Refusing vaccines made from cells derived from aborted fetuses: Let us seek our

Mother’s response
https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/refusing-vaccines-made-from-cells-derived-
from-aborted-fetuses-let-us-seek-our-mothers-response
A reflection on vaccines and the modern-day massacre of the innocents.
Wed Feb 3, 2021
By Karen Darantière

February 3, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The following reflection on vaccines and their

relation to abortion was written by Karen Darantière, an American living in France.

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Psalm 139:13-14)

Abortion is the modern-day massacre of the innocents. Before asking ourselves

whether or not we would be complicit in this crime by accepting vaccines made from
cells derived from aborted human fetuses, let us for a moment contemplate a painting
that illustrates beautifully the sanctity of human life in the womb.

“Before I Formed You in the Womb” (painted in 2012) is a work of art by pro-life
artist Ron DiCianni, whose intention it was “to make a statement that each life is
precious to the One who created it, namely God. No life is an accident, and each has
a purpose. As someone who was scheduled myself to be aborted, that has been my
own story as well as the promise we have in Scripture … I wanted to clearly show
three things. Notice the hand of Christ reaching out to touch both mother and child ...
Look at the shadow cast by Christ's thumb, see how it completes the cross? Christ
died for each of us, those long dead and those yet to be conceived ... Finally, note the
star at the place where Christ’s hand touches the mother, that moment of Divine
Presence touching real life flesh. I believe that if you could pull back the curtain of
what our human eyes are limited to see, we would see that powerful hand of God
‘knitting’ together each child in its mother’s womb.”

***

“If any Israelite … sacrifices a child of his to the false god Moloch, his life must
pay for it … I will not let him live among my people any longer, once he has
outraged my sanctuary, dragged my holy name in the dust, by sacrificing his
child to Moloch.” (Leviticus 20:2-3)

Now, let us confront honestly the reality of abortion. About one in five pregnancies
worldwide ends in abortion. There are an estimated 42 million abortions per year
worldwide. In 2020 alone, there were over 42.6 million abortions. By way of
comparison, an estimated 1.8 million people died from the coronavirus over the past
year, making abortion 23.2 times deadlier than this virus. At this rate of 42 million
per year, in a mere 25 years one billion babies are murdered. Since the abortion
business began in earnest in the early 1960s, we have probably murdered nearly twice
that number, that is to say two billion unborn babies. Two billion unborn babies
murdered in the wombs of their mothers. Just for a moment, let us ponder that figure,
and try to fathom this fathomless abyss.

The 20th century’s exceptionally barbaric cruelty, with its two very deadly world
wars and even deadlier ideologies, comes nowhere near to approaching the immense
magnitude of this worldwide massacre of the most helpless of all human beings: our
very own unborn babies. Over the past half-century, in countless towns, in countless
countries across the globe, we have killed up to two billion of our children. How
could we not keep this fact firmly in mind as we thoughtfully deliberate as to the
morality of vaccines made from cells derived from aborted human fetuses?

This genocide of the unborn is unthinkable in its magnitude, but it is equally

unconscionable in its heinous brutality: not only is the abortion business horrifying
due to the quantity of babies who have been murdered in the womb, but the manner
of their murder is barbaric beyond belief. Let us place before our mind’s eye a couple
of the favored surgical abortion methods which stop the beating heart of unborn
babies. Let us picture an unborn baby boy at nine weeks after conception: He can do
somersaults, frown, and swallow. To abort this unborn boy, a hollow tube with a
knife-edged tip is inserted into his mother’s womb and is connected to a vacuum 29
times more powerful than a household vacuum cleaner, which tears him into small
pieces that are sucked into a bottle and discarded.

Now let us picture an unborn girl at the end of the third month in her mother’s womb:
She can and does sometimes cry silently, and she can feel pain. To abort this unborn
girl, a pair of forceps is inserted into her mother’s womb to grasp, break and twist off
her bones, until her body is totally dismembered and removed, her spine most likely
being snapped and her skull crushed in the process.
Finally, let us picture an unborn boy at 20 weeks: He can hear and recognize his
mother’s voice. To abort him, the doctor inserts a long needle into the mother’s
abdomen and injects a strong salt solution which he swallows and is poisoned by. It
also acts as a corrosive, burning off the outer layer of his skin. Within a day, his
mother will give birth to her dead or dying baby.

Many such babies have been born alive, then left unattended to die. This is a death
more cruel than that of the children sacrificed in Gehenna, the valley near Jerusalem
where the ancient Israelites once sacrificed their own children, burning them alive in
the hands of the Canaanite idol Moloch. The fires of infanticide consumed them more
rapidly than today’s tiny martyrs. It is icy cold in Moloch’s hands today: The little
boy shivers until he is silent and still, lying in a pool of blood that quickly chills.
Once swaddled warmly in the womb, he now lies lifeless in a sterile room, naked
from head to toe, with no one to mourn or weep for him.

