Putting Children's Lives at Risk by Impeding Vaccines
This is really a bad idea: A Missouri legislator named Dr. Rob Schaaf wants the state to stop buying and distributing important vaccines that are crucial to maintaining the health of children because they were derived from the cells of aborted fetuses. But how is that any different from harvesting and transplanting an organ? If the patient were killed for the purpose of organ procurement, it would be wrong. Likewise, if a fetus was aborted for the purpose of using the body in experiments and for vaccines, it would be wrong. But that isn't what happened in the development of these vaccines. Moreover, as the story points out:Scientists aren't using any new fetal tissue--the vaccines come from the original 1960s cell line, which has been frozen.
There are certainly very important issues that need to combat the use of human beings instrumentally. But this isn't one of them.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 11:54 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
I want to word this carefully: I do give my kids the MMR vaccine, and I wouldn't support this guy's bill. But because of the origin of the vaccine, I'd be happier if there were a readily available alternative.
I think the issue is a _bit_ more complicated than you do, and I think an analogy will show that: Suppose you could be absolutely convinced that the Chinese government is not killing political prisoners for their organs. But suppose you became equally convinced at the same time that the Chinese government is executing totally innocent political prisoners and donating their organs to other people. Would all of your objections to Chinese government organ donation from executed prisoners be addressed? Would you then have no objection?
My guess is that the worry that they are killing them _for_ their organs is only one part of your objection. I think the other part has to do with a concern about whether it's ethical, when innocent people are legally killed, for their bodies then to be used without their consent after their deaths. The unethical and, in a sense, "officially approved" nature of the death in some sense "taints" the using of the body after death. Here's the state killing innocent people and using their bodies afterwards. Something unpleasant about that.
Similarly, abortion is, from the strong pro-lifer's perspective, state-sanctioned and protected (though not formally state-performed) murder. And there is something not-quite-good about using the bodies of children thus murdered for others' benefit. That is why until 2000 the official position of the NRLC was that tissue from aborted fetuses should not be used in government-funded research.
The question becomes how "necessary" these vaccines really are. Most of the diseases they prevent are also preventable by proper hygiene. And it is not that alterantives are completely unavailable. There are ethical alternatives for MMR, polio, chickenpox and every other vaccine that isn't for an STD.
They just aren't approved in all cases by the FDA. There are ways, however, for these vaccines to be obtained without FDA approval.
The question becomes how "necessary" these vaccines really are. Most of the diseases they prevent are also preventable by proper hygiene. And it is not that alterantives are completely unavailable. There are ethical alternatives for MMR, polio, chickenpox and every other vaccine that isn't for an STD.
They just aren't approved in all cases by the FDA. There are ways, however, for these vaccines to be obtained without FDA approval.
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