Morally Acceptable

When the following article appeared in several Catholic publications, beginning in late February of this year, the public became aware of a little known fact about the vaccines we have given our children for years.  And the reaction and response has been rather overwhelming from parents, pediatricians and pro-life groups across the country. Below is the original article, followed by letters and subsequent editorials on this subject, printed through August 23rd, 2000.  Articles are in chronological order.

National Catholic Register March 12-18

Vaccine From Aborted Fetus Cell Lines Judged Morally Acceptable 
by Joseph Kenney

Ethicist says the individual is not in immoral cooperation with the evil of abortion

      The St. Louis Archdiocesan Pro-Life Office says using a hepatitis vaccine derived from cell lines developed from an aborted fetus is morally acceptable because it is the only available alternative to the spread of the disease.  The office said it had been receiving inquiries about the ethics of such vaccinations when a bill was passed in St. Louis County ordering food handlers to be vaccinated.  Some of them have refused to get the vaccine because of their pro-life views.
Hepatitis A, a viral infection of the liver, is usually contracted by consuming food or drinks handled by an infectious person.  The vaccination against it requires an initial shot followed by a booster shot.  In making its determination, the Pro-Life office cited research by ethicist Dr. Edward Furton of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston, who concluded it is permissible for a Catholic to receive the vaccine since the individual is not in immoral cooperation with the evil of abortion.
In an interview with the St. Louis Review, archdiocesan newspaper, Father Edward Richard, professor of moral theology at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis said he agreed with Furton’s conclusions.  “There’s no alternative if we want to prevent the spread of disease and the consequences that flow from that”, Father Richard said.  “The use of the vaccine itself is not intrinsically evil. Certainly the origins are, but the person who uses it, wants to do something positive”, he added. “The church wants to do all it can to promote life and the respect for life”, he said. People who believe they should refuse the vaccine because it flows out of abortion “have very legitimate feelings about their respect for life – and that is to be commended”, he added.
However, Father Richard emphasized there is no other option available, not just in the case of the hepatitis A vaccine, but also when it comes to rubella, chicken pox and other vaccines.
“No one should have to be put in this position”, he said. “In spite of the fact that people find this totally abhorrent and want nothing to do with it, the moral principles of the church always apply.  One can morally use the vaccine.”  Father Richards said those who want to make a strong case against the health care industry must consider the protection of others and their own lives.
“They cannot endanger the lives of others in the community,” the priest said.  Furton said adults have a moral obligation to provide vaccinations to their children and operators of daycare centers also have a responsibility to protect children from potentially deadly diseases.  Father Richard said Catholics have “some positive obligations to fulfill in protecting the public, protecting children and protecting ourselves.”
“These are serious.  We are talking (about) not only potential but the likelihood that the disease would spread,” he added.  “The desire to be moral in that respect, to protect ourselves when something is available, is the motivation for using the vaccine. – CNS

Letters of response to the Editor.
National Catholic Register (April 2-8, 2000)

LETTERS

Vaccines and Abortions

I am shocked and saddened to see the St. Louis Archdiocese make the statement that the use of the Hepatitis-A vaccine, taken from aborted fetus cell lines, is morally acceptable. (“Vaccines From Aborted Fetus Cell Lines Judged Morally Acceptable,” March 12-18).  And Ted Furton from the National Catholic Biothics Center should know better than to take such a stand when less than a month ago, he cried out for Catholics to protest the National Institutes of Health (NIH) request for federal funding of stem cell research using human embryos.
The two moral atrocities are really not different from one another. By (quoting Father Richard’s statement) that “the use of the vaccine is not intrinsically evil…certainly the origins are,” the message you are sending is that abortion is OK as long as the outcome produces something good.  And such a statement is no different from the convoluted theory used by the NIH in attempting to procure federal funding, which is that the actual funding would not be used to destroy the embryo, so the research could be divorced from the destruction itself.  In both cases, human babies must be destroyed to produce the desired results.
Since 1973, Roe v Wade has decided that embryos or fetuses are not persons and therefore are not not entitled to legal protection or rights.  And so we go about treating them as such, by using human remains of deliberately killed babies to create pharmaceutical products.  Instead of being a precious gift from God, human life is treated as a commodity.  How can you expect any good Catholic to buy into that?  I will quote two sources that do not support what the Archdiocese of St. Louis is saying.  The first comes from the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Research or experimentations on the human being cannot legitimate acts that are in themselves contrary to the dignity of persons and to moral law” (No.2295). The second comes from Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, director of bioethics at Georgetown University: “You cannot do something evil so that something good may come from it”.  Need I say more?
Debi Vinnedge
Clearwater, Florida

