Category Archives: Abortion

Abortion, Consistent Ethic of Life

USCCB, St Louis, New Orleans archdioceses: Catholics should seek ethical alternatives to Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine

Johnson & Johnson’s stem cell line comes from an abortion performed in 1985, according to Science.

-by Christine Rousselle, Catholic News Agency

Washington D.C., Mar 1, 2021 / 05:00 pm MT (CNA).- The Archdiocese of New Orleans says that the recently-approved Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine is “morally compromised,” and advises Catholics to use ethical alternatives if available.

The Janssen/Johnson & Johnson vaccine was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with an emergency use authorization issued on Feb. 27.

The pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute had determined that the vaccine used abortion-derived cell lines in design and development, production, and lab testing. The New Orleans archdiocese on Feb. 26 stated that the vaccine was “morally compromised” because of its connection with abortion.

However, the two other available COVID-19 vaccines are “morally acceptable,” the archdiocese said, while also not prohibiting Catholics from receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine if no other ethical alternative is available.

The decision to receive a vaccination for COVID-19 “remains one of individual conscience in consultation with one’s healthcare provider,” the archdiocese said.

“The Archdiocese of New Orleans, in light of guidance from the Vatican, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and The National Catholic Bioethics Center affirm that though there was some lab testing that utilized the abortion-derived cell line, the two vaccines currently available from Pfizer and Moderna do not rely on cell lines from abortions in the manufacturing process and therefore can be morally acceptable for Catholics as the connection to abortion is extremely remote,” the archdiocese’s statement read.

Ethicists have said that both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were “ethically uncontroversial” as their connection to abortions in the design phase were extremely remote. However, some lab tests for the vaccines were conducted using aborted fetal cell lines. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, meanwhile, used aborted fetal cell lines in all phases.

“It is under the same guidance that the archdiocese must instruct Catholics that the latest vaccine from Janssen/Johnson & Johnson is morally compromised as it uses the abortion-derived cell line in development and production of the vaccine as well as the testing,” the archdiocese said. This ethical problem is similar to that of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which also used an abortion-derived cell line in the development and testing of their product.

The archdiocese emphasized that “in no way does the Church’s position diminish the wrongdoing of those who decided to use cell lines from abortions to make vaccines.”

“In doing so, we advise that if the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine is available, Catholics should choose to receive either of those vaccines rather than to receive the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine because of its extensive use of abortion-derived cell lines.”

A cell line derived from an abortion decades prior (HEK-293) is commonly used in the testing and development of pharmaceuticals.

The Archdiocese’s statement echoes that made in December by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. Back then, they stated that it was “morally acceptable” to receive vaccines produced using cell lines from aborted fetuses when no alternative is available.

In a note issued Dec. 21, the CDF said that in countries where ethically uncontroversial vaccines are not available or where their distribution is limited, it is “morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process.”

This does not in any way imply a legitimation of the grave evil of the practice of abortion or that there is a moral endorsement of the use of cell lines proceeding from aborted fetuses, the Vatican congregation said.

One of the touted advantages of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is that it does not require specialized refrigeration and can be delivered in a single dose, making it more attractive to some healthcare professionals than the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. Those vaccines require deep freeze storage and are administered in two doses.”

Author Headshot By David Leonhard, New York Times, 3/4/2021

“Many Americans are worried that Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine is an inferior product that may not be worth getting. Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota recently told The Washington Post that he was now seeing not only “vaccine hesitancy” but also “the potential for brand hesitancy.”

The perception stems from the headline rates of effectiveness of the three vaccines: 72 percent for Johnson & Johnson, compared with 94 percent for Moderna and 95 percent for Pfizer. But those headline rates can be misleading in a few ways.

The most important measure — whether the vaccine prevents serious illness — shows the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to be equally effective as the other two. All work for nearly 100 percent of people. The picture is murkier for mild cases, but they are not particularly worrisome.

Today, I want to unpack the statistics about the three vaccines and explain why the current perception is a problem.

I’ll start with an anecdote that this newsletter has included once before: Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-disease expert at Vanderbilt University, was recently talking with some colleagues about what they would tell a family member who could choose between getting the Johnson & Johnson tomorrow and one of the other vaccines in three weeks.

“All of us said, ‘Get the one tomorrow,’” as Schaffner recounted to my colleague Denise Grady. “The virus is bad.”

The headline effectiveness numbers — like 72 percent — describe a vaccine’s ability to prevent all infections from this coronavirus, known as SARS-Cov-2. But preventing all infections is less important than it may sound. The world is not going to eliminate SARS-Cov-2 anytime soon. Coronaviruses circulate all the time, causing the common cold and other manageable illnesses.