Yet, as if the sheer number and the barbaric brutality of these abortions were not
horrific enough, we are now harvesting aborted baby body parts for the purpose of
medical research in a kind of modern-day feticidal horror story. Abortionists have
admitted to amending surgical procedures so as to ensure that some body parts are
left intact and usable by researchers. Picture the same little boy: He feels the
excruciating pain when the abortionist very quickly cuts out his kidney, so that it can
be shipped overnight to keep it fresh.

Consider this contradiction in fact: Pre-born children are not considered human
enough to be granted the legal right to life, but they are  treated as human enough to
have their organs harvested for medical research. Our very crimes perpetrated against
these tiny people are proof positive of their humanity, and of our own
inhumanity. Knowing full well just how heinous these crimes are, both in cruelty and
in magnitude, how can we possibly accept to benefit from their sacrifice by using a
vaccine which used these aborted babies’ body parts throughout the process of
production? What does the voice of our conscience say to us? Can we possibly justify
even the most remote cooperation?

“How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many
flowers.” (Mother Teresa)

We may not know the names of these two billion babies massacred in their mothers’
wombs, but their names are known by God. We may not mourn their deaths, but they
are mourned by their holy guardian angels. Bishop Athanasius Schneider, when he,
along with four other bishops, wrote the declaration entitled, On the moral illicitness
of the use of vaccines made from cells derived from aborted human fetuses, certainly
had these martyred souls in his shepherd’s heart, as his personal testimony attests:
“When we were preparing the document, I was very much praying … to the souls of
these babies who were murdered in the womb of their mothers, … because from the
first moment of conception there is a human soul, a person. And the souls of these
children, because they died innocently, they are in the reign of God … they are not in
the kingdom of the devil because they are … martyred souls. And so, I asked
specifically the souls of those children who were killed and whose cell lines were
used for the vaccine … Well, I was praying for all this because God knows these
souls by name.”

Let us try to imagine the special place in the Kingdom of God, where a sea of ruby-
colored roses graces His garden, where the blood-red bodies of the tiny martyrs have
become as red rose buds blossoming eternally. These tiny martyrs are dear to the
Immaculate Heart of our Heavenly Mother and to the Sacred Heart of Her Child.
Should they not be dear to our own hearts as well? So dear that we could only react
with the utmost horror and repugnance at the very thought of benefiting from their
martyred bodies, employed in the process of producing a vaccine? What does Mother
Mary’s Immaculate Heart say to us?

“Thus saith the Lord: A voice was heard on high of lamentation, of mourning,
and weeping, of Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted for
them, because they are not.” (Jeremiah 31:15)

Let us pause once again in order to contemplate a work of art (painted 1451-1452)
depicting the horror of the Massacre of the Innocents. The painter, Fra Angelico, a
Dominican beatified by Pope John Paul II, patron saint of painters and one of the
greatest Christian artists of all times, places before our eyes the massacre of the Holy
Innocents, the Gospel episode recounted at the same time as the flight into Egypt:
The massacre of all children under two years of age in the region of Bethlehem,
carried out by order of Herod, who feared the advent of a king of the Jews announced
by the Magi. This scene reminds us of the immense global genocide of children in
their mother’s womb. However, the horror of the Gospel scene depicted here pales in
comparison with the present-day crimes of abortion and the harvesting of aborted
baby body parts. Indeed, contrary to what this painting shows, where we see Herod’s
soldiers stabbing children in the arms of their mothers who are desperately trying to
protect them, the mothers and fathers of the children murdered today are themselves
complicit in the murder of their very own children. And are we not complicit, if, for
the sake of ensuring our own health and our own well-being, we accept to benefit
from the martyred bodies of aborted babies employed in the production of a vaccine?
What would the Immaculate Heart of Our Coredemptrix respond to us?

“They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God
because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.”
(Ephesians 4:18)

Are we not, as Christians, guilty of a sort of moral blindness and hard-heartedness, if,
while gravely considering the morality of recourse to abortion-tainted vaccines, we
nonetheless remain blind to the magnitude of this evil? Let us ponder in our hearts,
deeply, the fact that we are not talking about just any murder, but the murder of the
most helpless and innocent among us — unborn babies; and not only that, but this
murder, far from being committed against the will of the mothers by the hands of
some cruel tyrants, is committed by their mothers whose natural maternal instinct,
which incites them to protect and nurture their offspring, has momentarily been
snuffed out; and not only that, but these abortions constitute gruesome and barbarous
forms of torture, including dismemberment of unborn babies capable of feeling pain.
These unspeakable crimes are incalculable and ever-growing in number: There are
billions of these massacred unborn babies.

However desirable the good to be achieved by accepting an abortion-tainted vaccine

may be, is it not negligible in comparison with the magnitude and the horror of these
crimes? Does our conscience not make us recoil in horror at the mere thought of the
slightest, most remote complicity with evil of this magnitude? Are we not confronted
with an evil of such magnitude that it is to be avoided at all costs? How blind are we
when we calmly deliberate on this question without deeply taking into account the
extreme gravity of these crimes?

