Category: Society & Politics

Moral Reflections on Vaccines Prepared from Cells Derived from Aborted Human Foetuses

Pontifical Academy for Life; Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

PONTIFICIA ACADEMIA PRO VITA

Il Presidente
Prot.n.P/3431

Vatican City,
June 9 2005

Mrs Debra L.Vinnedge
Executive Director, Children of God for Life
943 Deville Drive East
Largo, Florida
33771
Stati Uniti

Dear Mrs Debra L.Vinnedge,

On June 4, 2003, you wrote to His Eminence Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, with a copy of this letter forwarded to me, asking to the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith a clarification about the liceity of vaccinating children with vaccines prepared using cell lines derived from aborted human fetuses.  Your question regarded in particular the right of the parents of these children to oppose such a vaccination when made at school, mandated by law. As there were no formal guidelines by the magisterium concerning that topic, you said that catholic parents were often challenged by State Courts, Health Officials and School Administrators when they filled religious exemptions for their children to this type of vaccination

This Pontifical Academy for Life, carrying out the commission entrusted to us by the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, in answer to your request, has proceeded to a careful examination of the question of these “tainted” vaccines, and has produced as a result a study (in Italian) that has been realized with the help of a group of experts. This study has been approved as such by the Congregation and we send you, there enclosed, an English translation of a synthesis of this study. This synthesis can be brought to the knowledge of the interested officials and organisms.

A documented paper on the topic will be published in the journal “Medicina e Morale”, edited by the Centra di Bioetica della Universita Cattolica in Rome.

The study, its synthesis, and the translation of this material took some time. We apologize for the delay.

With my best regards,

Sincerely yours,
+E.Sgreccia

 00193 Roma – Via della Conciliazione, 1 – Tel. 06 698.82423 – 06 698.81693 – Fax 06 698.82014

See Moral Reflections on Vaccines Prepared from Cells Derived from Aborted Human Foetuses 

Results of the first consultation on Physicians and the Human Rights Code

Sean Murphy*

In February, 2008, the  Ontario Human Rights Commission responded to a draft policy of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario with a submission recommending that physicians “must essentially ‘check their personal views at the door’ in providing medical care.”1

The College, in response, released a draft policy, Physicians and the Ontario Human Rights Code, stating, “there will be times when it may be necessary for physicians to set aside their personal beliefs in order to ensure that patients or potential patients are provided with the medical treatment and services they require.”2

As a result of the subsequent controversy and public pressure the demand that physicians abandon their moral or religious beliefs was dropped before Physicians and the Ontario Human Rights Code was adopted. The policy was slated for review by September, 2013, but a public announcement of the review was not made until June, 2014.  The first stage of a public consultation about the policy closed on 5 August, 2014.

In December, 2014, a working group at the College released a new policy draft called Professional Obligations and Human Rights (POHR)  for a second stage of consultation ending on 20 February, 2015. The most contentious element in POHR is a requirement that physicians who object to a procedure for reasons of conscience must help the patient find a colleague who will provide it.3

According to the College, POHR takes into account feedback received during the first consultation. When the new draft policy was released in December, Dr. Marc Gabel, then President of the College, stated that “public polling” by the College had demonstrated that “the vast majority of Ontarians believe that [objecting physicians] should be required to identify another physician who will provide the treatment, and make and/or coordinate a referral.”4

The “public polling” to which Dr. Gabel referred appears to be an on-line random survey of 800 Ontario residents conducted by the College in May, 2014. The participants were randomly selected “using a Voice Response system,” and College Council was told that the results can be generalized to the online population of the province (80% of adults), with an accuracy of +3.5% and a 95% level of confidence.5 Beyond that, the College has not disclosed details of the poll that would permit an independent assessment of its validity. Particularly on such an important question, this seems inconsistent with its commitment to greater transparency.6

An analysis of consultation feedback posted on the College website produces quite a different result.

College Council was told that the consultation produced 6,710 responses7 – an “unprecedented volume.”8 However, an unknown number of respondents contributed both to the On-line Survey and Discussion Forum, so the number of unduplicated consultation responses actually available for analysis may have been far less than 6,700. Less than half that number responded to a question about the extremely contentious issue of mandatory referral, and only 50% of that group supported it.9

In any case, an overwhelming majority of responses in a Discussion Forum supported freedom of conscience for physicians, but only about 2% advocated a policy of mandatory referral. Nor were On-line Survey responses supportive of a policy of mandatory referral, suggesting, instead, that such a policy is controversial.

