The Moral Implications of Fetal Tissue Vaccines
By Steven Kellmeyer
vaccination is against our religious beliefs." While this statement is
associated with religious groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses, it may become
much more common due to two relatively recent vaccines: Varivax and Meruvax II.
Both vaccines were generated through the use of fetal tissue obtained through
surgical abortion. The use of such viral vaccines poses a serious moral
challenge. Can the health interests of a living child be weighed against a child
whose death is an accomplished fact, when the murderer promises to kill no more
children - in fact, he promises to use the wealth derived from the murder to
keep your child, and thousands like her, alive?
While fetal tissue harvesting and research are widely discussed, a more
insidious moral dilemma remains unmentioned: the use of fetal tissue obtained
from abortion and used to generate vaccines. Is it morally licit to use such
vaccines? This issue demonstrates the moral situation is at its most extreme.
The child whose tissues have been harvested has been dead several decades.
Unlike front-page experiments in the macabre, the medical treatments being
derived from these tissues are neither speculative nor rank failures - the
vaccines work. Lives will be preserved and not just yours. The lives preserved
are even more precious to you than your own - they are the lives of your
children. We have only to accept the terms.
The arguments surrounding such vaccines are thus the acid test of the
right-to-life movement. The problems involved have led astray even
well-catechized, well-meaning Catholics. Within the last five years, two
different groups of Catholic ethicists have found the use of these vaccines to
be moral, largely through subtly flawed analogies. Note carefully: the ethical
problems discussed here only arise with a class of vaccines generated for use
against certain viral diseases. Vaccines generated against bacterial disease do
not have the same ethical problems. In order to understand why this is so, we
need to re-visit our high school biology.
Why Fetal Tissue is Used
In order to produce a bacterial or a viral vaccine, laboratory personnel
must have large quantities of the bacterium or virus in question. Fortunately,
bacteria can be grown in large quantities simply by giving them the equivalent
of chicken broth. Unfortunately a virus, a simple strand of DNA or RNA, isn't as
capable. A virus needs cellular machinery, machinery it doesn't have, in order
to reproduce. It must insinuate itself into a cell, hijacking the cell's
machinery. To grow large quantities of virii, a tissue culture, essentially a
vast "lawn" of cells which coat the inside of the flask like scales on
a fish, must be prepared. The virus is placed in contact with the cell tissue,
invades the cells, hijacks the cellular machinery, and reproduces itself. After
large numbers of viruses have grown, they are removed from the cell culture,
inactivated, and processed in order to produce the vaccine.
The problem: viruses need good cells to hijack. The cells must provide excellent
machinery for virus production, and be easy for the virus to invade. Two human
cell lines used to produce cell cultures, WI-38 and MRC-5, have problematic
origins. WI-38 is normal lung tissue taken from a three-month old female child
aborted in Philadelphia in 1961. MRC-5 is normal lung tissue taken from a
14-week old male child aborted because a Swedish couple wanted no more children.
Both cell lines support a broad range of rhinoviruses. Both are
"immortal," which means they reproduce rapidly and self-consistently
enough to remain essentially similar to the tissue taken from two dying bodies
over thirty years ago.
vaccines generated using viruses grown in these cell lines are Merck and Co.'s
Varivax, a chicken-pox vaccine, and Meruvax II, for rubella. Catholic ethicists
have analyzed the morality of these vaccines at least twice in the last five
years; once in an October 1994 briefing paper issued through the English
Bishops' Catholic Media Office (EBCMO), and again in July 1997, by Daniel Maher,
Director of Publications of what was then called the Pope John Center in
Braintree, Massachusetts, at the request of Denver's Archbishop Charles Chaput.
Though somewhat different, both arguments reach the same conclusion: the
vaccines are morally licit. Both opinions clearly find abortion reprehensible,
and both struggle to provide a just response. However, neither analysis is
morally binding, and both are subtly flawed.