“It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”
(Mother Teresa)
Finally, let us for a moment ponder over the distinctly anti-Christian character of
abortion. Abortion is the antithesis of the joyful mystery we celebrate at Christmas:
instead of contemplating Mary and Joseph adoring the Christ Child in the manger,
our eyes follow a trail of blood from an empty cradle to a freshly-filled grave.
Abortion is antithetical to the Paschal mystery of Christ’s sacrificial love. Instead of
hearing the echo of our Savior’s words (“This is my body, given up for you”), we hear
a satanic voice saying, “This is your body, given up for me.” Abortion is a sort of
anti-Christmas, anti-Paschal mystery of iniquity whose depths we cannot begin to
fathom. Abortion is akin to a sacrilegious sacrament, a perverse cult rendered to the
Antichrist.

Our Mother Coredemptrix cooperated with Her divine Son in his work of redemption,
from conception to Calvary, through the self-giving love of her Maternal Heart,
which is the exact opposite of the coldheartedness of the woman who screams: “My
body, my choice.” How surprising is it, therefore, to see some of the more extreme
advocates of feticide engage in hideous spectacles in which they portray the Virgin
Mary aborting the Baby Jesus? Such horrifying performances reveal just how
intimately wedded abortion advocacy is to a deep-seated hatred of the Christian
message. Abortion is rooted in the outright rejection of the very notion of sacrificial
love, whereas the Christian story is that of Christ’s Sacred Heart and His Mother’s
Immaculate Heart indissolubly united in one sacrificial love for the salvation of fallen
humanity.

The abortion ideology is nothing other than the perverse inversion of the Way, the
Truth and the Life; it is the victory of callous, cruel selfishness over selfless,
sacrificial love. If the greatest love is a willingness to sacrifice your life for another,
then its contrary consists in sacrificing another’s life for yourself. This, then, is our
choice: uniting our hearts with those of Christ our Redeemer and His Mother our
Coredemptrix, bearing witness to the Truth, or, on the contrary, cooperating in this
immense, infernal, infanticidal cult. May we, with our consciences enlightened by
God’s grace, make the right choice. If there are no faithful Christians who will stand
up and say no to these abortion-tainted vaccines, the horror can only continue on and
on, relentlessly, until the day when God himself will intervene.

Let us listen once again to the testimony of Bishop Athanasius Schneider, a faithful
shepherd whose words we should meditate on attentively: “There have to be
witnesses without any shadow of even the slightest collaboration with abortion in the
case of the vaccines, because there is a concrete murdering of children … We have
to resist … We have to follow the truth. Even if I lose all my good friends, I will
follow my conscience. Even if I am alone, I will follow my conscience, as Saint
Thomas More and Saint John Fisher did … We have to follow our conscience, a
conscience which we have prayed, studied, consulted before God … God will
illuminate us, we who will confess His truth, and He will give us strength. What is
this short life in comparison with eternity, with the Truth? With the uncompromising
witness of the prophets, ... with the saints, the martyrs ...? We have to follow them,
even when we will lose our short temporal life.”

“Now the mother was to be admired above measure, and worthy to be

remembered by good men, who beheld seven sons slain in the space of one day,
and bore it with a good courage, for the hope that she had in God” (2 Machabees
7:20)

To conclude our reflections, let us meditate on an extraordinary figure of our Mother

of Sorrows in the Old Testament: The noble “Mother of the Maccabees” who, under
the persecution of the king, Antiochus, witnessed her six sons, one after the other,
being excruciatingly tortured and murdered for their loyalty to the Law of God.
Antiochus himself invited this mother to intervene with her seventh son to urge him
to save himself by accepting the king’s offers of wealth and power, if this son would
only turn away from the divine Law. Instead, this mother addresses words of
exhortation to her son: “My son, have pity upon me, that bore thee nine months in my
womb, and gave thee suck three years, and nourished thee, and brought thee up unto
this age. I beseech thee, my son, look upon heaven and earth, and all that is in them:
and consider that God made them out of nothing, and mankind also: So thou shalt
not fear this tormentor, but being made a worthy partner with thy brethren, receive
death, that in that mercy I may receive thee again with thy brethren.” (2 Machabees
7:29). The Mother of the Maccabees admirably prefigures our Mother Coredemptrix:
The suffering caused by the death of the seven sons announces the seven swords of
pain which will pierce the heart of our Mother, according to the prophecy of Simeon.
What does our Mother Coredemptrix say to us, through these words of the Mother of
the Maccabees, who exhorts her last living son to prefer to suffer death rather than to
be unfaithful to the Law of God? What would our Mother answer if each of us asked
Her this question: Must I refuse abortion-tainted vaccines in order to avoid being an
accomplice in the modern-day massacre of the innocents?