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People, both here in the UK and abroad, are beginning to reach out to me for help to explain to their employers, university administrators, etc, why they as Christians cannot in good conscience receive abortion-tainted vaccines. Here is a letter template that I hope will be helpful - please feel free to copy and paste as required. No need to cite me. To whomever it may concern, As director of Brephos, the Church project of the Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform UK, I am writing to confirm that the conscientious refusal of any medication that has made of use of fetal cell lines in its development and/or testing is a sincerely held Christian conviction that deserves to be respected by any nation or institution that wishes to be seen as tolerant or respectful of religious liberty. To coerce or expel those who wish to conscientiously refuse is, in religious terms, comparable to pressurising Jews to eat pork or Sikhs to shave their hair. By way of explanation, in the case of most of the globally available Covid-19 vaccines, the fetal cell line “HEK 293” has been used – “HEK” standing for “Human Embryonic Kidney”. The kidney in question belonged to a Dutch baby girl who was aborted in the 1970s. Her kidney was harvested and a cell line was cultured. This cell line was used to develop and/or test most of the available Covid-19 vaccines available around the world today. Christian opposition to abortion is well known – life begins at conception (Psalm 51:5), and therefore abortion is prohibited under the Sixth Commandment (Exodus 20:13). Organ harvesting from babies (which continues around the world today, and often begins torturously whilst babies are still alive) is similarly abhorrent to the Christian conscience. To accept vaccines that depend on the fruit of organ harvesting from babies is to benefit from, normalise, encourage, and perpetuate the practice, and the culture of abortion on which it depends. Many sincere Christians conclude therefore that they cannot receive a vaccine that has been produced in such an unethical way. They have strong grounds in Scripture for their conviction: there is ample biblical example and instruction against close contact with or benefit from things that are morally or spiritually compromised, or that treat lightly human life. - King David refused (2 Samuel 23:15-17) to drink water that was acquired at reckless risk to the lives of his own men: But he would not drink of it. He poured it out to the Lord and said, "Far be it from me, O Lord, that I should do this. Shall I drink the blood of the men who went at the risk of their lives?" - Daniel and his friends (Daniel 1:8-14) refused the Babylonian king’s food as it violated their religion, even though it put their own health and lives at risk and that of their steward. - Ephesians 5:11 teaches much more than mere personal abstinence from direct acts of evil: Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. - Leviticus 20:1-5 goes beyond mere prohibition of child sacrifice: actually preventing others from sacrificing children is commanded, laying down the principle of positive intervention to effectively oppose evil and prevent it. Tolerating evil is out of the question: how much more benefiting from it. According to the highest authority within the Christian faith – the Bible – refusal of vaccines that have come to market with the help of organ harvesting from human babies is a serious and well-grounded Christian conviction. For the Christian believer, who is conscience-bound before God, such a conviction is not merely ancillary to their faith, but an integral part of it. Yours faithfully, Dave Brennan

I have been involved with a couple of debates in which I presented the ethical case against vaccines which use the cell line HEK-293 derived from the kidney of an "aborted" baby. As it happens, this includes all the currently available Covid-19 vaccines in the UK. Here, basically unedited, is the opening speech I gave in both debates: I wish to make the case that how we respond to fetal cell line vaccines, is how we respond to the practice that produces them: namely, the harvesting of vital organs from human babies – which continues today. In making this case I thought it’d be helpful to take three of the most common justifications for taking the vaccine, and show where I think they fall down. The first, is this idea that in the case of this particular cell line, HEK-293…, we’re talking about only a very “remote” connection with evil – it was just one abortion many decades ago. The connection is so slight now as to be insignificant: the vaccine is permissible. Analogies used here include train tracks laid down by slaves in centuries past – is it wrong to take a train ride on such tracks? Surely we can condemn the past slavery but still benefit from the fruit left behind. After all it would be a waste not to. The slaves wouldn’t hold it against us if we made us of the train tracks today. The problem with using an analogy like this is that it suggests that organ harvesting is a thing of the past. If I can make only one reality memorable and central in this whole debate let it be this: organ harvesting from human babies is not a thing of the past. It’s happening today. But before we look into that, I just want to question this subjective idea of “remoteness”. This baby girl, “HEK-293”…, had she been allowed to live, would be in her late 40s today, and might have had children of her own. It’s hardly ancient history. There may well be people tuned in today who were themselves born in 1973. Johanna – this is the name we’ve imagined for this baby girl, with the intention of honouring her dignity as a human being made in the image of God – Johanna would have been your contemporary. More importantly, where did we get this idea that evil diminishes over time? I can see nothing in the Bible to suggest such a notion. But the main point I wish to make here is this: this idea of remoteness is just in ignorance of the facts. Organ harvesting is not history. Both the baby genocide and the practice of organ harvesting that made HEK-293 possible back then, continue today, in full force. There has been no let-up. It’s happening in the very same labs, universities, countries that it happened in back then. As recently as 2015, nine babies were delivered alive in their sacs in China for dissection. Researchers were after lung tissue. In the end they used tissue from just one baby girl, to make the new fetal