Page 29 - Vaccines

Key principles of Catholic moral

theology

ere we treat key principles of Catholic moral
theology essential for an evaluation of the
H legitimacy of using vaccines derived from or
tested using material from aborted human foetuses.
The properly moral questions of whether or not it is
morally permissible or even obligatory to use a vaccine
(or certain vaccines) cannot be reduced to social doctrine,
nor can these questions be consigned to the realm of
political judgment, laws and procedures, especially when
legislation, administrative decrees and judicial sentences
have sanctioned or endorsed abortion and other grave
offences against the life and integrity of innocent human
beings. The most fundamental moral issue at stake here
is that of human life itself, not just of protecting people
from death through illness, but of the deliberate killing
unborn human beings for the alleged or even real benefit
of others and/or the use of vaccines produced from or
through the use of the human remains of those deliber-
ately aborted. Apart from efficacy, safety and just distri-
bution, the matter of the origins of many of the vaccines
offered requires more than a mere affirmation and
certainly more than a tacit recognition that these must
avoid all compromise with deliberately procured abor-
tion. Nor can the problem of cooperation in that grave
moral wrong be underestimated. Therefore, some key