Regarding the Use of Vaccines Developed Using Cells from Aborted Human Persons

American Life League, December 22, 2020

On 21 December 2020, Reuters reported on a document issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith announcing that the Vatican had signed off on the use of vaccines “even if their production employed cell lines drawn from tissues of aborted fetuses.”^[1] Though the CDF document stresses that it strongly desires the use of “ethically acceptable” vaccines, the document also emphasizes that the common good and the protection of the “weakest and most exposed” also hold equal claim. While CDF laments the lack of ethically acceptable vaccination methods, it argues incorrectly that the use of ethically compromised vaccines using fetal cell lines is remote material cooperation with evil, precisely because we are dealing in questions of life and death.

Using vaccines that are produced using cell lines involving the destruction of embryonic life is an act of sacrilege precisely because it is the destruction of the things of God—namely, human persons created in His own image.

For this reason alone, any justification for vaccines that entails the destruction of human life to save human lives pits one set of basic goods (life) against another (health) and does so in a disintegrative way that destroys the things of God.  …

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