Vaccination with abortion cells.

Vatican City -- In June, 2005, the Pontifical Academy For Life produced moral reflections on vaccines prepared from cells derived from aborted human babies. This study explained the principle of licit cooperation in evil. The Church distinguishes between formal and material cooperation, either active or passive.

The vaccines currently produced using human cell lines derived from aborted fetuses are used in the prevention of infection by rubella (German measles), mumps, hepatitis A, chickenpox, poliomyelitis, rabies, and smallpox. The moral principles involved are as follows:

Formal co-operation, i.e., sharing in the evil intent of those who have performed an abortion which allowed retrieval of fetal tissue, is morally illicit.

Doctors and fathers of families have a grave responsibility to use alternative vaccines, if they exist, and to make a conscientious objection with regard to those that have moral problems.

Where there are no alternative vaccines that are available and ethically acceptable, it is right to abstain from using these vaccines if it can be done without causing significant risk to children and indirectly to the population as a whole. If there is a considerable danger to health, vaccines with moral problems pertaining to them may also be used on a temporary basis. This is particularly true in the case of German measles.

There remains a duty to fight and employ every lawful means to obstruct the pharmaceutical industries which act unscrupulously and unethically. The lawfulness of the use of these vaccines should not be misinterpreted as a declaration of the lawfulness of their production, marketing, and use, but is to be understood as being a passive material cooperation and, in its mildest and remotest sense, also active, morally justified as an extrema ratio due to the necessity to provide for the good of one's children and of the people who come in contact with the children, such as pregnant women.

Safe and effective federally approved vaccines grown from animal cells or chick embryo are available for all but chickenpox, hepatitis A, and rubella.

The Academy study provides a list of vaccines that are incriminated today as using cell lines derived from aborted fetuses. The National Catholic Bioethics Center, in Philadelphia, USA, also has a list of vaccines originating in abortion. In addition it has a list of "safe or alternatives available." To contact them go to: www.ncbcenter.org. The address is 6399 Drexel Road, Philadelphia, PA 19151, U.S.A., (tel.) 215-877-2660, (fax) 215-877-2688.