cell line WALVAX-2. Here in the UK, the Cardiff Fetal Tissue Bank has been collecting organs for research purposes from babies electively aborted. Just in the last week or so it has come to light that at the University of Pittsburgh in America, you can read their study in the journal Nature, “scientists described scalping 5-month-old aborted babies to stitch onto the backs of lab rats. They wrote about how they cut the scalps from the heads and backs of the babies, scraping off the "excess fat" under the baby skin before stitching it onto the rats. They even included photos of the babies' hair growing out of the scalps. Each scalp belonged to a little Pennsylvania baby whose head would grow those same hairs if he or she were not aborted for experiments with lab rats.” I just honestly do not know how we can countenance taking the fruit of such barbaric practice – even if it was from the experiments 40 years ago and not the ones done yesterday. I would like to know if…would be prepared to take a vaccine made with the fetal cell line WALVAX-2, for which nine human babies were dissected in 2015, in China? If he would, what message does he think that would give to the Chinese regime and others who carry out and profit from such practices today? If he would not, why the discrepancy – why accept a fetal cell line from longer ago but not a more recent one? Second: the claim that since no babies were killed for the creation of fetal cell lines, we’re not encouraging more abortions by making use of this material. It’s as if we stumbled across an adult who had been murdered, not for their organs, and took the opportunity to use their organs to save others. The taking of organs is neither here nor there when it comes to the original wrongful killing, it is argued – which of course we all roundly condemn. But the problem here again, is that it is in ignorance of the facts. There is collaboration between the abortionists and those wanting the organs. I hope I can make this distinction clear. It is true that in most cases, the babies in question were going to be killed anyway. But it is not true that they were going to be killed in this way, in such a torturous manner. Planned Parenthood in America have been found to admit that they sometimes alter the way in which they kill babies in order to preserve certain organs that have been ordered. The babies delivered by water bag abortion in China were deliberately kept alive as close to dissection point as possible – ideally, for the researchers, they would still have been alive when dissection began – for the freshness of their organs. You can read the official write-up of the production process of WALVAX-2. They are at pains to point out that animals used in the process were treated humanely, given anaesthetic etc. No such mercy was afforded the human babies. Friends, in the production of this fetal cell line, babies were treated worse than lab rats. How can we even countenance drawing benefit from such practice, when it continues today? So no, babies generally aren’t killed for their organs, but they do endure additional, specialised torture for their organs. Is that an irrelevance? Is that something we’re happy to tolerate – because they were going to be killed anyway? I think we would shudder at the idea of cutting open criminals on death row – alive and with no anaesthetic – to get their organs fresh – “because they were going to die anyway”. Why do we take innocent unborn children so much less seriously than adult criminals on death row? Is that God’s heart? Is he pleased with this attitude? Third: the argument that we live in a fallen world, moral taint is all around us, it’s the water we swim in, the air that we breathe: we just have to accept that some level of proximity with such things is inevitable – otherwise we’ll end up living in a desert cut off from pretty much all civilisation. In some cases, this is true. We can’t get away from proximity with all evil – even some, involuntary or reluctant, participation. A good example would be taxes. We are clearly commanded in the Bible to pay our taxes, even though some of them are spent on evil things. It’s not a choice we have. Biblically, I think that’s clear and simple. But what we’re talking about here is not a compulsory or unavoidable thing. The vaccine producers didn’t have to use a fetal cell line. Some didn’t – CureVac. It was entirely unnecessary. And we don’t have to take this vaccine. It’s a choice. The question is not whether it’s possible to avoid this, the question is whether we’re willing to pay the price to avoid it. Where possible, and according to the knowledge available, we should seek to invest in good practices and avoid/discourage evil practices – but let me suggest two reasons why it’s especially important in this case: i) Child sacrifice – more than, for example, animal welfare – is especially grievous to the heart of God. It ought to weigh on us as heavily as it weighs on God. It ought to grieve us. We ought to find it horrendous. I don’t think the thought of opting to benefit from it should even cross our minds. ii) In a way that is not the case for almost any other injustice you can think of, baby genocide and organ harvesting enjoys almost universal acceptance worldwide. It’s a multi-state-sponsored, financially comfortable, genocide and it’s baked into so much of the global medical establishment, with global organisations such as the WHO encouraging and accelerating it. It’s important to try and bring a total end to sweat shops etc, but the good news is: almost everyone already agrees about that, at least notionally, and efforts are being made. On the baby genocide, however, the consensus is on the other side of things, and so, in the words attributed to Bonhoeffer: “Not to speak is to speak”. We need to take this opportunity. We need to take every opportunity to go out of our way to expose it, stand apart from it, and stand against it. I confess that I am saddened that it seems that most Christians today, in line with the mainstream messaging, see in the abortion-tainted vaccine a “way out” or a “route back to normal”, instead of seeing a great opportunity for us to be salt and light and to reject the promises and principles and practices of this world, in favour of the world to come. How we respond to fetal cell line vaccines, is how we respond to organ harvesting from babies. To accept the vaccine, is to accept the practice that produced the vaccine, which continues today. As Christians, I do not see how we can do this.

