Family matters James Preece on the vaccine dilemma facing Catholics

Ends and means

There's a big decision coming, some of you may have made it already. Whether to have the Covid vaccine? Does it work? Is it safe? I'm not qualified to tell you. There, that was a short column.

Something else I'm not qualified to tell you is whether the vaccine is morally okay. You may have read online that the vaccines available in the UK have been tested using the HEK 293 fetal cell line. What this means in practice is that parts of an aborted baby girl have been kept and grown in a lab in order to conduct experiments. In some vaccines these cells are also used in the manufacture of the vaccine but we are assured that they are ‘filtered out’ before you get your jab. That's not a mad conspiracy theory, it is absolutely true.

The teaching of the Catholic Church on this matter is clear. Abortion is a grave evil. It's absolutely not okay. Any vaccine which makes use of aborted cells is clearly off limits, case closed. So why do I read that, not only has the Pope said it’s okay, he's said that ethically we should take the vaccine. What's that all about?

Well, it turns out the Catholic Church wasn't born yesterday and theologians through the centuries have thought about this stuff in rather a bit more detail than I ever have. St Thomas Aquinas in the 13th Century didn't have to think about vaccines but in his Summa Theologiae he did consider whether it is lawful to kill a man in self-defence (Q64) and, in the process, introduced the principle of double effect. I know what you are thinking: self-defence? That's different – aborted babies are not synonymous with armed assailants! That's not the point here. The point is we can apply the principle of double effect to different problems. Bear with me...

Aquinas writes: ‘Nothing hinders one act from having two effects, only one of which is intended, while the other is beside the intention. Now moral acts take their species according to what is intended, and not according to what is beside the intention, since this is accidental.’ In other words, your action can have two outcomes – one you intended and another you did not intend. The morality of the action depends on the intended outcome, not the unintended one. In the case of the Covid vaccine, the intention is to avoid people dying from a virus. That's clearly a good intention and the act would therefore be good. The secondary effect of using of fetal cell lines would be bad, but not intended.

Does that mean we can do evil in order that good may come of it? Clearly not. Aquinas continues: “Though proceeding from a good intention, an act may be rendered unlawful, if it be out of proportion to the end.’ In other words, we have to balance the evil effects of our actions against the good ones. If the bad outweighs the good, then it ceases to be a good act. In the case of the Covid vaccine, it could be argued that using material from an aborted baby to test the vaccine is out of proportion to the end of saving lives from the virus, especially if one doubts the efficacy and safety of the vaccine. In that case one would have to say, as Bishop Athanasius Schneider does, that the ends do not justify the means. On the other hand, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has received the vaccine. There are good people on both sides and both views are reasonable.

Let's say the ends are proportional and we can receive the vaccine – are we off the hook? Aquinas is clear that the unintended outcomes must be limited to that which is necessary, ‘if a man, in self-defence, uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful’. It seems to me that the vaccines which are manufactured using fetal cells must be rejected in favour of the ones which are only tested. If a vaccine existed that had not even been tested using fetal cells, clearly the problematic ones would no longer be necessary and there would be no longer be any possibility of considering them morally permissible.

This is why it is simply not good enough to receive the vaccine while quietly mumbling about double effects and remote cooperation. Headlines such as ‘Pope Calls Coronavirus Vaccinations an Ethical Obligation’ in the New York Times do not tell the whole story. Catholics absolutely must demand that an alternative be provided. Just as Humanae Vitae once called on scientists “especially those who are Catholics” to pool their research efforts, so today we need a new call for scientists to develop and test vaccines without the use of fetal material. In this regard I fear the Vatican has not been clear enough. If there are any medical research scientists reading – get on to it!