Please tell me this is a mistake.  This is Nazi Germany revisited.  We have had a non-controversial vaccination for
years – even before abortion was legal.  I pray God you correct this error.  This is the crack in the door our enemies are looking for. Please give arguments against using aborted babies to benefit someone else.  In your article on the first page (of the same issue) Franz Jaegestaetter gave his life rather than help a Nazi dictator, even when clergy were asking him not to follow his conscience.  God help our priests teach as Jesus taught. Please, National Catholic Register, stay on track.
Ruth Sweeney
Springfield, Ohio

Below is the Editor’s response – same issue.
National Catholic Register (April 2-8, 2000)

EDITORIAL
Vaccines and Abortion

One letter begins this way: “You goofed!”  It sums up many comments on the story, “Vaccines from Aborted Fetus Cell Lines Judged Morally Acceptable” about the St. Louis Archdiocesan decision (by Joseph Kenney) of the Catholic News Service, in the March 12-18 Register)
“This is like saying abortion is OK if it is used for a good purpose”, continued the letter. “Or the end justifies the means.  Anybody taking Theology 101 knows that the end does not justify the means.”  The tragic reality is that the use of aborted children is linked, in its past, to the hepatitis-A vaccine in question.  But the immorality of using it is not as clear-cut as it may appear.
The principle that “You cannot do something evil so that something good may come from it”, is certainly true.  Work that destroys a human life at any stage and for any reason is certainly wrong.  But once such work has been done, and has produced a beneficial vaccine, should that vaccine be avoided?  Not on the ends-and-means principle.
After all, if we were to avoid using any good that was the result of evil acts, we would find ourselves condemning the adoption of the child of an unmarried mother.  We would also find ourselves shunning things we use every day:  technological developments originally made in producing immoral weapons, etc.
Still, in the case of an evil so great and so pervasive as abortion, many find good reason to oppose the vaccine.  The U.S. bishops’ point-man on human life questions is Richard Doerflinger.  In battles in the National Institutes of Health and Congress, he has provided a great service to the pro-life cause.  His answer on the question of vaccines, speaking to our sister publication, Catholic Faith & Family (Nov 21 – Dec 4), is perhaps the best.
“Certainly, the abortions [for research] were immoral, but the idea that a person is complicit in that act many years later is a difficult argument to make.  Nevertheless, it’s worthwhile to insist to the vaccine manufacturers that they produce these vaccines in other ways in the future.  A Catholic may want to make a moral statement by refusing the vaccine, but the people who analyzed the issue didn’t feel that was a moral requirement.”
“Nonetheless,” he added, “If there are alternatives available that don’t use fetal tissue from abortions, it would be vastly preferable to use those.”

