Abortion, Vaccines, and Moral Imagination 04/19/2021 at 1:09 AM Posted by Kevin Edward White
By Mark Perkins, Public Discourse, April 13, 2021
Scholars who advocate receiving the vaccinations for COVID-19 should not minimize or brush aside concerns that those vaccines were produced with the help of abortion. Facing the problem more fully should not rule out vaccination, but it will help us better understand the depths of our entanglement in this late-modern culture of death.
Christians today confront a variety of novel and profound challenges to the Church’s moral teachings, and they do so amid a culture increasingly indifferent or hostile to the Church’s metaphysical claims. Within this broader context, the arrival of COVID-19 vaccines with historical links to abortion presents not only a question to answer but also an opportunity for Christians to develop more robust moral imaginations.
(Image: Daniel Schludi/Unsplash.com)
Objection 1. It seems there is a moral obligation, for one is obligated to care for one’s own body and to care likewise for the body of the neighbor, who by divine command is to be loved as oneself. Now, vaccination may render one’s own body less likely to succumb to a viral infection and less likely to pass on such an infection to the potential harm of the neighbor. Therefore one ought to be vaccinated. As Vitoria says (
On the Law of War,
Q. 2, art. 2), “any person who has the power to prevent his neighbor’s danger or loss is obliged to do so.”