In a recent back-and-forth over the ethics of abortion-related vaccines, Matthew Mason and John Stevens helpfully corrected my thinking on 1 Corinthians 10 and then went on to say that there are other and better ways than refusing the vaccine to bear witness against the horrors of our baby genocide. And I wholeheartedly agree. There are other and better, tried and tested ways to change hearts and minds on the baby genocide - it's just that I can't see how voluntarily receiving the fruit of the very genocide that we are seeking to stop (along with baby organ harvesting which also continues today) can go hand in hand with any such endeavour. However, leaving behind for now the question of the vaccine itself (is that a small cheer for joy I hear?), I wish to address head on the all-important question of how to end abortion. I am thankful to John Stevens for articulating what he thinks is the way to end abortion, but with the greatest respect I fear that what reveals in doing so is the acceptance of a number of dangerous myths or misunderstandings which are badly at odds with the history of successful social reform and continue to hold back the pro-life movement significantly in this nation, costing many thousands of lives yearly. Although it is in response to Stevens that I am writing, in fact his beliefs are shared by many if not most Christians in the UK, and it is for this reason that I felt it important to hold these beliefs up against the history of social reform and beg him, and anyone else currently convinced by them, to reconsider. So much is at stake. Allow me to take these commonly accepted myths or misunderstandings in turn before, in Part 2, commending instead the tried and tested strategies gifted to us by the history of successful social reform. 4 myths that most of us believe about how to end abortion 1) "We just need to preach the gospel and plant churches" I don't want to overstate Stevens's adherence to this particular belief. He is certainly not saying we should sit back and do nothing other than preach and plant (many do hold that view). But he does say: "Pursuing evangelism and church growth is the most effective long-term pro-life strategy." This is because we need many more people to accept "the biblical view of the value of human life created in the image of God." Obviously the most likely way that is going to happen is if many more people become Christians. As Stevens says, revival would really help! In a sense I completely agree with Stevens - and I certainly share his heart for evangelism and church planting and a longing for revival. Christians are more likely to be pro-life than others, and so the creation of more Christians has to be a good idea. But I need to qualify what Stevens says in a fundamental way, and I have to be blunt here. There are many evangelical Christians who are not pro-life, not even notionally pro-life, and there are a good few non-Christians who are pro-life. It's just not as simple as: Christian = pro-life. A relatively recent Evangelical Alliance survey found that 80% of evangelicals think that abortion is sometimes justified. There is a huge spectrum of opinion within the UK evangelical world, even just on the morality of abortion, let alone the strategy for ending it. The obvious reason for this is that almost no evangelicals receive thorough, regular, biblical teaching on abortion. They may know that they are meant to be pro-life because that's what evangelicals are, but they have no real understanding of the issue and they are defenceless against the unrelenting onslaught of the other side through the media, Hollywood, education systems, and other channels. They are extremely vulnerable to the subtle and not so subtle lies and twists of the abortion lobby. And so 80% of them think that abortion is sometimes ok, even if at the same time they think they are basically "pro-life". People don't become truly pro-life automatically upon conversion or by osmosis thereafter. They need to be taught, persuaded, shown the evidence. Read Part 2 for more on that. At the same time, people such as my atheist vegan animal rights activist friend Lesley, who volunteers with one of our CBRUK public education teams, demonstrate that you don't have to be Christian to be strongly pro-life. Lesley is one of our most faithful volunteers full stop. It is always difficult to know how to respond when she asks why so many Christians are so weak and inconsistent when it comes to abortion. "They're meant to be pro-life," she says. We need to pay attention to this evidence. It leads us to some uncomfortable conclusions. How do I put this? When it comes to abortion, UK evangelicalism is not working. Not even in proportion with its small size. Not even internally. We aren't even managing to convince ourselves to be pro-life, let alone others. Pro-choice ideology is dominating, within the Church. Let me put it like this: How will the proliferation of churches that say and do virtually nothing about abortion bring about the end of abortion? How will the multiplication of Christians who think that abortion is tolerable bring about the end of abortion? And on the question of revival specifically: What makes us think that revival will come before we repent of our apathy, indifference, tolerance, even complicity and participation, in the face of child sacrifice? The idea that revival could end abortion rather ignores the fact that we are part of the problem, that we are currently facing in the wrong direction. An extra wind in our sails is not quite what we need right now; we need to turn around. Repentance and revival: yes! Evangelism and church planting are essential, and they could help to end abortion, but not automatically. What we desperately need is not a change in the number of churches but a change in the culture of churches. We already have enough churches to end abortion. We could have ten times as many churches and we still wouldn't be ending abortion if they were of the same kind as we have now. We need to address the culture, the hearts and minds, the attitudes and thinking, the behaviours, both within and without the Church. How do we do that? Read Part 2. 