Are Your Child’s Vaccines Made With Aborted Fetal Remains?

Bioethics, , , ,

Earlier this week we wrote about medical treatments that use stem cells derived from aborted fetal remains. Today we want to focus on vaccines that utilize similar methods.

In order to produce a vaccine, scientists must first propagate large quantities of the virus against which the vaccine will be used.

One way to propagate the virus is to allow it to spread throughout a tissue culture in a lab. While any number of types of tissue or cells can be used—including animal cells or yeast cultures—for many viruses, sometimes researchers choose to use cells derived from human beings—specifically aborted fetal remains.

From the 1960s to the 1980s cells from various aborted human fetuses were obtained by scientists for the purpose of medical research. Researchers kept the cells alive to be multiplied under laboratory conditions. As the cell cultures multiplied, they were made available to other scientists for research and development.

In the U.S., vaccines for measles and rubella; chickenpox; and shingles are all manufactured using cells derived from aborted fetal remains. Other vaccines may be manufactured using cells derived from aborted fetal remains, depending on the methods used by the vaccine’s producers.

A Brief History Lesson with PepsiCo

In 2011 and 2012 PepsiCo was at the center of a controversy over the use of aborted human remains in testing Pepsi products. The allegations were that the company with which PepsiCo contracted for research and development tested flavor enhancers using cells known as HEK-293.

“HEK-293” stands for “Human Embryonic Kidney 293.” It is a cell line obtained from the kidneys of a baby aborted in 1973.

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Study Finds Vegetative Patient “Not Just Aware, but Paying Attention”

Bioethics, Life, Medical Ethics, , , , ,

A recent study published in the journal Neuroimage: Clinical has found some patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) are aware of the world around them — and some are “not just aware, but paying attention.”

Scientists at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and the University of Cambridge published their research last month. In the study, researchers examined 21 PVS patients, asking the patients to listen and mentally respond to a series of words. Scientists used electroencephalography to measure electrical activity in the brain, and compared brain activity in the patients with brain activity in healthy volunteers who were asked the same questions.

Researchers at Cambridge write,

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Eric Metaxas on “Producing” Children from Skin Cells

Bioethics, Medical Ethics,
[audio:http://www.breakpoint.org/images/content/breakpoint/audio/2013/100713_BP.mp3]

Nearly a year ago scientists in Japan developed a process by which mice offspring were “produced” in a lab using little more than skin cells obtained from the mice.

The discovery has many wondering if it is possible for scientists to “produce” biological children for human beings by a similar process, but it also carries troubling implications for bioethics.

Eric Metaxas comments on the ethical questions this discovery raises,

“Well, I think C. S. Lewis would have responded with another question: ‘Is there anything that should be forbidden?’ That’s precisely the challenge he issued in his famous essay, ‘The Abolition of Man,’ and to which academics of his day had no answer….As part of mankind’s conquest of nature, Lewis argued, we’ve conquered our own belief in moral absolutes. After all, the materialist would say, such beliefs are also part of nature. They’ve evolved to help us survive. But now that they’ve outlived their usefulness, we’re free to rise above them. The problem, as Lewis pointed out, is that we have no higher level to which we can rise. When we give up saying, ‘I ought,’ the only thing we can still say is, ‘I want.'”

You can read a full transcript of Metaxas’ comments at BreakPoint.

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