The trouble with this virus is its lethality. It has killed 15 times as many Americans as an average flu season. Turning Covid into something more like a mild flu or common cold means victory over the pandemic.

All three vaccines being used in the U.S. are accomplishing that goal. In the research trials, none of the people who received a vaccine died of Covid. And after the vaccines had taken full effect, none were hospitalized, either.

In the real world, the vaccines won’t achieve quite as stellar outcomes. Still, the results are excellent — and equally excellent across the three, as Dr. Cody Meissner of the Tufts School of Medicine said during a recent F.D.A. meeting.
Like running into the wind

But why doesn’t Johnson & Johnson appear to be as good at preventing mild illness?

There are a few possible answers. For one, Johnson & Johnson’s research trials seem to have had a greater degree of difficulty. They occurred later than Moderna’s or Pfizer’s — after one of the virus variants had spread more widely. The variant appears to cause a greater number of mild Covid cases among vaccinated people than the original virus.

Second, Johnson & Johnson is currently only one shot, while Moderna and Pfizer are two shots. That happened mostly because of how strong the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is. Initial testing showed it to deliver impressive levels of immunity after only one shot, while the others required a booster, as Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, explained to me.

The truth is that all of the vaccines seem to provide significant protection after a single shot. (Look at Britain, which is not rushing to give second shots and where cases and deaths continue to plummet.) Similarly, all three vaccines may benefit from a second shot.

I recognize that may make some people anxious about getting the single Johnson & Johnson shot, but it shouldn’t. If further data suggest that a second Johnson & Johnson shot would help, regulators can change their recommendation. Regardless, follow-up Covid shots may be normal in the future.

What’s the bottom line? A single Johnson & Johnson shot may indeed allow a somewhat larger number of mild Covid cases than two shots of Moderna or Pfizer. It’s hard to be sure.”

Love,
Matthew

Abortion, Consistent Ethic of Life, Fides et Ratio

Vaccines

https://mycatholicdoctor.com/our-services/vaccines/

In 2005, the Pontifical Academy for Life issued a document: “Moral Reflections on Vaccines Prepared from Cells Derived from Aborted Human Foetuses.” The Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith also approved this document.

In 2017, The Pontifical Academy for Life released a short document called “Clarifications on the medical and scientific nature of vaccination.” This clarification was written in collaboration with the Italian Bishops’ Conference and the “Ufficio per la Pastorale della Salute” (“Association of Italian Catholic Doctors.”)  The 2017 document notes declining vaccination rates in Italy, encourages vaccination, and concludes, “While the commitment to ensuring that every vaccine has no connection in its preparation to any material of originating from an abortion, the moral responsibility to vaccinate is reiterated in order to avoid serious health risks for children and the general population.”

In the 2005 document, The Pontifical Academy for Life teaches that we have a duty to request and use those vaccines which are produced in a morally acceptable way. In the United States, we can make specific vaccine brand choices to avoid some vaccines derived from aborted fetal tissue. In the 2017 “clarification” they do not comment on the issue of vaccine brand choices. They state, “We believe that all clinically recommended vaccinations can be used with a clear conscience and that the use of such vaccines does not signify some sort of cooperation with voluntary abortion.” Of note, this clarification was written by Italian bishops and Italian physicians. In Italy, patients do not have the same vaccine brand choices as in the United States.

In the United States, the National Catholic Bioethics center states that we should choose ethical vaccines when they are available. The NCBC’s “FAQ on the Use of Vaccines” was most recently updated in 2019, and is frequently cited by U.S. bishops.

Some, but not all of the Coronavirus vaccines under development are derived from aborted fetal tissue. This article from Science magazine, published in June, 2020 provides a good summary of the coronavirus vaccines under development and the cell lines used for each vaccine. Of note, the United States government has provided 1.2 billion dollars of funding for the Astra Zeneca vaccine, which is being developed using the HEK-293 cell line. This cell line originated from kidney cells from a fetus that was aborted in 1973.

For some vaccines there are no morally produced brands. In the United States, these vaccines are MMR, hepatitis A, and varicella. So should we use these vaccines, when there is no alternative?