2) "We need to cultivate sympathy for the pro-life movement" Stevens believes rightly that the pro-life movement in the UK does not enjoy widespread popular support (though it's always surprising just how much sympathy there is out there on the streets compared with what the media would suggest there is). He also believes, again probably rightly, that refusing a vaccine would not endear us any more to the culture around us. But that is simply not the point. The purpose of the pro-life movement is not to endear itself. It is to endear the actual victims of the real injustice - the babies - and I'll come onto how we do that in Part 2. Here, suffice to say, rightly handled, refusing the vaccine could indeed endear the victims of the injustice, even if at the same time it made us less popular. Here is a key principle of social reform: that you can, indeed must, allow your personal reputation to plummet whilst at the same time, by highlighting their humanity and their plight, causing the victims' reputation to rise. This is an incredibly important point: no successful social reformer was ever universally liked, and no universally liked social reformer was ever successful. William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and their abolitionist allies were tremendously unpopular in their day. Clarkson had to have a personal bodyguard on his travels, and he was very nearly assassinated by a gang of sailors on a pier in Liverpool. If the abolitionists had focused on cultivating sympathy for themselves, for their movement, rather than for the actual slaves, they would never have undertaken effective activity and they would never have prevailed. Similarly, Martin Luther King was hugely unpopular in his time. In 1966, two years before his assassination, two thirds of Americans still disapproved of his actions. But MLK understood the bigger picture, he knew what needed to be done. By definition, you cannot overturn accepted, systemic, widespread injustice with all your bridges intact. We need to make peace with being "hated for righteousness' sake", even having men "falsely say all kinds of evil against [us]" (Matthew 5:10-12). Of course we make friends wherever we can and of course we avoid any unnecessary offence. But the point I'm making is this: offence is absolutely inevitable in this work, and in fact, rightly handled, it is actually a powerful tool. If we insist on keeping our reputation in one piece, we will never do what is needed to end abortion. We may as well write an official letter of resignation to the babies: "Good luck, you're on your own!" 3) "We need more social support in place" In some ways this is an extension of myth/misunderstanding No. 2, in that it is sometimes a response to the kind of ad hominem that says, "Unless you're willing to adopt every baby on the planet, you have no right to stand against abortion." It is the charge heard often in the States, and sometimes here, that "pro-lifers" aren't really "pro-life" because they ... (fill in the blank: "have a different attitude towards public healthcare provision / immigration / welfare state..."). They are therefore bad people who don't really care, they have therefore no right to voice opposition to abortion, they should therefore shut up. The problem is that for those of us who want to be liked or who think that being liked is a sine qua non for ending abortion, it is indeed enough to shut us up - and we may well busy ourselves improving social support for the less than 1% of unwanted babies that the genocide perpetrators allow to escape the womb alive, but we will leave the other 99%+ of unwanted babies totally unsupported and undefended to be violently killed by those perpetrators, whom we have allowed to establish themselves as the only ones righteous enough to voice an opinion on abortion. It is a clever ploy by the abortion lobby to take us out of the game, and largely it is working. It is interesting that we don't apply this thinking to other crimes or acts of violence. No-one would dream of saying we should remove the pressures that lead to wife-beating instead of outlawing wife-beating. No-one says we should ask what makes people feel like being racist instead of exposing and condemning racism itself. It would be quite bizarre of someone to say, "Until you are willing to pay personally for police reform in the USA, you have no right to demand an end to police brutality." We need to call out this ad hominem for what it is instead of trying to dance to its tune. It is a cynical delaying tactic, a dishonest changing of the subject. The fact of the matter is that even if it were true that pro-lifers are nasty people who don't care about anyone the moment they exit the womb (and it's not), the brutal killing of babies in the womb would still be an egregious evil and it would still need to stop. But even if we set aside the ad hominem element to this, if we take seriously the belief of some pro-choicers and some pro-lifers alike that abortion really is just the result of other social issues and we should attack those issues instead of abortion itself, there's another reason we need to reject