Both lines of reasoning are founded on the nature of the seminal event: since
the cell lines are immortal, no further abortions are needed in order to
generate more cells. Thus, the evil act which procured the tissues is complete
and sufficiently remote from the present use of the tissues that whoever uses
the vaccine today is not morally complicit in the original abortion. That is,
using the vaccine won't prevent the historical abortion, vaccine generation
doesn't require more abortions today or in the future, so there is no attachment
to the sin of abortion.
Two analogies are used to support this argument. The first rests on the use of
data from Nazi death-camp experiences. German doctors froze prisoners to death
in tanks of ice water in order to learn how to treat hypothermia. Though they
failed to find a treatment, their data was eventually captured by Allied troops.
Allied doctors developed information based on that data which is used today in
the treatment of hypothermia. Since this use of illicitly collected data was
moral, it is also acceptable to use illicitly collected fetal tissue.
Unfortunately, the comparison fails. First, the use of data is substantially
different from the use of tissue. Second, no one argues that present hypothermia
treatments show Nazism and Nazi experiments were not really evil, nor is anyone
arguing that the current use of the Nazi data justifies undertaking similar
experiments today. However, fetal tissue research, transplants, and products are
quite often used to justify abortion. Third, the profits and data obtained from
that research allows society to assume the method of obtaining fetal tissue is,
if not completely moral, at least not particularly relevant.
Thus, the Nazi murderers reap neither monetary benefits from their evil nor an
enhanced reputation from the use of the hypothermia data, and, most important,
they gain no emulators on the basis of their work. However, the abortion
industry is reaping both monetary benefits and an enhanced reputation from the
use of this tissue, and they have gained quite a few emulators. Furthermore, the
abortion industry and society uses contraception and abortion to structure a
eugenic biomedical agenda essentially similar to that of the original Nazi
regime. The unwanted members of society, whether they be children in the womb,
the poor unable to afford medical care, or the aged, useless in a consuming,
producing society, are being systematically killed or pressured into suicide.
Ironically, Nazi ideology is reaping the benefits of an enhanced reputation
through the use of fetal tissue for biomedical purposes.
The second analogy compares the use of fetal tissue to that of a murdered organ
donor. It is morally acceptable to use an organ harvested from someone who has
been murdered. Since the manner of death is not relevant to the ability to
donate organs, tissue harvesting is called morally acceptable.
However, organ donation is a freely willed act. Organs can be harvested from an
individual only if and as the individual stipulates. Thus, the donor may give
permission only to remove her corneas, she may permit organ harvesting only if
she dies naturally, or she may forbid harvesting entirely. The patient's
pre-established will rules how her organs will be handled, not the manner of
death. Her will must be positively established, or no donation can take place at
all. Clearly, the child's will in regard to her tissues cannot be established.
While a parent has the right to decide how to dispose of her dead child's
organs, this right presupposes the parent has not brought about the child's
Neither analysis considers a more closely-related example: enforced cannibalism.
The use of tissue to generate vaccines which may save other's lives is a kind of
cannibalism. On October 13, 1972, a plane with 40 people aboard, all Catholic,
crashed in the Andes. Due to the total lack of food in the snowy wasteland, the
survivors of the crash were forced to eat the bodies of those who had died in
order to maintain their own life. The Church ruled the cannibalism to be
acceptable in this instance, because the bodies of the slain were treated with
great reverence and the need for sustenance was life-threatening. While it is
true that most of those whose bodies were eaten had not given their consent, it
is also true that none were murdered; their deaths were unforeseen and
unpreventable. By removing the issue of will, this example better corresponds to
the abortion event, while simultaneously highlighting the moral problem: the
manner of death and the reverence due the human body in death must be
Another argument asserts the separation of the cells from the living being to
which they once belonged gives the tissue a different, independent life. While
technically true, it doesn't address how the tissue came to have this status. In
May 1973, at a combined meeting of the American Pediatric Society and the
Society for Pediatric Research held in San Francisco, California, Dr. Peter Adam
and associates described their experiment on fetal brain metabolism. The
putative scientists aborted babies between 12 and 21 weeks gestation and cut
their heads off. The heads were kept alive in a nutrient solution in order to
study the brain tissues' uptake of nutrients. Using the above argument, the
living brains in the severed heads could morally be used to generate the viruses
necessary for vaccine production because those brains have a life which is now
different from and independent of their origin, the living child. Though this
example merely substitutes brain tissue for lung tissue and skulls for
test-tubes, few could look the living skull in the eye and call the products
derived from the living brain within morally licit for use.
