Page 38 - Vaccines

Vaccines and Catholic morality

diseases. The despoiling of the human remains of a
deliberately aborted foetus in order to produce a vaccine
or for any other purpose is gravely immoral. The use of
the tissues and cells taken from an unborn child who has
died in the womb or after a miscarriage, with the consent
of the parents for certain organs to be studied and for
tissues to be used to develop vaccines, out of charity and
for the good of others—and within the strict limits of that
consent—would be morally legitimate.

c. Scandal as a factor in cooperation with the
wrong-doing of another

i. Scandal
The question of producing and using vaccines derived
from the tissues of deliberately aborted human foetuses
inevitably raises the question of scandal, which is always
a consideration in acts of cooperation with the wrong-
doing of another. St. Thomas defines scandal as some-
thing said or done by a person which is “minus recte”
which could lead someone else to stumble over an
obstacle (skandalon, scandalum) and hence could lead
them into committing sin.11 He distinguishes between
active scandal, which occurs either when a person says
or does something immoral with the intention of leading
another to join them or to imitate them in sin or when,
even without such an intention, what is said or done is
intrinsically immoral and of itself could lead another into
sin, and passive scandal, which is where another person
is either effectively led into sin by what another says or
does or where they could have been led into sin, even
though, in fact, they did not fall, despite the obstacle

11 Cf. Ibid, Summa theologiae, II-II, q. 43, a.1.

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