this kind of response. Stevens says that without more social support in place the pro-life movement is a "non-starter in contemporary culture", which would seem to suggest we should indeed do nothing until more social support is in place first. We should keep killing babies until there is more social support waiting for them outside the womb. But how much more? This is one of the reasons this idea is so dangerous. It is a bottomless pit. One can always demand more social support, which will often be a good and helpful thing of itself. But we are caught in never-ending procrastination if we keep on insisting: Just a little more support in place and then we'll oppose the bloodshed (or maybe, we'll never have to)! The reality is that whilst of course there are all sorts of pressures and circumstances that contribute to any abortion decision, and we can and should target those, they do not tell the whole story nor are they, at a societal level, the most important explanatory factor behind our soaring genocide figures. Put it this way: you could have all the support in the world and there would still be lots of abortions. Indeed, we do have a great deal of support, certainly compared with the 1960s, and yet abortions continue to climb. Reality Check Between 1967 and 1973, abortions per year multiplied by six, from 27,000 to 175,000. Was that because poverty multiplied by six over the same time period? Or did sexual crime multiply by six? Did the benefits system get six times worse over those six years? Stevens argues that more needs to be done to remove the "stigma" of single parenting, instead of attacking abortion directly. Honestly, I cannot recall a single moment in my lifetime (b. 1989) when I have actually witnessed an act or word of stigmatisation against single parenting. Of course it can be subtle or implied or felt, I'm not saying it never happens, but my point is this: compared to the 1950s or 60s there is absolutely no question that there is far less stigma attached to single parenting - and yet the abortion rate continues to soar more than ever. There is in fact an ongoing mainstream campaign to destigmatise alternatives to the traditional family unit - and still abortions rage. Social support is a good thing in itself and I am not saying that people shouldn't be working on this. We all have our different callings and focus. But insofar as ending abortion goes, it's a red herring. Lack of social support is not the problem that led to abortions multiplying in the first place, so more social support is not going to be the solution. Nor am I saying that all or most abortions are undertaken lightly. Many women are indeed in desperate situations, often thanks to complete abandonment and dereliction of duty by men. We can do a lot of good at an individual and societal level by highlighting and addressing these many facets. But it's not how we're going to end abortion. Perhaps the best illustration of this is to consider the many abortions at the other end of the motivation spectrum. I know of a couple in a stable relationship with good jobs who actually wanted to have babies together some day. They got pregnant but because it wasn't the year they had planned to have a baby, they had the baby killed. What is Stevens's social support answer to this, for which we are waiting before we oppose that killing directly? Or consider the "bikini body" abortion. The abortion industry was found to give the green light for an abortion on the grounds that being pregnant would jeopardise the woman's figure on an upcoming beach holiday. What is Stevens's social support solution to this? Should churches launch pre- or post-partum fitness classes so that women don't feel they have to choose between a great figure and having a baby? Again the history of social reform is clear that you don't end an injustice by working around it, addressing everything except the actual injustice itself. Yes, there are contributory factors, as with everything, and yes they deserve attention too, but injustice must be tackled head on. The abolitionists understood this. Setting up free colonies such as Sierra Leone was an admirable and worthwhile venture, albeit met with significant teething issues. The abolitionists did have a hand in providing a better future for freed Africans, but thanks be to God that they did not drop their focus on ending the slavetrade itself whilst doing so. They knew that the kingpin, which we will consider in Part 2, could not be neglected. You can make Sierra Leone as attractive as you like but that won't open the hands of slavetraders to release voluntarily their precious slaves. 4) "We need to focus less on trying to change the law" Stevens says that we have "focused too narrowly" on trying to change the law. Instead, as outlined above, we should try to improve the social situation, bring about cultural change, remove "incentives" to abort. Here, actually I half agree with Stevens. The relationship between law and culture is a little like chicken and egg. It is hard to know which one comes first but they undoubtedly do produce one another. What I think Stevens underestimates is just how much the law does change the culture, by which I mean here attitudes and behaviours to do with abortion. The stats I've already mentioned show how the change of abortion law in 1967 led directly and rapidly to the multiplication of abortion numbers year on year. It is quite simply by far the greatest explanatory factor. Why were there so many abortions every year in the UK by the mid-70s? Because the law allowed them. The same pattern is repeated again and again worldwide: when abortion is legalised, numbers