More Letters to the Editor
National Catholic Register April 30-May 6

LETTERS
The Means of Vaccines

    Your editorial comment “Vaccines and Abortions” (April 2-8) is astounding!  I cannot see how you have come to the conclusion that the cold-blooded murder of a baby by abortion, coupled with the obvious advanced knowledge of a pharmaceutical firm in need of cells from such a victim, somehow can be equated with “adoptions of the child of an unmarried mother”.  What?
You refer to something called “ends and means”. Well, according to Father John Hardon, SJ, in The Catholic Catechism, “good intentions alone are not enough, as though we could do moral good by using evil means.  This is the error that the end justifies the means.  We may never do evil to attain an otherwise good end.”  No one is arguing that a parent is complicit in the act of murder because he wishes to have his child vaccinated.  However, as Catholic physician Christopher Kahlenborn points out regarding patients who request such vaccines, they should “be informed of the source of the cell line that is used to make the vaccines so that they can make an informed choice based on knowledge and faith.”
Author Steve Kellmeyer has written, “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.”  It is up to us, the consumers, to make that happen by standing up in defense of life, refusing to accommodate the drug firms’ lack of desire to develop alternatives that do not rely on cell lines taken from murder victims and trusting that God will protect us, our children and the souls of those whose eternal health is in jeopardy if we remain silent.  The end, in this case, does not justify the means, sir!
Judie Brown
American Life League, Inc.
Stafford, Virginia

In the Same Issue, Another Article
National Catholic Register April 30-May 6, 2000

