The headline reads: Aunt's boyfriend arrested after child dies during visit to home over weekend.
We have all sadly seen such headlines. The mother in this case, despite her shock and grief, decides to sign an organ donor slip. In some small way, she wants her child to live on through the lives his death can save. It is a way to honor a life cut short.
Do the organ donations of this child become somehow immoral because he was murdered rather than in an accident? I don't see how anyone could think so.
Today, I read that some church leaders are calling the J & J vaccine immoral because of the use of embryonic stem cells in its development.
Johnson & Johnson confirmed in a statement released Tuesday that the vaccine formula itself includes no fetal tissue. So what does make their COVID-19 vaccine so much more controversial than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines?
The particular cells that are involved in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine are called PerC6 cells. "These are retinal cells that came from a fetus that was aborted in 1985 in the Netherlands, which were treated in the lab to allow them to reproduce in lab settings since that time," Barker explains.
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are different—they involve HEK293 cells, which also came from an aborted fetus in the Netherlands (in 1973). These cells have also been reproducing in lab settings since that time, Barker says.
I don't care where you stand in the pro-life, pro-choice argument. The point is actually moot when it comes to these vaccines. None of the cells used came about by someone intentionally getting pregnant for the purpose of generating those cells.
Whether you consider an aborted fetus a child with a soul or not, these cells have led to extending the lives of thousands over the years. The research and development of stem cell therapies, vaccines, and tissue regeneration programs honor the lives of these embryos and to call this immoral is equivalent to saying their existance did not matter at all.
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