A detailed analysis of the results of the consultation is available here.

[PDF Text]

Notes

1.  Submission of the Ontario Human Rights Commission to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario regarding the draft policies relating to establishing and ending physician-patient relationships. 14 February, 2008. (Accessed 2018-03-07)

2.  College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, Physicians and the Ontario Human Rights Code, p. 4

3.  College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, Professional Obligations and Human Rights (Draft, December, 2014)

4.  Gabel, M. “Dear Colleagues.” College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, Dialogue, Vol. 10, Issue 4, 2014, p. 6. (Accessed 2018-03-07)

5.  College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, Annual Meeting of Council, December 4-5, 2014, p. 330 (Accessed 2018-03-07)

6.College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, Appendix 2, Transparency Principles (2013-09) Accessed 2018-03-07).

7.  College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, Annual Meeting of Council, December 4-5, 2014, p. 328 (Accessed 2018-03-07)

8.  “Balancing MD and patient rights: Human rights draft policy open for consultation.”  Dialogue, Vol. 10, Issue 4, 2014, p. 49.  (Accessed 2018-03-07)

9.  3,104 responses. College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, Physicians and the Ontario Human Rights Code Consultation: Online Survey Report and Analysis, Figure 4 (Accessed 2018-03-07)

CBC interviewer fails to ask tough questions

Sean Murphy*

A bill has been introduced in the Canadian Senate by Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth to legalize physician assisted suicide and euthanasia.  Bill S-225’s definition of of “assist”  is of particular interest.  It means  “to provide the person with the knowledge or means to commit suicide, or to perform an act with the intent to cause the person’s death.”   Consistent with this, an “assisting physician” is one “who provides assistance” to a patient seeking euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide.

This indicates that indirectly facilitating suicide even by providing information for that purpose is equivalent to more direct forms of assistance, like providing a lethal prescription.  Further, it implies that both providing information to facilitate suicide and actually killing someone are of comparable legal or moral significance.  Many physicians and health care workers who object to assisted suicide and euthanasia would agree, and, for that reason, would refuse to refer or otherwise help a patient find someone willing to kill him or assist him in committing suicide.

The point was overlooked during an interview of Senator Ruth by Evan Solomon on CBC Television’s Power and Politics (2 December, 2014).  After discussing the contents of the bill in general terms and asking Senator Ruth about her reasons for introducing it, Solomon raised the issue of conscientious objection:

Evan Solomon:  A doctor might be watching this, and say, you know, “Great piece of legislation. What do you do if, what will you do to me if I don’t want to do this?”

Senator Ruth:  Nothing.  No doctor is coerced to do this, no patient is coerced to do this.  This is about choice.  The choice of doctors who want to assist in it and their protection . . .

Solomon failed to ask the tough questions.  Among them:

  1. If physicians will not be forced to kill patients, will they, nonetheless, be forced to help patients find someone who will?
  2. Why is it that the bill is about the choice and the protection of doctors who want to help to kill patients, and not about the choice and protection of those who refuse?
  3. When abortion was legalized, politicians and activists promised that no physician would be forced to provide abortions, but refused to include a protection of conscience provision in the law.1  Now the College of Physicians of Ontario is proposing a policy that would compel physicians to provide abortions or help  patients obtain them.2  Dr. Marc Gabel, chair of the working group that produced the draft policy, warns that physicians who refuse to do this should get out of family practice.3  As written, the policy could be applied equally to euthanasia and assisted suicide.  Why does Senator Ruth think that objecting physicians will not be coerced – if not sooner, then later?

Notes:

1. Murphy, S.  “Promises, promises.  Canadian law reformers promise tolerance, freedom of conscience:What happens after the law is changed is another story.” Protection of Conscience Project

2. “Ontario physicians to be forced to do what they believe to be wrong:  Draft policy demands that objectors provide or refer.  Policy would apply to euthanasia, if legalized.”  Protection of Conscience Project news release, 10 December, 2014

3.  Swan, M.   “Catholics doctors who reject abortion told to get out of family medicine.” The Catholic Register, 17 December, 2014.  (Accessed 2014-12-19)

 

 

Clarifying Our Terms for 2015

Catholic moral theology has a great way to sift through some of the hardest moral debates.