Vaccines and Abortion:
Cooperation or Cop-Out? 
by Don DeMarco 

Too scrupulous a moral attitude can lead to paralysis and, as a consequence,
leave a great deal of good undone.
The thought that Catholic leaders could approve the use of a vaccine developed from aborted fetus cell lines appears at first glance, shocking.  Yet this is exactly what the St. Louis Archdiocese and the editor of Ethics and Medicine at at the National Catholic Bioethics Center did recently.  The question that their approval raises is whether they have placed themselves on the same path that connects a tragic past with a dangerous future.  So whose side are we on?
The moral ramifications of the issue are indeed, highly complex.  What may initially seem shocking may turn out to be, if not permissible, then at least, less shocking. My personal sense is that the private and medically indicated uses of vaccines derived from aborted fetuses, such as WI-38, which was developed from a 3 month aborted female in 1961, can be viewed as “remote material cooperation” and morally permissible. Where no alternative is available, cooperation in immoral acts admits to a variety of important moral distinctions.  Not every kind of such cooperation is morally equal.
At their general meeting in November 1994, the Catholic Bishops of the United States approved a revised and expanded text of their Ethical and Religious Directives, a document summarizing much of the Church’s teaching regarding health care.  At the end of the Directives, in an appendix, the bishops provide a statement intended to clarify the terms pertaining to different degrees of cooperation in immoral acts.
The first important distinction they make is between the “action of the wrongdoer” (whom we might call the “operator”) and the “action of the cooperator”.  It may prove helpful here to note that the notion of “cooperation” can be so limited and tenuous, in certain circumstances, that it may be more accurately represented by the word “involvement”. “Cooperation” suggests willful complicity, whereas “involvement” leaves room for a person being “drawn into” a situation in which his degree of consent is significantly weaker.
According to the bishops, if the cooperator intends the object of the wrongdoer’s activity, he exemplifies formal cooperation (which is always morally wrong), whereas if he does not, he exemplifies material cooperation (which may or may not be morally wrong).  With regard to the medically indicated, private use of the vaccine in question, it is clearly not a case of formal cooperation (explicit or implicit) where the agents neither intend, approve, nor condone either the act of abortion or the acts by which fetal tissue was used to generate the vaccines.
Delicate Distinctions
The second important distinction that the bishops make is between immediate and mediate material cooperation.  One is guilty of the former when his object is the same as the the object of the wrongdoer (the collusion of the pharmacists and the abortionists, for example).  Here, immediate material cooperation is tantamount to implicit formal cooperation.  In the case of mediate material cooperation, the object of the cooperation is not the object of the wrongdoer.  Concerning the vaccine, the object of the user is health and not the abortion of the fetus or the cultivation of a cell line.   The bishops state: “When the object of the cooperator’s action remains indistinguishable from that of the wrongdoer’s, material cooperation is mediate and can be morally licit.”
Over the years, Catholic moralists have employed a further refinement, dividing mediate material cooperation into the proximate and remote.  While it is difficult to draw a clear line that would separate the two, the distinctions can be useful.  Here is an example.  A secretary is aware that some of the statements that she types for her boss are lies.  She may be disturbed by this and may feel that, if she protests, she risks losing her job.  At the same time, she has no prospects for another job and has a child who is dependent on her.  She cooperates materially, but not formally (she does not assist in crafting more convincing lies).  She does not intend the object of her boss’s deception.  Her cooperation is proximate.  But the cooperation of the people in the mailroom (who also know about the lies) is remote.  And that of the mail carriers who deliver the mail is so remote as to be clearly morally inculpable.  As material cooperation becomes increasingly remote, it passes from cooperation to increasingly diluted forms of involvement, through loose association to complete disassociation.
Many churches have been built and maintained thanks to Mafia contributions.  But it would seem that church attendance would exemplify an extremely remote (and therefore morally inculpable) material involvement, especially where the participant does not affirm in any way how the donors acquired their money or even the fact that they made their contributions.  Nor would a store clerk be morally cooperating in wrongdoing by selling merchandise to a member of the Mafia whom he has good reason to believe derives his income from illicit activities.  Wrongdoing leaves its fingerprints virtually everywhere.  Can a person stay at a hotel that provides “adult” entertainment for its patrons without cooperating illicitly with an evil?  It would seem that such cooperation is sufficiently remote as to be innocent of any moral censure.
The bishops also advise that the “object of material cooperation should be as distant as possible from the wrongdoer’s act,” and that any act of material cooperation requires “a proportionately grave reason.”  The grave reason for using the vaccine may very well be the health and continued life of one’s children, surely a grave reason.  But is such a reason “proportionate”, that is, does the good of the vaccine outweigh whatever evils might be unleashed as a result of its use?
Purifying
One must take into consideration the possibility of scandal, the charge of hypocrisy, further institutionalizing the abortion-vaccine industry, and so on.  These potential evils, however, can at least theoretically, be effectively opposed.  Once can publicly denounce abortion and the cultivation of vaccines from aborted fetuses, lobby to encourage scientists to cultivate vaccines from non-human sources and still use the vaccine.  On the other hand, not to use the vaccine could be interpreted as an abdication of parental responsibility and could bring considerable stress into a marriage relationship.  In short, the use of such a vaccine may be understood as a form of morally acceptable cooperation that is material and remote.
Can it really be morally permissible to benefit from something whose genesis is morally impermissible?  Surely a child conceived by rape can enjoy the benefits of human existence without endorsing the nature of the act that brought him into being.  It can be permissible to enjoy such a benefit if there is a proportionate reason to use the benefit and the degree of material cooperation is so remote from the wrongdoing that the cooperator does not incur any moral culpability for the wrongdoings that were initially committed.  In particular cases, however, where one is able to defend his actions, one may even be obliged to do so.  One is not morally bound to refrain from performing a good action because others, who are ignorant, may voice censure or disapproval.  The obligation to educate may be very strong.  A moral choice with an explanation is better than inaction combined with a fear of the opinion of others.
Part of the meaning of the “global village” in which we live is that the contamination from various acts of wrongdoing has seeped into almost every corner of our existence.  Given what is shown on television these days, can anyone justify owing one?  Many food items one purchases at the grocery store have a genesis that involves a worker exploitation or even slave labor.  Is one even allowed to to watch an NBA game, given the stories that exist concerning the making and selling of certain sneakers?  We pay taxes to governments that subsidize abortion and other crimes.  Too scrupulous a moral attitude can lead to paralysis and, as a consequence, leave a great deal of good undone.
The notion of excusable, remote, material cooperation allows us to be involved in a morally contaminated world without contributing to that contamination.  The medically indicated use of vaccines cultivated from aborted fetuses can be morally licit.  And it can be done without giving approval to the way they were developed, and without necessarily contributing to any of the associate evils that we rightly denounce.  There are distinctions that must be made so that we can live with a clear conscience and cooperate with others in our problematic world – so that we can be effectively in the world, without being of it.

