Page 37 - Vaccines

Key principles of Catholic moral theology

more serious if conducted upon the bodily remains of
voluntarily aborted foetuses, even if their parents consent
to this (since their consent to deliberate abortion is itself
already intrinsically gravely immoral and invalid), Yet,
it is gravely immoral also in the case where consent has
been given in anticipation by the person themselves or
by the parents of a child for an organ or for certain organs
to be studied in the laboratory in order for doctors to be
able to learn more about a disease which may have been
the cause of the death. The scandals which arose in the
United Kingdom about twenty years ago revealed that
in certain hospitals the limited permission given to study
certain organs had been grossly exceeded by doctors
removing most organs from the bodies of deceased adult
patients and, in the case of the Alder Hey Children’s
Hospital in Liverpool, the same in the case of babies
whose parents had given their consent for specific and
clearly limited study of certain organs. The mutilation of
living human bodies is a violation of the principle of
bodily integrity, quite distinct from the removal of
organs, tissues or tumours under the principle of totality
strictly understood,1⁰ but the mutilation of the bodily
remains of deceased human beings is also a grave
violation of the dignity which is due to the bodily
remains of human beings, as well as a violation of the
truth of the resurrection. Neither any remote therapeutic
purpose nor any consent can render morally legitimate
such intrinsically immoral acts.
These considerations are very relevant also to the
question of the development of vaccines and to the
question of their eventual use to protect people against

Assemblée médicale mondiale, 30ᵗʰ September, 1954.
1⁰ Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II–II, q. 64, a. 2; q. 65,
a.1.

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