In the 2005 document, The Pontifical Academy for Life says we can use them “on a temporary basis” and “insomuch as is necessary in order to avoid a serious risk not only for one’s own children but also, and perhaps more specifically, for the health conditions of the population as a whole – especially for pregnant women.” In the 2017 document, the Pontifical Academy for life writes, “Especially in consideration of the fact that the cell lines currently used are very distant from the original abortions and no longer imply that bond of moral cooperation indispensable for an ethically negative evaluation of their use. On the other hand, the moral obligation to guarantee the vaccination coverage necessary for the safety of others is no less urgent, especially the safety more vulnerable subjects such as pregnant women and those affected by immunodeficiency who cannot be vaccinated against these diseases.”

Love, fides et ratio,
Matthew

Abortion, Consistent Ethic of Life, Contraception, Divorce, Family Life

Catholics don’t like sex (WRONG!!)


-by Theresa Zoe Williams

“In his book detailing his and his family’s conversion to Catholicism, The Catholic Church Saved My Marriage, Dr. David Anders points out four radical areas of the Church’s teachings on sex and marriage—teachings that helped bring him into the Church. “Protestants and Catholics have different views of marriage, I came to understand, because they have different views about the foundational concepts of morality, spirituality, salvation, and human happiness.

Catholics believe that the ultimate end of human life is loving union with God and neighbor. Aided by grace, we ought to bend every fiber of our being toward that end. Catholic ideas about marriage and contemplative life reflect that lofty calling. The Protestant tradition also extols loving union with God but has always been more skeptical about the Christian’s moral potential,” Anders writes. So let’s look at what the Church teaches and what convinced Dr. Anders and his family of the truth of Catholicism.

1. Contraception and sodomy

On this very first point, Anders makes the distinction that Catholic teaching forbids both while Protestantism has never broadly decried these except outside of marriage. This is probably why Catholics get the “prude” label so often, because the first discourses on sex is a list of “Nos.”

But really, these Nos are really yeses to so much more. To say no to something less good or even bad (as contraception is both morally and physically) is to say yes to something better, greater. A common criticism of Catholic teaching in this area is that Catholics just want you to have as many babies as possible, reducing women to embryo incubators and sex to a means to an end only. Neither of these things is true, of course, and that’s exactly what Dr. Anders discovered.

“No, Catholic don’t think you should have as many babies as you possibly can,” Anders writes of his discoveries in his studies. “No, the pope is not simply trying to grow the Church through fertility. And, no, Catholic opposition to birth control does not mean the Church is heedless of teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, or other dangers associated with sexual activity. Rather, I found that Catholics have developed a rich theology of the human person that takes full account of man’s social, sexual, and psychological nature. Moral theology, I came to understand, is more than just listing all the prohibitions mentioned in Scripture; it is the science of human happiness. Just as a physician prescribes treatments for the flourishing of the body, the moral theologian seeks the flourishing of the whole person by asking, ‘How can man act in the world to achieve his true good?’”

2. Virginity, celibacy, and continence

It’s no secret that Catholics hold virginity and celibacy in high regards, sometimes the highest of regards. So many of the early saints are name Saint So-and-So, Virgin Martyr. And the early Fathers talk extensively about celibacy. These concepts and teachings have been with Catholics from the very beginning. And, sometimes feel really outdated because of that. Or, it seems oppressive. These can be valid criticisms, if the Church’s teaching meant only the denial of the sexual appetite. But it doesn’t. The Church’s teachings on virginity and celibacy actually are meant to point us towards heaven even more, that our bodies are actually symbols of Christ and divine love.

Dr. Anders found answers and inspiration in the early Christian ascetics: “These Christian ascetics were motivated not by hatred of the body or by a craven fear of damnation but by the promise of friendship with God. Augustine did not despise marriage; indeed he wrote one of the great Catholic treatises praising marriage. What Augustine, Antony, and other ancient Christians valued most, though, was the idea of a life given wholly to God. Marriage is a good state of life, but Christian contemplation is better.”

What’s even more astounding about this teaching of the Church is how widespread it was. Anders also picks up on this. “When I started reading about this ancient spirituality,” he writes, “I was surprised by how widespread it was. From Ireland to Persia, ancient Christians were almost unanimous in their praise of virginity and continence. Whatever else might be true about them, the earliest believers surely did not share modern Protestant attitudes towards sex.”

3. Why Catholics can’t divorce

Just to start off on the same page, no, annulments aren’t “Catholic divorces”. There is no such thing as a Catholic divorce. An annulment is a dissolution of a marriage, a ruling that finds that no sacrament was conferred in by the partners to each other during the wedding. You can’t end a marriage that never was. And that brings us to the Catholic view of marriage versus the Protestant view of marriage. To Catholics, marriage is a sacrament, but to Protestants, a marriage is a simple civil contract. If marriage is just a civil contract, of course it can be broken and dissolved. But if marriage is a sacrament, a visible sign of an inward grace, then that’s not something humans can just undo.

