The Vatican has responded to a request for clarification of the moral issues surrounding mandatory vaccinations with vaccines developed from fetal cell lines.
The summarized statement includes a good review of the differences between formal cooperation and material cooperation; between proximate cooperation and remote cooperation; and between active and passive cooperation in evil.
Making and selling the vaccines is unambiguously illicit:
As regards the preparation, distribution and marketing of vaccines produced as a result of the use of biological material whose origin is connected with cells coming from foetuses voluntarily aborted, such a process is stated, as a matter of principle, morally illicit, because it could contribute in encouraging the performance of other voluntary abortions, with the purpose of the production of such vaccines. Nevertheless, it should be recognized that, within the chain of production-distribution-marketing, the various cooperating agents can have different moral responsibilities.
We have a moral obligation to insist on alternatives if they exist:
Therefore, doctors and fathers of families have a duty to take recourse to alternative vaccines (if they exist), putting pressure on the political authorities and health systems so that other vaccines without moral problems become available. They should take recourse, if necessary, to the use of conscientious objection with regard to the use of vaccines produced by means of cell lines of aborted human foetal origin. Equally, they should oppose by all means (in writing, through the various associations, mass media, etc.) the vaccines which do not yet have morally acceptable alternatives, creating pressure so that alternative vaccines are prepared, which are not connected with the abortion of a human foetus, and requesting rigorous legal control of the pharmaceutical industry producers.
The document concludes that is our right to abstain from these vaccines if we can, but we may, licitly, temporarily have recourse to them in the face of "the danger of favouring the spread of the pathological agent."
The reference is specifically to rubella, a disease which primarily harms unborn children.
H/t. Amy Welborn.
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