Don DeMarco, a philosophy professor at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, is a member of the American Bioethics Advisory Commission.

The following letter to the editor appeared in response to the above article
National Catholic Register May 14-20, 2000

LETTERS
Vaccines and Abortion

    Vaccines and Abortion:  Cooperation or Cop-out? (April 30-May 6) puts words in the bishops’ mouths.  What the bishops say is that material cooperation “may or may not be morally wrong.”  DeMarco is the one who starts changing words around, saying the word cooperation can be “so limited and tenuous”, etc.  The bishops go on to state: “When the object of the cooperator’s action remains distinguishable from that of the wrongdoer’s, material cooperation is mediate and can be morally licit.”  Not that it is.
The parallel examples…[such as] the many churches built and maintained by the Mafia and the people using these churches, are a far cry from using vaccines [developed] from aborted fetuses.
John Hrach
Fort Pierce, Florida

In response to yet another rash of letters, the following article was written
National Catholic Register – June 18-24, 2000

Vaccines OK’d Despite Dark Past
by Una McManus
Register Correspondent

After a flood of mail on the topic, the Register asked several of the nation’s top Catholic thinkers to speak about the morality of using vaccines that were developed from the tissues of unborn children aborted in the 1960’s.  All agreed with bishops’ statements that the vaccines, though their origins are evil, are permissible for Catholics to use.  The group included pro-lifers such as Humanae Vitae scholar Janet Smith, moral theologian Msgr. William Smith and former abortionist Bernard Nathanson.  Their individual responses follow:
Msgr. William Smith
Professor of Moral Theology, St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers NY, Board Member New York Right to Life Committee
“There is a clash between the parental duty to provide health care and the call to heroic witness.  The heroic is extraordinary and it’s optional.  You can’t mandate martyrdom anymore than you can mandate miracles.  There is a principle in moral theology that  ‘no one is held to the impossible’.  If people say it is possible, wait, you have to look at the balance here.  Parents obviously have a duty, in fact a serious duty, to provide ordinary health care for their children.  When you balance this certain obligation against a tenuous one, one for which there’s no real agreement, the answer seems obvious.  That may not be convincing to everyone, but it seem obvious and safely prudent to me.
Now, some people say there’s the problem of scandal.  Maybe, maybe not.  How do you get out of [using these vaccines]?  No one in their right mind is going to ask parents to de-vaccinate their children.  That’s just dumb.  Or not to vaccinate them at all.  The question of scandal is a question upon which perhaps not everyone agrees.  Scandal is some word, deed, or omission that is evil or has the appearance of evil.  However, I would prefer that more present attention be given so that similar things either not be initiated or even worse things not come about with fetal tissue research and so on.  You don’t have to keep asking the question: Where does this tissue come from?  I’m much more in favor of putting our limited energies on some current things that we may be able to prevent.  That doesn’t mean that there are no problems (with certain vaccines).  There are problems.  But I would hope that we are not looking at a 30-year-old runaway while other planes are taking off right under our noses.”
Janet Smith
Professor of Philosophy, University of Dallas
“Is it wise in our present culture – what Pope John Paul II has called a ‘culture of death’ – to use vaccines produced with the aid of fetal tissue from aborted babies?  Those who argue that it is not place a great deal of emphasis on the scandal and complicity that may arise.  They believe that, in a culture where scientists are salivating over the availability of fetal tissue to use in research, the use of such vaccines will be interpreted as giving approval to such research and perhaps will even give rise to more abortions and experimentation on embryos.  They argue that the vaccines could be produced from fetal tissue from spontaneously aborted fetuses and that such must be done.  This is a very powerful argument.
Others argue that unless there is a concerted effort by a large group of people to boycott the vaccines tainted with the specter of abortion, little if any good will be done – and some harm might be done to those who would greatly benefit from the vaccines.  This too is a powerful argument.
