 1970, when researchers published a paper about it in the British science journal, NATURE. Already at that time the cell line WI-38, which was derived form the lung cells of a deliberately aborted female fetus, had shown “stability and integrity” for 10 years. “We have developed another strain of cells,” wrote the authors of the NATURE article, “also derived form fetal lung tissue, taken from a 14-week-old male fetus removed for psychiatric reasons from a 27-year-old woman with a genetically normal family history.”

But any benefits drawn from deliberate abortion must have a “stigma” attached to them, Dr. Kahlenborn said, until biomedical researchers become convinced “that the aborted baby is not an object from which to choose spare parts.”

Medical Cannibals:
The Moral Implications of Fetal Tissue Vaccines
By Steven Kellmeyer

“Childhood vaccination is against our religious beliefs.” While this statement is associated with religious groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it may become much more common due to two relatively recent vaccines: Varivax and Meruvax II. Both vaccines were generated through the use of fetal tissue obtained through surgical abortion. The use of such viral vaccines poses a serious moral challenge. Can the health interests of a living child be weighed against a child whose death is an accomplished fact, when the murderer promises to kill no more children – in fact, he promises to use the wealth derived from the murder to keep your child, and thousands like her, alive?

While fetal tissue harvesting and research are widely discussed, a more insidious moral dilemma remains unmentioned: the use of fetal tissue obtained from abortion and used to generate vaccines. Is it morally licit to use such vaccines? This issue demonstrates the moral situation is at its most extreme. The child whose tissues have been harvested has been dead several decades. Unlike front-page experiments in the macabre, the medical treatments being derived from these tissues are neither speculative nor rank failures – the vaccines work. Lives will be preserved and not just yours. The lives preserved are even more precious to you than your own – they are the lives of your children. We have only to accept the terms.

The arguments surrounding such vaccines are thus the acid test of the right-to-life movement. The problems involved have led astray even well-catechized, well-meaning Catholics. Within the last five years, two different groups of Catholic ethicists have found the use of these vaccines to be moral, largely through subtly flawed analogies. Note carefully: the ethical problems discussed here only arise with a class of vaccines generated for use against certain viral diseases. Vaccines generated against bacterial disease do not have the same ethical problems. In order to understand why this is so, we need to re-visit our high school biology.

Why Fetal Tissue is Used
In order to produce a bacterial or a viral vaccine, laboratory personnel must have large quantities of the bacterium or virus in question. Fortunately, bacteria can be grown in large quantities simply by giving them the equivalent of chicken broth. Unfortunately a virus, a simple strand of DNA or RNA, isn’t as capable. A virus needs cellular machinery, machinery it doesn’t have, in order to reproduce. It must insinuate itself into a cell, hijacking the cell’s machinery. To grow large quantities of virii, a tissue culture, essentially a vast “lawn” of cells which coat the inside of the flask like scales on a fish, must be prepared. The virus is placed in contact with the cell tissue, invades the cells, hijacks the cellular machinery, and reproduces itself. After large numbers of viruses have grown, they are removed from the cell culture, inactivated, and processed in order to produce the vaccine.

The problem: viruses need good cells to hijack. The cells must provide excellent machinery for virus production, and be easy for the virus to invade. Two human cell lines used to produce cell cultures, WI-38 and MRC-5, have problematic origins. WI-38 is normal lung tissue taken from a three-month old female child aborted in Philadelphia in 1961. MRC-5 is normal lung tissue taken from a 14-week old male child aborted because a Swedish couple wanted no more children. Both cell lines support a broad range of rhinoviruses. Both are “immortal,” which means they reproduce rapidly and self-consistently enough to remain essentially similar to the tissue taken from two dying bodies over thirty years ago.

