Immorality of Human Cell Lines
With a heavy heart, I hereby protest the unspeakable public desecration of G-d's name committed by a prominent online website that purports to speak in the name of Chabad Lubavitch.
This site shockingly featured an article that sanctions using a vaccine containing a cell line cultured from aborted fetal tissue.
The article argues that getting the vaccine is in no way encouraging anyone to perform abortions to harvest their cells, since "scientists are still using a cell strain that was obtained more than 50 years ago from a fetus."
This assertion is patently false.
The author is woefully oblivious to the current state of affairs in which abortions are performed routinely for the development of new human cell lines.
In fact, abortion is no longer the right term, but infanticide. Late-term viable babies are regularly delivered alive (in a horrific procedure called "water bag method") and dissected while their hearts are beating like laboratory animals. Live dissection without pain medication.
This odious reality is nothing less than a modern-day death cult.
By making use of any vaccine that contains a human cell line, one is effectively compensating the vaccine manufacturer for the past abortion while funding future abortions for the research and development of new cell lines, since those currently in use will not last forever.
In Torah law, such compensation is strictly forbidden. One who compensates a murderer for the murder he committed (or will commit) is morally complicit and is guilty of death in the heavenly court. [1]
Even with regards to early-stage fetuses, as was presumably the case fifty years ago, abortion is still akin to murder. [2] It is indefensible and morally intolerable.
Furthermore, there is another problem involved as well, that of deriving benefit from any human cadaver. [3]
Making use of a pharmaceutical product that contains the genetic code derived from any human corpse constitutes deriving illicit benefit thereof. While this prohibition might be lifted to save the life of a living person, a vaccine does not constitute "pikuach nefesh" or "hatzalat nefashot" in this regard. [4]
While there might be grounds for leniency in his regard, but ideally one should avoid such halachically dubious benefit from the dead.
However, the most serious aspect of this article is its blatant disregard for the widespread frequency of abortions in contemporary medical research.
Utilizing products that contain human cell lines obtained from abortions verily constitutes collusion in, and encouragement of, a) the abortion itself, b) the countless other abortions committed in the process [5], and c) all future abortions that are perpetrated by this company on a regular basis.
This is no small matter. The Rebbe entrusted us with the holy task of teaching the laws of morality as commanded to Noah and his descendants, recorded in Genesis 9. Abortion is a grave violation of the Divine Code.
As representatives of the Rebbe, Chabad should NOT be condoning abortion in any way.
Jews and all humans of conscience ought to boycott all products containing human cell lines until this horrific practice stops altogether.
There is too much at stake.
I demand that this ill-advised article be retracted at once.
Notes:
[1] Maimonides, Laws of Murder 2:2
[2] Genesis 9:6
[3] Shulchan Aruch Yoreh Deah 349:1
[4] Preventing illness in the future is not considered a current exigency of pikuach nefesh. See Noda B’yehuda mahadura tinyono Yoreh Deah 210, cited by Mishne Halachos (Rabbi Menashe Klein), Mador Hateshuvos, 6:203, prohibiting autopsy of fetus (nivul hamais) even if it's to save a future life. See also Mahadura tinyono, 2:253.
[5] For example, some seventy plus fetuses were aborted and dissected by Dr. Stanley Plotkin in 1962 until two were selected for the development of the cell line used in the Rubella Vaccine.