there is a further problem, which none of the above analyses address. Who owns
an immortal cell line? In October, 1976, UCLA Medical Center, while treating
John Moore's hairy-cell leukemia, discovered his T-lymphocytes had unique
properties and harvested them, establishing a new cell line without his
knowledge. The cell line turned out to be quite valuable. Moore found out and
sued, claiming a right to part of the profits. Although he lost, the court found
his doctor failed in his fiduciary duty towards Moore. Three elements were
1.. the patient was being treated for an illness
2.. the patient survived the treatment
3.. the cells were taken without the patient's consent, thus the courts found
these researchers violated the patient's right to informed consent.
Certainly the aborted child was not being treated for an illness, did not
survive the treatment, did not consent to the harvesting of the cells, nor was
he informed of what the researchers would do with those cells. By every one of
the court criteria, the researchers who established the immortal cell line
obtained the tissue dishonestly.
But what is the moral culpability of the cell-line researchers or the
pharmaceutical researchers? It seems unlikely the tissue is licit. The
children's consent was not obtained, and the only individuals who could have
given such consent, i.e., the parents, or just possibly the physician, lost
their this right by their collusion in the children's death. How culpable are
the researchers for these deaths?
It has been argued the pharmaceutical researchers bear no culpability: the
tissue for the cell line could, in principle, have come from a natural
miscarriage. This is a variation of the cannibalism argument; just as the Andes
plane crash survivors were forced by circumstances to eat their dead companions,
so the researchers were forced by circumstances to use aborted fetal tissue to
generate a vaccine. Yet, while chicken pox/rubella can be deadly diseases under
the right circumstances, the two situations hardly seem equivalent. Even if we
grant such an equivalence, are the researchers innocent bystanders? They could
make such an argument. In 1992, the National Institutes of Health successfully
lobbied President Clinton to repeal the federal funding ban on the use of tissue
from surgical abortion precisely because miscarriages were not providing enough
suitable tissue for continued research. Researchers, pointing to this, could
claim it proves surgically aborted children were their only real source of
tissue. Sadly, this means the pharmaceutical researchers depended on an
intrinsically evil act, making the vaccine morally illicit.
Cell-line researchers collude with abortionists in order to get tissue.
Researchers require living tissue, as fresh as possible; dead and dying tissue
is useless. Getting living fetal tissue requires extraordinarily close
cooperation between the researcher and the abortionist. In fact, the researcher
is often at the foot of the table while the abortion is being performed,
immediately dissecting the child. Typically, published scientific papers on
fetal tissue research list the abortionist who supplies the fetal tissues as a
co-author; without the close cooperation of the abortionist, the paper wouldn't
have been possible.
Thus, little independence exists between the cell-line researcher and the
abortionist. Even if the aborted tissues were simply shipped to the lab by the
abortionist, money and/or a positive social acceptance of abortion will be given
in exchange for the tissues. The abortionist will not be dissuaded from his evil
act, he will be encouraged to continue it; indeed, the abortionist intends the
act of supplying tissue to spread social acceptance of abortion. Similarly, we
encourage researchers to support abortionists when we support work based on
aborted fetal tissue. The Nazi data could be used precisely because there was no
danger of such material cooperation; insofar as the possibility of such
cooperation exists, the use of the Nazi data is proscribed.