Current Moral Analyses
Two vaccines generated using viruses grown in these cell lines are Merck and Co.’s Varivax, a chicken-pox vaccine, and Meruvax II, for rubella. Catholic ethicists have analyzed the morality of these vaccines at least twice in the last five years; once in an October 1994 briefing paper issued through the English Bishops’ Catholic Media Office (EBCMO), and again in July 1997, by Daniel Maher, Director of Publications of what was then called the Pope John Center in Braintree, Massachusetts, at the request of Denver’s Archbishop Charles Chaput. Though somewhat different, both arguments reach the same conclusion: the vaccines are morally licit. Both opinions clearly find abortion reprehensible, and both struggle to provide a just response. However, neither analysis is morally binding, and both are subtly flawed.

Both lines of reasoning are founded on the nature of the seminal event: since the cell lines are immortal, no further abortions are needed in order to generate more cells. Thus, the evil act which procured the tissues is complete and sufficiently remote from the present use of the tissues that whoever uses the vaccine today is not morally complicit in the original abortion. That is, using the vaccine won’t prevent the historical abortion, vaccine generation doesn’t require more abortions today or in the future, so there is no attachment to the sin of abortion.

Two analogies are used to support this argument. The first rests on the use of data from Nazi death-camp experiences. German doctors froze prisoners to death in tanks of ice water in order to learn how to treat hypothermia. Though they failed to find a treatment, their data was eventually captured by Allied troops. Allied doctors developed information based on that data which is used today in the treatment of hypothermia. Since this use of illicitly collected data was moral, it is also acceptable to use illicitly collected fetal tissue.

Unfortunately, the comparison fails. First, the use of data is substantially different from the use of tissue. Second, no one argues that present hypothermia treatments show Nazism and Nazi experiments were not really evil, nor is anyone arguing that the current use of the Nazi data justifies undertaking similar experiments today. However, fetal tissue research, transplants, and products are quite often used to justify abortion. Third, the profits and data obtained from that research allows society to assume the method of obtaining fetal tissue is, if not completely moral, at least not particularly relevant.

Thus, the Nazi murderers reap neither monetary benefits from their evil nor an enhanced reputation from the use of the hypothermia data, and, most important, they gain no emulators on the basis of their work. However, the abortion industry is reaping both monetary benefits and an enhanced reputation from the use of this tissue, and they have gained quite a few emulators. Furthermore, the abortion industry and society uses contraception and abortion to structure a eugenic biomedical agenda essentially similar to that of the original Nazi regime. The unwanted members of society, whether they be children in the womb, the poor unable to afford medical care, or the aged, useless in a consuming, producing society, are being systematically killed or pressured into suicide. Ironically, Nazi ideology is reaping the benefits of an enhanced reputation through the use of fetal tissue for biomedical purposes.

The second analogy compares the use of fetal tissue to that of a murdered organ donor. It is morally acceptable to use an organ harvested from someone who has been murdered. Since the manner of death is not relevant to the ability to donate organs, tissue harvesting is called morally acceptable.

However, organ donation is a freely willed act. Organs can be harvested from an individual only if and as the individual stipulates. Thus, the donor may give permission only to remove her corneas, she may permit organ harvesting only if she dies naturally, or she may forbid harvesting entirely. The patient’s pre-established will rules how her organs will be handled, not the manner of death. Her will must be positively established, or no donation can take place at all. Clearly, the child’s will in regard to her tissues cannot be established. While a parent has the right to decide how to dispose of her dead child’s organs, this right presupposes the parent has not brought about the child’s death.

Neither analysis considers a more closely-related example: enforced cannibalism. The use of tissue to generate vaccines which may save other’s lives is a kind of cannibalism. On October 13, 1972, a plane with 40 people aboard, all Catholic, crashed in the Andes. Due to the total lack of food in the snowy wasteland, the survivors of the crash were forced to eat the bodies of those who had died in order to maintain their own life. The Church ruled the cannibalism to be acceptable in this instance, because the bodies of the slain were treated with great reverence and the need for sustenance was life-threatening. While it is true that most of those whose bodies were eaten had not given their consent, it is also true that none were murdered; their deaths were unforeseen and unpreventable. By removing the issue of will, this example better corresponds to the abortion event, while simultaneously highlighting the moral problem: the manner of death and the reverence due the human body in death must be considered.