Certainly, I believe that groups should form to protest the fetal tissue to produce vaccines and should [push] to have vaccines produced in a legitimate way.  They may well find a boycott of current vaccines to be a good leverage in the fight.  Nonetheless, I also believe (and am open to changing my mind) that, until such an effort is undertaken, parents concerned that grave harm may come to their children without the use of current vaccines, may use them.”
Bernard Nathanson
Clinical Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, New York Medical College
“You cannot tell me that in this day and age, with genetic splicing and recombination and all the bio-technology tricks that have been worked out, that these companies can’t possibly manufacture a vaccine without using fetal cells.  That’s just not conceivable to me.
They’ve got all kinds of ways of programming bacteria to manufacture drugs and all kinds of bizarre proteins and I’m sure if an advanced biotechnical company sat down and tried and plotted a way to manipulate genetically bacterial to do the same thing, they would be able to do it.  But things are no easy now (using the vaccines originally cultured in the aborted fetal cells) and it costs them nothing.  Basically, you’re coming down to dollars and cents.
Nevertheless, I’m not recommending that parents shouldn’t get their children vaccinated.  That’s far too radical a step.  In the present circumstances, with state requirements for routine vaccinations of children and so on, parents probably have to go along with that and use the vaccines.
But this use must be accompanied in parallel fashion by strong organized protest against this kind of vaccine.  Also, Catholic physicians should boycott or otherwise abjure dealing with companies who manufacture their vaccines in this manner.  Pressure must be brought against these companies.”
Father Benedict Ashley, OP
Professor of Moral Theology, Aquinas Institute of Theology (St. Louis) Co-author, Health Care Ethics textbook
” I think parents should go ahead and use the vaccine.  But the fact that they know about the issue raises a question for them:  Is there something they can do about the whole use of embryos in the abortion business?  Perhaps they can protest in come way, or write the companies.  But you know, there’s all kinds of evil in the world that I could demonstrate against but I have to pick and choose what I do to try to prevent these things.  To ask individual people to engage in a boycott or protest, it’s not strictly obligatory.
If the killing of embryos to make these vaccines was ongoing, that would be a different situation.  Then using the vaccines would be encouraging more and more abortions and killings.  Then we’d have to do something to stop it.  But that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
Richard Doerflinger
Associate Director of Policy Development, National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Office of Pro-Life Activities
“Both the British Bishops Conference and the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston have done serious analysis of this problem.  Basically, both studies conclude that it is not immoral for a parent to use these vaccines.  Certainly, the abortions were immoral and the vaccine companies’ cooperation with the abortionists was immoral, but the idea that a person is complicit in that act many years later, solely because he or she was presented with the vaccine as the only available way to protect his or her health, is a difficult argument to make.
Nevertheless, it’s worthwhile to insist to the vaccine manufacturers that they produce these vaccines in other ways in the future…A Catholic may want to make a moral statement by refusing the vaccine, but the people who analyzed the issue didn’t feel that was a moral requirement.
If there are alternative vaccines that don’t use fetal tissue from abortions, it would be vastly preferable to use those.  We can certainly make this case to the doctor or the person administering the vaccine and urge them to send that message back up the line.  One can also find out who the manufacturer is.  Contact their public relations office and complain.  Raise the alarm.  These companies respond to pressure.  They operate on the acceptance of the public and if enough people are critical of this approach, they will ask their researchers if there are other ways that don’t raise controversy.  For some vaccines, I think there might be other ways, right now.  In the case of others, they would have to be developed.
Obviously, fetal tissue is not the only effective culture medium for vaccine.  Nor is induced abortion the only way to get fetal tissue.  Tissue from spontaneous abortions or miscarriages would not present the same moral problem.”