"Immediate material cooperation" is complicity in an action which one
does not formally approve, but in which one is so closely involved that one
shares its evil. The cell-line researchers were almost certainly immediate
material cooperators. Pharmaceutical researchers made no effort to avoid the
morally problematic cell line, and thereby spread the effect of the
abortionists' evil intent. While using the vaccine is not identical to attending
the abortion, using products derived from the living tissues of a murdered child
is uncomfortably close to immediate material cooperation with the vaccine
such vaccines institutionalizes the link between pharmaceuticals and abortion.
This effect was callously disregarded by Merck and Co. even if it wasn't
actually intended. Given the lack of equally effective vaccines based on
alternative, non-problematic cell lines, their intent is suspect. In a free
market one would expect non-abortion related vaccine cell-lines to be available.
None are. Either aborted tissue is intrinsically necessary to such vaccine
production, or we must seriously question the ethics of pharmaceutical
companies. Donum Vitae states: "The corpses of human embryos and fetuses,
whether they have been deliberately aborted or not, must be respected just as
the remains of other human beings.... the moral requirements must be
safeguarded, that there be no complicity in deliberate abortion and that the
risk of scandal be avoided. Also, in the case of dead fetuses, as for the
corpses of adult persons, all commercial trafficking must be considered illicit
and should be prohibited." The cell-line researchers are complicit in
abortion. Merck and Co. commercially exploit the results of this complicity.
Thus, Donum Vitae is violated.
It is irrelevant that the abortion is a one-time long-since completed event. A
rape-murder committed in 1961 is also a one-time long-since completed event, but
it is still immoral to buy the film of the event for one's own enjoyment. Buying
goods produced by apartheid or slave labor is not moral even if the crime which
produced the item is a completed action, with the slaves now dead. Using the
product encourages slavers. Using the vaccine encourages the abortion industry.
Even if chicken-pox or rubella were uniformly deadly diseases, the danger posed
to the public health by refusing this vaccine is irrelevant. If a serial killer
auctioned off his victims' property we must refuse to buy that property,
regardless of the danger to the public economy. In the same way, we cannot be
complicit in serial killing practiced by scientists. A murderer cannot be
allowed to justify the act of murder by donating his victim's organs. He does
not gain rights over the body of his quarry simply by virtue of having swung the
killing blow. Neither does a society complicit in abortion have a right to
apportion the victim's body in ways which benefit itself, while muttering,
"Well, she's dead now, and we can't let the body go to waste." Drug
companies use these cell lines because the cell lines make money. The cell lines
will only be discarded when market pressures demonstrate they do not make money.
Assume someone learns the inheritance on which he lives was given to him on the
basis of a false will, designed to deprive the rightful heirs of their money.
The person who has benefited from the injustice must attempt to rectify the
situation. Likewise, Merck and Co. has a duty publicly to renounce the abortion
and all profits accruing therefrom. The problem of scandal derives precisely
from the fact that it encourages others to sin or to continue in their sin. We
cannot avoid participating in scandal if we provide no incentive for the sinners
to change. Public use of the vaccines will not cause Merck and Co. or the
abortionists to change their behaviour. In fact, derived profits encourages
their continued fetal tissue efforts in other avenues of research. They
experience no downside. Is not this very fact scandalous?
The arguments supporting the morality of these vaccines do not stand up to
scrutiny. Refusing to use these vaccines involves physical risk for ourselves,
for our children, and for society. But their use poses an even greater risk to a
just society. The widespread use of contraception has led inexorably to
abortion, euthanasia and infanticide. Where might the widespread use of tissue
taken from surgically aborted children lead us? Do we really want to find out?
Kellmeyer holds a Master's Degree in theology from Franciscan University as well
as a Master's Degree in Modern European History, a Bachelor's Degree in Computer
Science and an Associate's Degree in Medical Lab Technology and has worked in each
of these fields. He is currently working as Associate Director for Evangelization
at the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois. Kellmeyer has published two books, Bible Basics, through Basilica Press,
which demonstrates the Scriptural support for about six dozen teachings of the Church, and The Flesh of God, through Bridegroom
Press, an Advent-Christmas study of the Infancy narratives.