Fetal Cell lines

By AnnaMaria Cardinalli

In conversations with friends, I have noticed that many of us calm our consciences with certain facts. We know that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines do not use any cells derived from abortion in the production process. That is, we know that we are not being directly injected with fetal cells or their engineered descendants (though this fact differs with other manufacturers). We hear that the abortion-derived cell lines were only used in testing, which should somehow comfort us, though it still means that the vaccines from which we seek to benefit depend on the involvement of abortion. We are told that the cell line used in testing came from one abortion, which took place decades ago. These things are all true, but they do not serve to inform us fully.

What we may not know follows. The most prominent cell line, called HEK 293, comes from an abortion performed in the 1970’s. It’s labeled 293 because that’s how many experimental attempts the researchers needed to get a working cell line. Therefore, though the abortion-to-experiment ratio is not precisely one-to-one, hundreds of abortions went into the project, even if they didn’t result in the working line.

HEK stands for human embryonic kidney. To harvest a viable embryonic kidney for this purpose, sufficiently healthy children old enough to have adequately-developed kidneys must be removed from the womb, alive, typically by cesarean section, and have their kidneys cut out. This must take place without anesthesia for the child, which would lessen the viability of the organs. Instead of being held, rocked, and comforted in the time intervening between their birth and their death, they have organs cut out of them alive.

There is no way that a spontaneous abortion could result in the cell line (as the kidneys cannot remain viable past the brief window in which they must be harvested) or that some brilliant researcher found a way for great good to come out of a rare tragedy by making use of a child’s body donated to science after it was aborted. The deliberate killing of an unwanted child (a little girl, in the case of HEK 293) took place in the tortuous manner it did precisely to obtain her organs for research. The harvest of her organs was the direct cause of her death, prior to which, she was a living child, outside the womb.

I fear that Pope Francis and Pope Emeritus Benedict may not have had this information when they received the vaccines. If we re-examine the Vatican statement that “it is morally acceptable to receive COVID-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and productions process,” we see that it does not apply here. It does not imagine this scenario. To approve of the currently-available vaccines, it would have to read “it is morally acceptable to receive COVID-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from living persons, killed by the harvest of their organs for use in medical research and productions processes,” but the Church’s moral teachings could never truly bend so far.

Similar to the human rights abuses exposed by international tribunal in today’s China, where unwanted individuals such as religious and political dissidents are executed by the harvest of their organs for profit, the little girl whose cells gave rise to the COVID-19 vaccines was brutally sacrificed for the purpose, as were all the children whose cell lines failed before her.

Still, many rightly argue, when we discuss the COVID-19 vaccine, there are more lives at stake than even those of the hundreds of children who suffered and died for one specific cell line in the past. Concern for these lives must most certainly bear our consideration as well.

The information about how HEK 293 was created may call vividly to mind the current scandal of Planned Parenthood, who is selling human tissue to the highest bidder, and performing abortions in specific ways to obtain organs and preserve their viability—for the right price. Put more bluntly, the abortion industry performs vivisections on viable, healthy, and well-developed living children for massive profit, on a massive scale. What we are seeing now is the explosion of an industry trafficking in children’s bodies, which began with experiments in the 1970’s, including those on which the available COVID-19 vaccines rely.

Why does this go on? Money is a central motivator in any industry, and it goes on because we support it. We are consumers. If we boycotted, science would be forced to pursue alternative solutions. Even remotely, every one of us who benefits from an industry that functions this way plays our part in its perpetuation. This is why Pope Francis encourages Catholics to voice our dissent, even while receiving the vaccine. Unfortunately, when money is the motivator, voiced dissent does not speak as loudly as refusal.

However, we now find ourselves in a situation where put before us is either concern for our vulnerable neighbors who, we are told, might catch COVID-19 if we ourselves are not vaccinated, or concern over perpetuating an industry we know with certainty very deliberately and brutally kills the most vulnerable among us.

If concern for our neighbors does not burden our hearts into the acceptance of evil as a means to an end, even a good one such as the prevention of COVID-19, there exist other mechanisms of coercion that appeal to our own self-preservation. These are the social disincentives to refusal of ethically-tainted vaccines, from which our Church will now not protect us. Instead of saying, “my Church objects,” those whose informed Catholic conscience now binds them to refusal of the vaccine must now only say, “I object.”