Aleteia
Reproduced with permission

Mark Gordon*

Two-thousand-fourteen was a contentious year in the Catholic community as debates on a variety of issues divided the faithful. In the 2014 election, 54% of self-described Catholics voted for Republicans, with that number rising to 60% among white Catholics.  Healthcare and immigration reform, Common Core education standards, religious liberty, American foreign policy – including the torture debate – and even the normalization of relations with Cuba all provided fodder for often acrimonious food fights among Catholics. . . Catholics who engage one another on these and other issues usually rely on arguments that sound valid on the surface, but which are in fact misunderstandings, if not deliberate distortions, of Catholic teaching. [Full text]

Judgementalism and moralising in response to Brittany Maynard suicide

Sean Murphy*

On 1 November, Brittany Maynard,  a 29 year old woman with terminal brain cancer, committed suicide in Oregon State with the assistance of a physician (and, presumably, a pharmacist), who provided the lethal medication she consumed.  Assisted suicide is legal in Oregon; that is why Maynard moved to the state.  In the weeks leading up to her death she had become a celebrity because of her public advocacy of assisted suicide, augmented by a kind of “countdown” to the date she had chosen to die. [NBC News]

It is not surprising that the announcement that she had killed herself as planned was followed by an outburst of judgementalism and moralising.

Prominent bioethicist Arthur Caplan stated, “did nothing immoral when she took a lethal dose of pills.”  He dismisses the view that “only God should decide when we die” because he finds that inconsistent with the existence of free choice, adding, “To see God as having to work through respirators, kidney dialysis and heart-lung machines to decide when you will die is to trivialize the divine.” [Brittany Maynard’s Death Was an Ethical Choice]

Chuck Currie, a minister of the United Church of Christ in Oregon, also insisted that Maynard had “made a moral choice.”  He described committing suicide under the terms of the Oregon law as taking “medically appropriate steps to make that death as painless and dignified as possible” – an appropriate exercise of “moral agency.”  Like Caplan, his theological views about the nature of God inform his approach to the issue. [Brittany Maynard Made A Moral Choice]

Writing in the New York Post, Andrea Peyser did not explicitly address either moral or theological questions, but implicit in her headline and awestruck praise for Maynard’s suicide was the premise that the young woman had done a “brave” and good thing. [We should applaud terminally ill woman’s choice to die]

In contrast, the head of the Catholic Church’s Pontifical Academy for Life in Rome, Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, said that Maynard’s killing herself was a  “reprehensible” act that “in and of itself should be condemned,” though he stressed that he was speaking of the act of suicide itself, not Maynard’s moral culpability. [Daily News]

Those who condemn “judgementalism” and “moralising” ought to be offended by all of these commentators, because all of them –  Caplan, Currie, Peyser and de Paula – have expressed moral or ethical judgements.  To condemn suicide as “reprehensible” is surely to make a moral or ethical judgement, but moral judgement is equally involved in a declaration that suicide is a “moral” or “ethical” choice that should be applauded.

Health care workers who refuse to participate in some procedures for reasons of conscience or religion are often accused of being “judgemental” or of “moralising.”  In fact, as the preceding examples illustrate, their accusers are not infrequently just as “judgemental” and “moralistic.”   Such differences of opinion are not between moral or religious believers and unbelievers, but between people who believe in different moral absolutes.

This was one of the points made by Father Raymond De Souza during an interview about assisted suicide on CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup.  Interviewer Rex Murphy asked him if he thought that  “the idea of any absolute . . . even on the most difficult of questions of life and death . . . are no longer sufficient . . . for the modern world.”  Fr. De Souza’s response:

It’s a shift, Rex, I would say from one set of absolutes to the other.  And the absolute would be the absolute goodness of life, in one case, to assertion of personal autonomy, which is becoming an absolute assertion. And in fact in some of the arguments that have gone before the court, while acknowledging potential difficulties and philosophical objections, the right to personal autonomy trumps everything else.  So, in a certain sense, I wouldn’t say we are moving away from absolutes, but shifting from one set of absolutes to the other . . . [34:21- 35:24]