“The differences between Protestant and Catholic teaching on marriage have their roots in two fundamental issues. First, the Protestant Reforms thought that Catholic teaching on human sexuality was just too difficult. Second, the Reformers resented the authority that the Catholic Church exercised over Christian marriage. The way they tried to solve these ‘problems’ theologically was to naturalize Christian marriage, removing it from the realm of the supernatural. A major part of the Reformation, therefore, was an attack on the sacramentality of Christian marriage. The Reformers never denied that god instituted marriage at the creation of Adam and Eve. They simply denied that Christ elevated marriage to a sacrament,” Dr. Anders writes. This distinction is paramount to a Catholic understanding of marriage.

4. Marriage is a sacrament

So, Catholics believe that Christ did indeed raise marriage to a sacrament, and that makes all the difference. But a Protestant or non-Christian would firstly ask where this can be found in Scripture. I submit four Scriptural references for consideration, which Dr. Anders affirms: Matthew 19:8; 1 Corinthians 7:11, 17-20; 1 Corinthians 6:15; and Ephesians 5:25-32. One from Jesus’s own mouth and three from St. Paul, whom the Protestants love.

Dr. Anders writes of these Scriptures: “The first and most obvious fact was that Christ established a clear distinction between marriage under the old law and marriage restored by Christ. When the Pharisees questioned Jesus about divorce in the Mosaic Law, he acknowledged that Moses allowed this because of their ‘hardness of heart’ (Matt. 19:8). But now, Christ was calling his disciples to the perfection of marriage only possible by grace. Second, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul holds the marriage of two baptized Christians to a higher standard than that of a Christian to a non-Christian. In 1 Corinthians 6, St. Paul teaches that Christians must not engage in sexually immoral behavior. Paul teaches that a Christian’s very body has been permanently changed in a way that identifies him with Christ and thereby affects his sexuality. The Christian literally carried the body of Christ with him into the marriage bed. In the fifth chapter of Ephesians, St. Paul clearly teaches that Christian marriage is a sign or symbol of Christ’s marriage to the Church. St. Paul connects the holiness of Christian marriage to the mystery of Christ’s Body, the Church. As holiness flows from Christ to the Church, so, in a way, holiness flows from the sanctified bodies of the baptized spouses, because of their union with Christ.”

The Catholic way of life, especially as concerns sex, truly is radical. But it is transcendent. Catholic sexual ethics call us out of the ordinary of this earthly life and point us to the eternal and infinite. It’s not an easy path, as Dr. Anders found out, but it is good and fulfilling.”

Love & prayers for strength, patience, fidelity (in SO many ways) and love for all those married,
Matthew

Abortion, Consistent Ethic of Life

Protestants & the evil of abortion


-God saw all that He had made, and it was very good. Gen 1:31


-by Julie Roys, 2/25/15

(Julie Roys is an Evangelical Christian reporter. She graduated from Wheaton College and also attended the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Julie has published many articles at Christianity Today, World Magazine. Religion News Service, The Federalist, and The Christian Post. As a respected, conservative Christian voice, Julie also has been interviewed numerous times on National Public Radio, One America News, and Total Living Network. Julie hosted a live, call-in talk radio show on the Moody Radio Network that was called Up For Debate for six years. For calling out the issues at Moody she apparently lost her job. Julie and her husband live in the Chicago area and they have three children.)

“When Jackie sent an email to her church asking about its post-abortion recovery group, she used an alias and created a new account to hide her identity. Even now, 11 years after her abortion, and after sharing her story to dozens of other women, Jackie asked me not to use her real name. She still hasn’t told her daughter or many people at church that she’s had an abortion. “It’s just such a shameful secret,” she said.

Abortion is difficult for almost any post-abortive woman to discuss. Pro-choice activists attribute this reluctance to a pervasive stigma that stems from society’s “shame-based message that abortion is wrong.” They try to remove this shame by defending abortion, saying unborn babies are not persons or convincing women that abortion actually did them, or society, a favor.

However, in the church, we face the challenge of upholding the sanctity of life, while simultaneously ministering to women who feel overwhelming shame about their abortions. Our response is not to deny the sin and death inherent in abortion. Instead, we point women to the healing found in a community centered around the One who redeems us from all sin.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, one in every five women who gets an abortion identifies as a born-again, evangelical, charismatic, or fundamentalist Christian. Given that more than a million women abort each year in the US, this means a staggering 200,000 Bible-believing Christians annually. And according to Christian ministries working with this population, a vast majority of them will never reveal their secret.