In accepting these persecutions, conscientious Catholics’ choice to refuse an ethically-tainted vaccine may be a source of assurance to their neighbors that they do not lack care for their welfare, as they are themselves willing to assume a degree of self-sacrifice to avoid the deliberate murder of newborns rather than the possibility of infection from a disease primarily affecting adults. It is a dark parallel to the Eucharist—Christ’s perfect sacrifice by which we receive, in our own bodies and for our salvation, the innocent Divine Victim Himself. In the end, this chilling reflection frames the question that now conscience alone must answer.

Embryonic testing

Human embryos are people, and should be treated as such


ANTHONY FISHER


Science is wonderful, but we must beware those who wish to make early human life expendable

This week the media celebrated the achievement by Monash University scientists of so-called “model human embryos”, or “artificial human embryos”.

There was unadulterated excitement about another Aussie first in the field. It promises to be a cure for infertility, miscarriage, you name it. And it all happened, we were assured, “by accident”.

But hold on. Even if we take at face value that this was “accidental”, does anyone really believe it was unexpected? Or unlikely? Haven’t Monash researchers been experimenting on early human life for decades, pushing the boundaries on what is technologically possible and legally permissible?

Accident or not, is this really such a good thing? Remember when embryonic stem-cells were going to cure almost anything, as long as enough restrictions on human embryo experimentation were removed, and enough government money was thrown at them? Two decades later, there are no such cures. Indeed, the majority of the licences granted went not to those institutions researching cures for disease or spinal cord injuries, as promised, but to the IVF industry that pulls in revenues of half a billion dollars each year in Australia alone.

Remember when gene therapy was going to be the panacea, as long as there were no legal or ethical constraints? There’s not much to show for these promises either. So we should dial down expectations that artificial embryos will cure disease or alleviate suffering.

Thirdly, it’s interesting that although the Embryo Research Licensing Committee says these are human embryos, the researchers are saying they are “not really” and calling them names like “iBlastoids”. Is this label just a matter of convenience, masking legitimate questions about their identity and making them sound more like the latest Apple product and less than a human being worthy of respect or protection?

As the saying goes: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” So, too, with an embryo: if it has human genes, develops as a human being develops, and does the things a human embryo does, it’s probably an embryonic human.

Nature already provides for a significant variance in early human development. Those human embryos that do not develop exactly as expected because of some chromosomal abnormality or other genetic issue are still embryonic human beings, and it would be outrageous for anyone to suggest these were not human, just because their development did not appear “normal”. Until we know for certain, we must give these embryonic human beings the benefit of the doubt.

Fourthly, if these organisms do not have such a developmental trajectory, then they might not be bona fide embryos after all. In that case there might be ethical uses for them, and we would support and encourage such ethical use. That’s why for two decades now, the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney has funded competitive research into the therapeutic potential of stem cells that are not human embryos, nor derived from human embryos, and perfectly ethical.

Fifthly, if these organisms are human embryos, they deserve the respect owed to early human lives. We should be suspicious of those who rush to characterise them as no embryo at all, particularly when they stand to benefit from this type of dehumanisation. This could just be an Orwellian way of ensuring no one feels too queasy about the laboratory manufacture of human lives for experimental purposes, or that no one engages in much scrutiny of the project.

Some people evidently think Ethics is a place in England. Or that ethics are optional when results, profits or prizes are in view. Or that everything that can be done should be done and inevitably will be done. Researchers are already pushing to lift the period for experimentation on early human life beyond the 14-day limit. Others think this sort of thing is playing god — or playing the devil — and just plain bad.

But we don’t have to presume the best or worst of the embryo experimenters to be sceptical about the breathless celebration of every Aussie first in this arena, or call for caution while more investigation is done. We should all take a deep breath and ask: what’s the moral cost and where is this taking us?

Has the ready expendability of early human life now become an acceptable social norm?

Archbishop Anthony Fisher is the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney and holds a doctorate in bioethics from the University of Oxford.


Some people evidently think that Ethics is a place in England

Historical Crimes

Public shaming can’t replace justice


HENRY ERGAS



As extremely serious accusations proliferate about behaviour by senior politicians that is claimed to have occurred years or even decades ago, the greatest damage is likely to be to the cause of justice itself.

To say that is not to contend that the allegations, which have been strenuously denied, are necessarily ill-founded. But there are good reasons the Athenians, whose legal system allowed any citizen to act as a prosecutor and press claims on behalf of alleged victims, introduced a five-year limit on the time that could elapse between when crimes (other than murder) allegedly occurred and when an accusation was launched.

Underpinning the restrictions, which pioneered the modern notion of statutes of limitations, was the harm being done to the city’s integrity by “sycophants” — a term that, in classical Greek, referred not to flatterers but to those who used the right to press charges on behalf of others as a way of advancing their own interests. Originally, the sycophants primarily aimed at enriching themselves by blackmailing the alleged perpetrator or by obtaining a share of the winnings should the claim proceed and succeed.

