Page 34 - Vaccines

Vaccines and Catholic morality

v. The manner in which a medicine functions and
the medical good
A specific element that, in my opinion, should be
included in the therapeutic principle and which is rele-
vant also to this question of vaccines produced immor-
ally is that noted by Anthony of Corduba (Cordova),
when examining the legitimacy or otherwise of medi-
cines (or surgical interventions) which may be foreseen
to involve a real risk of provoking an abortion as a
side-effect of the procedure. It focuses attention also
upon the moral object of the human act involved in the
sense that, with a good intention in pressing circum-
stances, it is of major importance to evaluate what is
deliberately chosen by the rational will to implement
such an intention in such circumstances⁵; in this case that
requires very careful attention to the manner in which
the medicine functions or operates because that operation
or functioning is implied in the selection of that moral
object. Corduba distinguishes between medicina princi-
paliter or de se sanativa or salutifera and medicina principal-
iter or de se mortifera between a medical act of prescribing,
administering or taking a medicine or of undertaking or
accepting a surgical operation whose action is of itself
(and principally) curative or in line with the objectives
and implications of the therapeutic principle noted more
broadly above and one which, by contrast, acts in such
a way as to kill the patient (euthanasia) or, with a
pregnant woman, the second patient, namely the unborn
child (a direct abortion, the case Corduba actually con-
siders).⁶ To employ a medical procedure which was of

⁵ Cf. John Paul II, Veritatis splendor, n. 78.
⁶ Cf. Anthony of Corduba, Quaestionarium theologicum (Venice,
1604), q. 38, dub. 3, cited and discussed in J. Connery, Abortion:
The development of the Roman Catholic perspective (Loyola Univer-

22