By Judie Brown
A dear friend recently reacted to Bishop Joseph Strickland’s statement that he “will refuse” a potential vaccine for the coronavirus if it is made using tissue from “aborted children.”
Our friend wrote that he wonders what our national response would be if we were forced by law to receive such a vaccine. “It is a real question and conundrum,” he said. “It is a question we should not have to ask in the first place. What if it were the cells derived from a holocaust victim that were being utilized. Would that neo-cannibalism be OK? Why not?”
Indeed.
We know that many labs around the world are furiously working to develop a coronavirus vaccine. Among them are at least two that are incorporating aborted fetal cells in their test product.
Children of God for Life, the vaccine experts, reports that the Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine uses aborted fetal cells, as does Johnson and Johnson’s. These vaccines are being unethically developed. On the other hand, Sanofi Pasteur’s version of the vaccine does not use the tainted cells.
According to the Children of God for Life website, “In 2017, Sanofi Pasteur bought Protein Sciences and is using this same platform for their newly developing COVID-19 vaccine which will allow them the flexibility to make millions of doses of vaccine quickly.”
Debi Vinnedge, executive director of Children of God for Life, stated, “This is great news for millions of people worldwide who are concerned with the use of aborted fetal material in lifesaving treatments or vaccines. . . . There is a multitude of moral options that are safer and quite frankly, utilize a more modern technology.”
In light of this good news, one would think that the Catholic leadership in this nation would sound an alert and urge people to be aware of the horror of the development of the vaccines using aborted baby cells. Yet nary a word has been spoken against the development of the tainted vaccines by any leadership group, including our American Catholic bishops. Only one bishop has spoken out, while hundreds of them remain silent. Where is the outrage?
According to numbers from the Catholic media, there are 441 bishops (active and retired) overseeing 196 Latin and Eastern rite dioceses in our nation. And even though the nation is working through forms of isolation right now, the bishops have a platform and could be teaching, speaking, and leading by using all manner of modern technological communications.
Perhaps the bishops, archbishops, and cardinals need to take a page from the Planned Parenthood playbook. The coronavirus has not stopped PP. In fact, this virus has generated more than a few opportunities for the baby killers to grab headlines all over the place.
The latest mainstream opinion piece tells us all we need to know. In the pages of Rolling Stone, Planned Parenthood president Alexis McGill Johnson opines that “women are trying to survive COVID-19. Politicians are trying to take away their care.” She says that aborting a child is essential care for an expectant mother. The idea that women are trying to hold our nation together somehow justifies, in her view, a demand for total access to abortion. She believes, along with so many others, that abortion is healthcare.
Planned Parenthood rants that any effort to impede access to abortion is not only inhumane but unconstitutional—two words that have nothing to do with the reality of what the act of abortion does to a preborn baby. Killing someone is not a constitutional right, but in America the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Thus, our call to the bishops of this nation to stand up for truth, make waves, and help us defend the defenseless. Nobody should be able to use a pandemic to advance killing members of the human family or to rob the bodies of dead preborn babies of their tissue and cells.
Stand up for the babies and make your voice heard. Let the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops know you want them to join the battle to defend the babies, especially now. Fighting a contagious virus is one thing, but fighting to save the babies from the deadly act of abortion is—and must be—paramount, no matter what.
CONTACT THE USCCB:
Send an e-mail focusing on your concerns that its members must step up and act!
Or call the USCCB offices at (202) 541-3000.
image: J.M. Guyon