rocket. The converse is also true: restrict abortion legally, and numbers plummet. Some will claim that abortion numbers actually stay the same either way - it's just a question of whether they are clinical and safe, or backstreet and dangerous. But this is another abortion lobby lie, tragically believed on by so many pro-lifers. I myself believed it, or something close to it, until just a few years ago. Backstreet abortion numbers have been shamelessly fabricated or exaggerated by those who know they can use such figures to manipulate naive pro-lifers into giving way to abortion laws which the abortion lobby know they need because they are so significant and helpful to them. But the reality is this: even where backstreet abortion numbers really are high, legalising abortion will only increase the number of babies killed, and more women will die as a result as well. It is devastating to see Stevens going along with this abortion lobby narrative, that "recent legalisation of abortion in Argentina is a result of the fact [italics mine] that there are already an estimated 500,000 abortions a year." This is exactly what the abortion industry wants us to think: that we are helping by legalising abortion without having to stop being pro-life. It's precisely the same trick we fell for in 1967. Think on this: if the law is so irrelevant, why does the abortion lobby campaign so relentlessly for law change? The Abortion Law Reform Association was founded in 1936 in the UK. Working tirelessly for 30 years before their big break, they were pivotal in getting the law changed with the help of David Steel in 1967. They continue today under the new name Abortion Rights. I get their regular e.mails. They are still at it, instrumental in pushing the genocide into Northern Ireland. They never stop. Pro-aborts know that the law matters. Nothing could bring delight and peace to their mind more than the knowledge that pro-lifers are encouraging one another to back off from trying to change the law. Can you imagine if the abolitionists, or the civil rights movers, had told each other not to focus on trying to bring about legislative change? Stevens shares the fact that he was born in 1968 to a 15-year-old mother and was adopted. I am grateful. You don't really meet people with a similar story who are much younger. Nowadays, it's almost unheard of for a baby to be voluntarily relinquished for adoption at birth. That's because to the nearest percent, 100% of unwanted babies are killed in the womb. And that's because it's legal, not because there's a lack of couples queueing up to adopt babies. Quite the opposite. To put it crudely, the "demand" for newborn adopted babies (couples queueing up) vastly outweighs the "supply", or more correctly, the sparing of unwanted babies. And it's all thanks to the law, and the culture that the law chiefly has given birth to. But where I think I may agree with Stevens, is that we cannot tackle the law only or even directly. Just as law changes culture, so culture changes law (especially in a democracy), and so we must focus predominantly on changing the culture, partly as a means of ultimately changing the law. Law change must be the goal, but it is not the only or even the primary goal. What then are those cultural changes we need to focus on directly, and how do we do it? Read Part 2: How (then) to end abortion

In Part 1 we considered some of the most commonly believed myths about how to end abortion. They are easy to believe because they are quite intuitive, and if we were up against a different kind of problem, something other than legalised abortion, they might well be appropriate. But one of our greatest errors when it comes to trying to end abortion is that we omit to clarify what abortion even is in the first place. What kind of problem is this? We frequently misunderstand what abortion actually is and so we are prone to apply the wrong solution. Abortion is not a women's issue, a subset of sexual health, a function of poverty, a rare response to extreme medical emergencies, a result of dysfunctional relationships - though it can and does touch on all of those things. Abortion is the state-sponsored, widely accepted yet barely recognised, industrial scale killing of a disfavoured people group - unwanted babies. It is a genocide, a genocide spanning many decades. And it depends upon the total dehumanisation of that disfavoured people group for its survival. Understanding abortion in this way allows us to sift through history for answers. Where else have entire people groups been dehumanised and treated as subhuman in a state-sponsored or state-protected programme over a prolonged period of time? And how did successful reformers reverse and overturn that? We find upon investigation that injustices of this kind can only be overturned if two major goals are achieved: 1) The victims must be rehumanised. 