Vaccines

Vaccines are medical preparations that train the body’s immune system to resist a disease before a person is exposed to it. Their use raises no general moral question for Christians, who have a biblical mandate to fight disease.¹ The live ethical question concerns a specific subset: several standard vaccines, along with one of the three COVID-19 vaccines approved in the United States, were developed using human cell lines derived from two elective abortions performed in 1964 and 1970, which raises the question of whether using them makes a Christian complicit in the evil of abortion.¹

Confessional Contrast

The 1689 London Baptist Confession has no chapter addressing vaccines, a question that did not exist in its own era. Two adjacent confessional commitments bear on it without settling it. The confession holds that the moral law, including the prohibition of murder that grounds the sanctity of human life, “doth for ever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof.”² It also holds that “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in any thing contrary to his word, or not contained in it.”³ Neither clause names vaccination; the confession does not adjudicate this specific question, and Reformed Baptist Christians who share the same commitment to the sanctity of life disagree, in practice, about what follows from it here.

Arguments

For using the vaccines in question

Vaccines are one expression of the church’s long history of fighting disease in imitation of Christ, who healed skin disease (Matt. 8:1-4; Luke 5:12-16), a congenital blindness (John 9), a chronic gynecological ailment (Mark 5:25-34), and seizures (Mark 9:14-29).¹ Neighbor love (Lev. 19:18; Matt. 22:39) extends this further: because some people cannot be vaccinated or do not respond to vaccination, the rest of a population being vaccinated is what protects them, so declining vaccination has consequences for others, not only oneself.¹

Branch argues the moral question of complicity turns on proximity and intent rather than mere causal history. Neither abortion was performed in order to supply research tissue, no further abortion is required to keep these cell lines going today, and using a decades-old line does not itself encourage a future abortion.¹ He illustrates the distinction with an analogy: a family that donates a deceased child’s heart to save another child’s life does not thereby approve of the drunk driver who killed her; using the resulting vaccines likewise need not imply approval of the abortions that originated the cell lines, provided the user grieves rather than excuses that evil.¹

Against using the vaccines in question

First Thessalonians 5:22 instructs believers to “abstain from every form of evil,” and Romans 3:8 rejects doing evil that good may come. Some Christians reason from these texts that benefiting from tissue taken from an aborted child, however remote the connection, is a form of complicity that ought to be refused regardless of the medical benefit, and that using such vaccines when non-abortion-derived alternatives exist elsewhere (as with the rubella vaccine available in Japan but not the United States) blunts the moral urgency of that refusal.¹

Historical Development

Two human cell lines, WI-38 and MRC-5, trace back to two elective abortions: one performed in Sweden in 1964, the other in England in 1970. Five vaccines in the standard US immunization schedule are currently manufactured using one or the other line: chickenpox (varicella), the rubella component of the MMR shot, hepatitis A, and one manufacturer’s version each of the shingles and rabies vaccines.¹

The same question resurfaced with COVID-19. Of the three vaccines approved for use in the United States in 2020-2021, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine used the abortion-derived cell line PER.C6, developed in 1995 from a child aborted in 1985, at every stage: design, development, and production. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines used a different abortion-derived line, HEK293 (developed from a child aborted around 1972), only in confirmatory laboratory testing, not in development or production. Both lines were developed by the same research team at the University of Leiden.¹

Objections and Responses

Using these vaccines makes a Christian complicit in the evil of abortion. Branch distinguishes the direct moral responsibility of the parents, physicians, and other personnel who performed the original abortions from the remote use of tissue derived from them decades later, arguing that a pro-life Christian can affirm the benefit of a vaccine, urge the development of alternatives free of this history, and still not be excusing or promoting the abortions that produced the cell line in the first place.¹

If the moral history is troubling, the safest course is to decline vaccination altogether. Branch’s response weighs this against the neighbor-love argument above: declining vaccination is not a morally neutral default, since it can leave vulnerable others exposed to disease the declining person could have helped prevent, and it forgoes a documented medical benefit (rubella vaccination, for instance, protects against a disease that can itself cause a pregnant woman to miscarry) without addressing the complicity concern for the vaccines that have no abortion-derived alternative in the United States at all.¹

Related Doctrines

References

J. Alan Branch, 50 Ethical Questions: Biblical Wisdom for Confusing Times (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021), chap. 12, “Should Christians Use Vaccines Developed from Abortion-Derived Human Cell Lines?” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 5. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 21, “Of Christian Liberty and Liberty of Conscience,” para. 2. ↩