Another argument asserts the separation of the cells from the living being to which they once belonged gives the tissue a different, independent life. While technically true, it doesn’t address how the tissue came to have this status. In May 1973, at a combined meeting of the American Pediatric Society and the Society for Pediatric Research held in San Francisco, California, Dr. Peter Adam and associates described their experiment on fetal brain metabolism. The putative scientists aborted babies between 12 and 21 weeks gestation and cut their heads off. The heads were kept alive in a nutrient solution in order to study the brain tissues’ uptake of nutrients. Using the above argument, the living brains in the severed heads could morally be used to generate the viruses necessary for vaccine production because those brains have a life which is now different from and independent of their origin, the living child. Though this example merely substitutes brain tissue for lung tissue and skulls for test-tubes, few could look the living skull in the eye and call the products derived from the living brain within morally licit for use.

Researchers’ Moral Culpability
In fact, there is a further problem, which none of the above analyses address. Who owns an immortal cell line? In October, 1976, UCLA Medical Center, while treating John Moore’s hairy-cell leukemia, discovered his T-lymphocytes had unique properties and harvested them, establishing a new cell line without his knowledge. The cell line turned out to be quite valuable. Moore found out and sued, claiming a right to part of the profits. Although he lost, the court found his doctor failed in his fiduciary duty towards Moore. Three elements were present:

1.. the patient was being treated for an illness
2.. the patient survived the treatment
3.. the cells were taken without the patient’s consent, thus the courts found these researchers violated the patient’s right to informed consent.
Certainly the aborted child was not being treated for an illness, did not survive the treatment, did not consent to the harvesting of the cells, nor was he informed of what the researchers would do with those cells. By every one of the court criteria, the researchers who established the immortal cell line obtained the tissue dishonestly.

But what is the moral culpability of the cell-line researchers or the pharmaceutical researchers? It seems unlikely the tissue is licit. The children’s consent was not obtained, and the only individuals who could have given such consent, i.e., the parents, or just possibly the physician, lost their this right by their collusion in the children’s death. How culpable are the researchers for these deaths?

It has been argued the pharmaceutical researchers bear no culpability: the tissue for the cell line could, in principle, have come from a natural miscarriage. This is a variation of the cannibalism argument; just as the Andes plane crash survivors were forced by circumstances to eat their dead companions, so the researchers were forced by circumstances to use aborted fetal tissue to generate a vaccine. Yet, while chicken pox/rubella can be deadly diseases under the right circumstances, the two situations hardly seem equivalent. Even if we grant such an equivalence, are the researchers innocent bystanders? They could make such an argument. In 1992, the National Institutes of Health successfully lobbied President Clinton to repeal the federal funding ban on the use of tissue from surgical abortion precisely because miscarriages were not providing enough suitable tissue for continued research. Researchers, pointing to this, could claim it proves surgically aborted children were their only real source of tissue. Sadly, this means the pharmaceutical researchers depended on an intrinsically evil act, making the vaccine morally illicit.

Cell-line researchers collude with abortionists in order to get tissue. Researchers require living tissue, as fresh as possible; dead and dying tissue is useless. Getting living fetal tissue requires extraordinarily close cooperation between the researcher and the abortionist. In fact, the researcher is often at the foot of the table while the abortion is being performed, immediately dissecting the child. Typically, published scientific papers on fetal tissue research list the abortionist who supplies the fetal tissues as a co-author; without the close cooperation of the abortionist, the paper wouldn’t have been possible.

Thus, little independence exists between the cell-line researcher and the abortionist. Even if the aborted tissues were simply shipped to the lab by the abortionist, money and/or a positive social acceptance of abortion will be given in exchange for the tissues. The abortionist will not be dissuaded from his evil act, he will be encouraged to continue it; indeed, the abortionist intends the act of supplying tissue to spread social acceptance of abortion. Similarly, we encourage researchers to support abortionists when we support work based on aborted fetal tissue. The Nazi data could be used precisely because there was no danger of such material cooperation; insofar as the possibility of such cooperation exists, the use of the Nazi data is proscribed.