                                                                                                                                                Una McManus writes from Columbia, Maryland

The following letter to the editor appeared in response to the above article
National Catholic Register July 9-15, 2000

LETTERS

Vaccine Vortex

    We love the National Catholic Register but we are seriously disappointed in the paper’s continual propagation of the opinion that it is morally acceptable for Catholics to use vaccines developed from the tissue of aborted children. In “Vaccines OK’d Despite Dark Past” (June 18-24) you list the opinions of several well-known and respected Catholic thinkers – all of whom gave the same half-hearted argument – that while nobody likes the way the vaccines were developed, parents are not strictly prohibited in conscience from using the vaccines for the good of their children.
We understand their arguments and respect them, but we think that in our culture of death, the Register would do better to call us to a higher standard, rather than to continually repeat and promote the same minimum-moral requirement arguments which your readers have found such a bitter pill to swallow.
In the article, Dominican Father Benedict Ashley says, “If there are alternative vaccines that don’t use fetal tissue from abortions, it would be vastly preferable to use those.”  National Catholic Register, we implore you to find the vaccines and manufacturers that do not use aborted fetal tissue and promote these in your paper, so that parents will be able to notify their doctors and obtain these life-saving vaccines.
Stephen and Patricia Beaumont
Leeds, Alabama

The following letter to the editor appeared in
The National Catholic Register August 23 – September 2, 2000

LETTERS

Vaccine Volley

      In the July 23-29 Register, Sharon Peerzada of Ventura, Calif., submitted a Web page address to access information on untainted vaccines [Letters, “Help for Vaccine Shoppers”].  I am writing to tell you yes, there are untainted vaccines available for Rubella and Hepatitis-A which are produced in Japan by the Kitasato Institute (a working partner of Merck) and Kaketsuken.  One is from a rabbit cell line and the other is from the cell line of a monkey.  These are safe and reliable vaccines.  The bad news is they are not available in this country and are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
As a practicing pediatrician I am well aware of the personal and social benefits of effective vaccines and I have promoted their use for 35 years in my practice.  I am also aware that many good Catholic ethicists have concluded that Catholics may not only use these tainted vaccines but may have a personal and social obligation to do so.   The reason being that, our involvement is only “remote, material cooperation”.  I have read the arguments and I feel convinced that, in this particular case, since there is no ongoing killing of babies involved, “remote, material cooperation” fits.
I am very concerned that if we Catholics and all pro-life groups do not convince the pharmaceutical houses to use untainted cell lines in the production of medical products, they will have no incentive to do so.  Although “remote, material cooperation” is a correct moral argument to justify the use of vaccines using the present cell lines (MRC-5 and WI-38), it only covers this specific case and cannot be used as blanket justification for using stem cells or tissue from abortion.
The destruction of human embryos (persons) for the benefit of others does not wash.  Research using embryonic stem cells – cells derived from the destruction of a living person who is as worthy of protection as you and I – is already taking place in this country.  At the present time, only private funds are being used.  However, I feel sure that the National Institutes of Health guidelines will be approved in the near future so that federal funds will flow into embryonic stem cell research.  The only way we will discourage the use of stem cells and fetal tissue from abortion is the production of medical products will be for us to tell the pharmaceutical houses that we will actively seek out and use ethically produced vaccines in preference to tainted products.  That economic incentive should be persuasive.
If you have an interest and want to help you can go to cogforlife.org.  As Vice President of the National Catholic Medical Association and member of the executive board of the American Association of Pro-Life Pediatricians, I can assure you that we will make our preference known.
Robert J. Saxer, M.D.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

NOTE:  THERE HAS BEEN NO MODIFICATION OR ALTERATION TO THE CONTENT OF THESE ARTICLES.  COPYING AND CROPPING HAS BEEN DONE TO FIT THIS SCREEN LAYOUT AND PRINTER FORMATS ONLY.