However, as Athenian politics turned poisonous, sycophancy became as focused on vilifying rivals as it was on pursuing alleged breaches of the law.

That change led to sycophants being known as “borborotarax” — stirrers of muck or excrement — who spread scurrilous rumours in the city’s main meeting places, inflaming partisan tensions and fuelling the rise of the demagogues many of them served.

Characterised, according to Aristotle, by rancour, slander and malice, the sycophants relied on digging up old claims, which were inevitably hard to disprove, and then used the pretence of assisting a victim’s search for justice as an excuse for their defamatory attacks. As Demosthenes, one of Athens’ greatest patriots and orators, put it in commenting on a prominent case, “Nikomakhos, (were you genuinely seeking justice,) you would have brought matters forward when they occurred — but that was 20 years ago.”

Whether the constraints that were eventually imposed on the sycophants proved effective is controversial; what is certain is that even after Athens’ glory had faded, time limits on initiating criminal proceedings remained, though they sank into irrelevance when the collapse of the Roman Empire threw Europe back into tribal law.

However, as modern systems of justice evolved, time limits once again became a major concern of legal scholars and of political philosophers. Central to that reemergence was a new conception of justice that came out of the renewal of Christian scholarship that began in the 11th century.

In tribal law, justice was mainly a private responsibility, pursued by individual families and clans, often to the point of mutual destruction. But for Anselm of Canterbury and later for Thomas Aquinas, justice’s role was not to satisfy the private demand for revenge; it was to restore the “right ordering” of human affairs by punishing those whose actions not only harmed others but defied the law itself, threatening the divine gift that made human coexistence possible.

Justice was therefore a public responsibility whose task was to use the community’s power to preserve its material and spiritual foundations, including by giving victims their due. However, if public powers of coercion were to be used on victims’ behalf, the victims themselves had an imperative obligation to facilitate justice’s effective operation, not least by pressing claims in a timely manner and allowing their own credibility to be tested.

The importance of timeliness came even more sharply into focus as the absolutist monarchies of the 18th century dramatically expanded the state’s coercive powers, exposing citizens to the danger that they would be disgraced and horrifically punished for crimes allegedly committed long ago.

It was precisely so as to prevent those abuses, and protect the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial enshrined in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that the French liberals who drafted the criminal code of 1791 gave new life to the Athenian statutes of limitation.

While that code was swept aside in the Terror of 1793-94, the need for strict limits on how far back the law could reach was prominently recognised in 1808 as an integral part of the great Napoleonic codification of criminal procedure, which influenced legal systems worldwide.

“Civil peace cannot persist if claims for vengeance are allowed to remain eternally armed and active, hanging over social life,” Pierre-Florent Louvet explained, in presenting the draft provisions to parliament; “instead, wisdom requires that the passage of time should lead society to remove legal culpability from events (whose contours) have blurred into the distant past.”

The restrictions time limits imposed on human justice were, no doubt, easier to accept in an age universally convinced that a far higher justice than that which could be secured in this life awaited both the guilty and the innocent in the next; and which was also convinced that where there was sin, there could in time be remorse and redemption.

Now those convictions have all but disappeared. And what has filled the vacuum is a renewed culture of retribution, in which those who rightly or wrongly define themselves as victims assert a moral right to be vindicated, quite regardless of whether they have respected their own moral obligation to assist, where they reasonably could, in justice’s timely pursuit.

Aided and abetted by a media that, while claiming to act in the public interest, repeatedly ignores the fundamental Roman axiom of justice — Audi alteram partem, hear the other side — public shaming is replacing the judicial establishment of guilt. And with these contemporary sycophants leading the search for charges that can neither be proven nor rebutted, politically motivated scavenging through the detritus of the past is overshadowing the impartial ascertainment of legally actionable facts.

No one could deny the heartwrenching torment real or imagined wrongs that have long been left to fester can cause. But Franz Kafka was right when he emphasised in The Trial that the justice “which never forgets” — yet is also incapable of accurately remembering — is no justice at all; it is, as he graphically put it, an ambush perpetually waiting to happen, a disease from which there may be temporary remission but no cure, a nightmare weighing even more heavily on the entirely innocent than on the irretrievably guilty.

It is, in other words, the essence of the Kafkaesque. And in reverting to it, we are not advancing into a brave new world but descending into a very ancient one, for which the Athenians also had a name: barbarism.