“Immediate material cooperation” is complicity in an action which one does not formally approve, but in which one is so closely involved that one shares its evil. The cell-line researchers were almost certainly immediate material cooperators. Pharmaceutical researchers made no effort to avoid the morally problematic cell line, and thereby spread the effect of the abortionists’ evil intent. While using the vaccine is not identical to attending the abortion, using products derived from the living tissues of a murdered child is uncomfortably close to immediate material cooperation with the vaccine generators.

Conclusions
Using such vaccines institutionalizes the link between pharmaceuticals and abortion. This effect was callously disregarded by Merck and Co. even if it wasn’t actually intended. Given the lack of equally effective vaccines based on alternative, non-problematic cell lines, their intent is suspect. In a free market one would expect non-abortion related vaccine cell-lines to be available. None are. Either aborted tissue is intrinsically necessary to such vaccine production, or we must seriously question the ethics of pharmaceutical companies. Donum Vitae states: “The corpses of human embryos and fetuses, whether they have been deliberately aborted or not, must be respected just as the remains of other human beings…. the moral requirements must be safeguarded, that there be no complicity in deliberate abortion and that the risk of scandal be avoided. Also, in the case of dead fetuses, as for the corpses of adult persons, all commercial trafficking must be considered illicit and should be prohibited.” The cell-line researchers are complicit in abortion. Merck and Co. commercially exploit the results of this complicity. Thus, Donum Vitae is violated.

It is irrelevant that the abortion is a one-time long-since completed event. A rape-murder committed in 1961 is also a one-time long-since completed event, but it is still immoral to buy the film of the event for one’s own enjoyment. Buying goods produced by apartheid or slave labor is not moral even if the crime which produced the item is a completed action, with the slaves now dead. Using the product encourages slavers. Using the vaccine encourages the abortion industry.

Even if chicken-pox or rubella were uniformly deadly diseases, the danger posed to the public health by refusing this vaccine is irrelevant. If a serial killer auctioned off his victims’ property we must refuse to buy that property, regardless of the danger to the public economy. In the same way, we cannot be complicit in serial killing practiced by scientists. A murderer cannot be allowed to justify the act of murder by donating his victim’s organs. He does not gain rights over the body of his quarry simply by virtue of having swung the killing blow. Neither does a society complicit in abortion have a right to apportion the victim’s body in ways which benefit itself, while muttering, “Well, she’s dead now, and we can’t let the body go to waste.” Drug companies use these cell lines because the cell lines make money. The cell lines will only be discarded when market pressures demonstrate they do not make money.

Assume someone learns the inheritance on which he lives was given to him on the basis of a false will, designed to deprive the rightful heirs of their money. The person who has benefited from the injustice must attempt to rectify the situation. Likewise, Merck and Co. has a duty publicly to renounce the abortion and all profits accruing therefrom. The problem of scandal derives precisely from the fact that it encourages others to sin or to continue in their sin. We cannot avoid participating in scandal if we provide no incentive for the sinners to change. Public use of the vaccines will not cause Merck and Co. or the abortionists to change their behaviour. In fact, derived profits encourages their continued fetal tissue efforts in other avenues of research. They experience no downside. Is not this very fact scandalous?

The arguments supporting the morality of these vaccines do not stand up to scrutiny. Refusing to use these vaccines involves physical risk for ourselves, for our children, and for society. But their use poses an even greater risk to a just society. The widespread use of contraception has led inexorably to abortion, euthanasia and infanticide. Where might the widespread use of tissue taken from surgically aborted children lead us? Do we really want to find out?

Steven Kellmeyer holds a Master’s Degree in theology from Franciscan University as well as a Master’s Degree in Modern European History, a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and an Associate’s Degree in Medical Lab Technology and has worked in each of these fields.  He is currently working as Associate Director for Evangelization at the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois.  Kellmeyer has published two books, Bible Basics, through Basilica Press, which demonstrates the Scriptural support for about six dozen teachings of the Church, and The Flesh of God, through Bridegroom Press, an Advent-Christmas study of the Infancy narratives.