My view as a person of faith is that of we can make a vaccine that will save lives from a practice that takes life then this is evidence that God loves us more than we can understand. Aka something horrible is turned into something amazing. That’s pretty cool IMO.
2 Likes
I think it’s good to stop question where our research is coming from.
But this seems like a dumb case to single out. For one thing a lot of medical research is built on serious crimes that the medical community actively caused.
For another thing, there are millions of abortions and a lot of Mad Science happening right now that people of faith aren’t really fighting all that much.
The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines used fetal cell lines in their testing stages. Johnson & Johnson used a human fetal cell line called PER.C6, developed from the retinal cells of an 18-week-old fetus aborted in 1985 in its production and manufacturing stages.
These fetal cell lines are not taken from recent abortions, but are derived from decades old fetal cells. These cells replicate over decades in laboratory settings, thousands of times removed from the original fetus cells, becoming known as fetal cell lines.
Put differently…
It’s less disturbing that our vaccines were tested against cells that originated from an abortion…
…and more disturbing that we used labs to clone billions of cells borrowed from the kidney and retina a dead fetus, keeping them in some basic sense alive forever through these cells.
That’s kind of just life though. If I eat a cow to make more NormalDan cells then is the cow still alive in some sense?
Maybe? No? I don’t know, I’m no religioso.
If you think of living-cow-cells as being “cow-life” and living-human-cells as being “human-life”, then it is different. Certainly, the scientists needed to use living-human-cells and not cow-cells to test the vaccine.
Anyway, I just think we’re neck deep in “playing God” territory, and have been for some time.
I think traditionally there are 3 “levels” of human being, if you want to call it that.
You can have human cells. Maybe you believe they come from a dead person, for example an aborted fetus. This starts at conception, or even before since those are human cells too.
You can have an individual human life. It is hard to consider this as starting at conception, since for several weeks the fertilized egg and cells can still become twins, or in some rare cases two different fertilized eggs can merge into a “chimera”.
At some point the human life is granted a human person’s soul. There are a lot of different traditions in western thought on when this happens, but it has often not been considered to happen at conception. This is the “quickening”. In traditional roman catholic dogma, aborting before the quickening was not considered murder, i believe, although it was still some kind of sin. Under many approaches to the “soul”, the soul is an animating force in the aristotelian sense rather than some kind of second, shadow, incorporeal sense. In that case, it is not logically possible for a fertilized cell to have a soul, since there is no structure to support it. There was also some question about whether a person first received an animal-like soul, and whether this was later extinguished for a full human person’s soul, or perhaps added to.
I have read the cells are from 3 fetuses that were aborted around 1980 and almost every vaccine developed in the last several years has used the same stem cells. I think the link to abortion is to justify something they don’t want to do or are afraid to do anyway.
Yes, as I said in the other thread, I’m pretty sure they just bring it up to justify a decision they have already made. The Pope has said you should get vaccinated. I don’t think any serious ethicist believes you should refrain from a life-saving medicine because it uses something that was created sinfully half a century ago, for completely unrelated reasons, and which has been maintained without any additional sin for pretty much all of that time.