2) The horrors of the injustice must be exposed. You have to do both. The Problem Whether it be the transatlantic slavetrade, systematic racism and segregation in 19th and 20th century America, or the Holocaust, the victims were carefully dehumanised through language (e.g. "rats", "pigs"), and attention was drawn away from them and their rights onto the benefits that could be won for everyone else by, e.g., "terminating" them. The horrors of what was being done were kept comfortably out of sight and out of mind as far as possible. It's easy to forget what a positive term "ethnic cleansing" once was - now we know what it really means. But the same is happening today, as the horrors of mass baby killing are hidden behind terms like "healthcare" and "reproductive choice". The Solution Successful reformers of the past rehumanised the victims, through words but also, importantly, through pictures. Even before the invention of the Kodak, Clarkson and friends made use of artists' work drawing attention to the humanity of the victims of the slavetrade. Below: The iconic image popularised by Josiah Wedgwood, friend of Thomas Clarkson (Wellcome Library, London). But it's not enough to show only the humanity of the victims: you also have to show the inhumanity of the injustice itself, because this too is deliberately kept hidden. People for example could believe that the African was fully human but if they believed the slavetraders' lies that life aboard their ships and on the plantations was peaceful and idyllic, they still would not have any real problem with the slavetrade. Above: A depiction of Brookes slave ship, packing in hundreds of Africans in cramped and inhumane conditions for long voyages across the Atlantic (PICRYL). Below: With the help of the recently invented Kodak, the 1904 Casement Report exposed the brutal practice of mutilation and amputation in King Leopold II's Congo Free State, used as a weapon to terrorise the locals into faster rubber collection (badnewsaboutchristianity.com). WARNING: GRAPHIC HOLOCAUST IMAGERY BELOW (Wikimedia Commons). Below: More recently, the power of visual evidence was again demonstrated as this picture of Alan Kurdi washed up on a beach changed the way the world viewed the refugee crisis (flickr.com). Applying This to Today's Great Injustice Many today believe the lie that the unborn are not fully human, not like you and me. That they can be treated more like an idea, or an organ. Being a Christian, accepting the biblical view that life has value from conception, certainly helps. But you don't have to be a Christian for an image like this (below: 10-week human fetus) to change how you think and feel about "the pregnancy". Moreover, if you are a Christian already or notionally pro-life, a picture like this brings a new measure of clarity and definition. It can turbo-charge your pro-life-ness, moving you to action. A video (below) is better still. But it's not enough to have the "nice" pictures and videos only - because you can still be deluded by all the euphemisms as to what abortion itself actually is. You can believe that abortion is wrong, but you'll still be in the dark as to just how wrong and intolerable it is. You might, for example, still believe that the word "termination" is a fair description. This was where I was at until relatively recently. Now I can tell you that babies are dismembered, decapitated, crushed, poisoned, starved, and that will do something to help you imagine a bit more accurately what is going on hundreds of times every day in this nation. But nothing has the same impact as showing you. WARNING: GRAPHIC ABORTION IMAGERY BELOW (10-week human fetus, victim of "abortion") More impactful still are videos. These pictures are not instead of our theology, but rather they connect our theology more directly to the real-life situation and injustice that surrounds us - just as an e.mail from Open Doors with a picture of a persecuted Christian in one of the toughest nations on earth brings home to us their humanity, their plight, and our obligations to them as a neighbour and as a brother or sister in Christ. I've preached in a few dozen churches on abortion, and I always try to gather feedback. One of the most frequent responses is this: "I had no idea it was like that." Another is specifically how impactful and needed the pictures were, of the violence of abortion. (Others speak of how grateful they are that the presentation is embedded within the gospel and an overarching message of grace.) We tend to accept the necessity of unpleasant pictures of injustice when it isn't so close to home, as with for example the Holocaust, or when there is already popular consensus that the injustice in question is wrong, as with the graphic video of the death of George Floyd. But the rules of social reform don't change just because this injustice is uncomfortably all around us or because the culture is against us. It just means that we need to be willing to be the ones to accept the discomfort and persecution that will come, within and without the Church, if we stand up to expose it. Until people see the unborn as human beings, just like you and me, and until they see the horror and violence of abortion for what it is, they will continue to find abortion tolerable - just as we did the slavetrade, and segregation, and any number of historic injustices. People can have their perspective on this changed with or without more churches being planted, with or without our reputations and bridges still being intact, with or without better social support available. We must do this with grace, holding out the gospel. We must offer especial love and support to those who've had abortions, and to those who are in a difficult or unexpected pregnancy. We must fight against the kind of shame culture that would encourage secret abortions even within our own churches. But in all of this we cannot omit to do the very thing without which abortion will never end: we must display in all its majesty the humanity of the unborn child, and we must expose in all its horror the inhumanity of what's being done to them. Above: You won't be surprised to find that my colleague Aisling Goodison explains how to end abortion far more succinctly and compellingly than I can. This 30-minute video is important. Please watch, digest, and share. Below: Speak Life with a moving and provocative 7-minute "short" on the same theme.

