Page 63 - Vaccines

Moral responsibilities

bodies or from health authorities which, in the event, do
not exclude but admit expressly or tacitly, compromises
with directly procured abortion, may be all that can be
obtained at present, but matters cannot be left there. The
climate of utilitarianism and the claims of such officials
that they need to consider the views of other persons and
groups will mean that nothing much will change and the
risk of appearing to condone the immorality (and hence
of appearing to collapse into formal cooperation) will
remain. In my opinion, technical scientific bodies, includ-
ing the World Health Organisation, are needed to monitor
and to coordinate the production and distribution of
vaccines, while, without increasing yet further the number
of commissions, nunciatures can gather and transmit
relevant data about distribution and access to the existing
dicasteries of the Roman Curia. What is needed both to
address the need for evident disassociation from all
appearance of formal cooperation in such immoral com-
promises with abortion is for the Holy See to identify
experts truly committed to Catholic moral truth in these
fields (although they need not be Catholic or even Chris-
tian themselves), to gather such experts together, obtain
(or better to promote or encourage ways of obtaining) the
considerable funding which would be necessary, and to
establish centres or sustain such centres which would be
dedicated to the discovery, production, verification, and
distribution of vaccines of the highest efficacy and safety,
but exclusively from sources and through methods which
are morally upright. Although this argumentation may
not convince some bishops who consider the use of
vaccines derived from or tested with biological material
derived from aborted human foetuses immoral, I believe
that it does address their valid objections to the scandal
at issue. At the same time, it meets the needs of those faced

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