In interviews with about a dozen post-abortive Christian women, I heard each say they deeply regret their abortions and experienced profound emotional and spiritual trauma as a result. Without a place to confess and seek recovery, women who’ve had abortions remain shackled by fear, grief, and guilt.

“These women have no idea how this is affecting every facet of their lives – their relationships with their husbands, their children,” said Kathy Rutledge, who leads a study calledSurrendering the Secret at a non-denominational church in Kentucky. Rutledge said her shame kept her from volunteering at church and made her fear God’s punishment for her choice in the past. “I was… convinced that God was going to take my children from me,” she said.

Jackie, who after years of silence finally sought healing in a recovery group, likens women’s silence about their abortions to a splinter in their flesh. “Until you get it out,” she said, “the healing really can’t begin. It just continues to fester.”

Certainly, the church has grown in its ability to minister to these women. In the past 20 years, abortion recovery groups have multiplied in churches nationwide. Surrendering the Secret has trained about 2,500 leaders in churches and crisis pregnancy centers. Another leading recovery ministry, Rachel’s Vineyard, hosts about 1,000 retreats annually in 48 states and 57 other countries. Yet, these statistics pale in comparison to the number of post-abortive women in the church (not to mention the men who carry regret over their wives’ or girlfriends’ abortions).

Leaders in post-abortion recovery ministry say the church remains reluctant to fully face the impact of abortion within their own congregations. Rutledge said she once gave her testimony to a group of women at a megachurch in the South and by the end, several women were “practically bawling.” Yet, when Rutledge asked about doing a follow-up, the group’s leader said, “None of my women have had an abortion… and even if they did, they don’t need to be speaking about it.”

Nancy Kruezer, who serves as Chicago Regional Coordinator for Silent No More, said some pastors express fears that if they address abortion, it will “open the floodgates,” and they will be overwhelmed by wounded people. Others object because they say the topic is too political—or that discussing abortion might actually make it more acceptable.

But, Kruezer, said these fears are unfounded and that women desperately need to talk about their abortions. As a result of her abortion 22 years ago, Kruezer said she suffered overwhelming fear, anxiety, and nightmares. These problems persisted for about 15 years until Kruezer finally confessed her abortion to her small group. “They prayed for me,” Kruezer said, and “through them, I experienced God’s mercy.”

Kruezer also confessed her abortion to her pastor. “And, it was in confession,” Kruezer said, “that I came to understand that Jesus had truly come for me—not for the perfect or the righteous, but he had come for me, the sinner, the wounded.”

Stories like hers, when shared publically in the church, can lead fellow Christian women to admit their abortions and seek healing for the first time. Also, those who are considering abortion hear a stark warning—that abortion doesn’t solve our problems, but devastates those who participate.

“Silence is a powerful weapon of the enemy,” Kruezer said. “It’s in silence that the truth remains hidden and that lies flourish… lies that justify the killing of unborn children, lies that say abortion doesn’t hurt people.”

Jackie vividly remembers when Catherine Walker, a woman who runs an abortion recovery ministry called Life After Decision, shared her testimony in front of Jackie’s church. Walker told the congregation that she had had three abortions before becoming a believer and one after coming to Christ. Her fourth abortion happened when she was a brand-new believer, unmarried and uncertain if she was ready to have a baby.

“I was just so shocked,” Jackie recalls. “I never would have guessed that somebody else that could just look like a church-goer… somebody I would pass in the hallways, also had (an abortion). It was freeing.”

Jackie’s abortion had occurred nine years earlier, when she was in a prodigal season of her life. Though she had grown up in the church, she was reeling from a divorce and had begun engaging in casual sex. “I just got into this very devastated, dark place,” she recalled. “I can hardly even believe that I ever was that person—scared to death. I grew up in a family (where) nobody had a child out of wedlock… I just couldn’t imagine telling them about being pregnant.”

About a year after her abortion, Jackie returned to the Lord, but kept silent about her abortion for years. After hearing Walker’s, though, she got the courage to join a recovery group. “For whatever reason,” Jackie said, “part of the healing is just telling everything and feeling safe to do that.”

Our churches need to regularly communicate that they are safe places women like Jackie. While we cannot whitewash the sin of abortion, we also can’t ignore those who at one time have had abortions and are suffering. We must let them know that Jesus’ blood covers all sin, including theirs.”

Love,
Matthew