…In repentance and rest is your salvation, In quietness and trust is your strength, But you would have none of it… …Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help… Isaiah 30-31 “Light at the end of the tunnel”. “Injection of hope.” “Our way out of the crisis.” The prophecies concerning “the vaccine” are positively messianic. I write “the vaccine” in this way because we were taught to pin our hopes on “the vaccine” before we even knew which vaccine(s) we were talking about. Now that three different vaccines have been approved for use in the UK, we still use this catch-all, “the vaccine”. It has become for us the locus of all our hopes. It is human nature to fix our hope of rescue onto something. If not God, we won’t trust nothing, we’ll trust something. Right now, as a nation and largely as a Church, we’re putting our trust in “the vaccine”. But is the vaccine our way out of this? What is "this"? We have no hope of identifying our way out of this if we don’t even understand what “this” is. If we don’t diagnose the problem correctly, we can’t apply the right solution. So, do we know what the real crisis is? If the crisis of the hour is the virus, the pandemic, then an effective vaccine might well be the solution. But this is not the real crisis of the hour. The real crisis of the hour is a spiritual and moral crisis. We have sinned; we are under judgment; and we are not repenting. Each of these three is a spiritual and moral crisis in its own right, largely unnoticed or ignored by God’s people in the UK, but together they form a constellation of historic proportions. The call of the hour is not to beat the virus. I’ll say it again. The call of the hour is not to beat the virus. The call of the hour is to hear God, humble ourselves, confess our great sin, repent, and beg his mercy. But this we are not doing. This pandemic is a wake-up call from God to do with our spiritual and moral crisis: but we insist on sleeping still. We want our vaccine to stop this nasty alarm – hit snooze, or just break the thing! – so we can carry on with our slumber. But is that what God in his goodness desires for us? I want to argue that the vaccine may well represent a pathway even deeper into the real crisis that besieges us, compounding the crisis, rather than the longed-for way out. Have We Sinned? Caution is salutary when we are minded to interpret something as the judgment of God simply because it looks like the judgment of God. Biblical checks on this tendency include Jesus’s words to his disciples in John 9, when they assumed a person's blindness was punishment for sin (they just weren’t sure whose sin), and of course significant episodes within the lives of Job and Joseph. There is such a thing as suffering for doing good (1 Peter 3). But against this caution we must weigh example after example, both in the Old Testament and in the New, of specific temporal judgment indeed being inflicted because of specific sin: Cain is put under a curse and the land is made difficult for him because he shed his brother’s innocent blood (Genesis 4); “the LORD struck the child that Uriah’s wife had borne to David, and he became ill” (2 Samuel 12:15); Ananias and Sapphira are struck dead for lying to the Holy Spirit (Acts 5); believers get sick and die because of their attitude to the Lord’s supper and his body (1 Corinthians 11:29-32). It would be overstating it to say that this is the default – that if something looks like judgment from God then it probably is – but at the very least we should take it seriously as a possibility. If it looks like judgment from God, it could be. So is it? The most important question to ask in exploring this possibility is this: Have we sinned? If we can identify some significant unrepentant sin in our lives, it would be wise to consider whether there isn’t after all some connection between that sin and the suffering that God’s sovereign hand is bringing upon us. Indeed, God in his mercy may be using that very hardship to bring the sin to our attention so that we can repent of it and experience his forgiveness and restoration. We should clarify, as we set out to identify significant unrepentant sin, that we should be looking for corporate sin, not just individual, since this judgment we are experiencing (if indeed it is judgment) is being inflicted at a corporate level, sweeping up Church and nation. So, is there some great national sin, in which the Church has also played a part? The answer of course is yes. Do not dismiss as a mere “hot topic issue” the real-life fact that more than 9 million innocent bearers of the image of God have been systematically “terminated” by the State, through the NHS, with our taxes, since the Abortion Act was written into the statute books in 1967. This law was passed with the blessing and help of the national Church, and also with the support of evangelicals for many years. Click here to listen to something of that story. Although there have been huge improvements in our witness since the 80s thanks to the work of John Stott, John Wyatt, and others, it would be fair to say that we have never truly, permanently repented of our silence, inactivity, complicity and participation; we have never started behaving significantly differently in the face of the greatest human rights atrocity since the beginning of time. Today, 80% of evangelicals think that abortion is sometimes justified. Rarely do you hear any church offering clear, thorough teaching on abortion. When it’s an issue like racism, climate change, Covid-19, the Church jumps to it and is outspoken. Websites, books, conferences appear; teams spring up, programmes proliferate, money pours… But I have almost never heard of a church rallying a taskforce or a steering group to tackle the crisis of their local baby genocide, and yet the baby genocide is taking many more lives globally than racism, climate change, and Covid-19 combined. Biblically, the shedding of innocent blood is no small thing. The unsystematic killing of Abel alone was enough to curse the ground and bring God’s judgment. The mass killing of babies through child sacrifice – combining two of the things that God hates the most: idolatry and the shedding of innocent blood – was enough to provoke in God a response beyond anything we see elsewhere. In Jeremiah 7:31 he says that the very idea of his own people practising this was unthinkable to him. In Psalm 106 we read that it caused God to “abhor his own inheritance”. In 2 Kings 21, when Manasseh sacrificed his own son and shed “so much innocent blood that he filled Jerusalem from end to end”, we read that it provoked the LORD to anger and to declare: “I am going to bring such disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.” It does indeed seem that child sacrifice was the final straw: exile became inevitable. We know that child sacrifice is happening today not just in our nation but also in our Church. (If you don’t think of abortion today as child sacrifice, if you think it’s merely Cain-kills-Abel, please listen here.) We also know that not only is practising child sacrifice a sin in God’s eyes: turning a blind eye to child sacrifice is a sin (Leviticus 20:1-5). You and I may not have had an abortion ourselves, but we’ve looked the other way and left countless babies and mothers unrepresented and undefended. This is a grave spiritual and moral state for the Church and nation to be in. In light of the unimaginable quantity of innocent blood that has filled our land, with so little protest and opposition from ourselves, even with our help and participation, would it really be so surprising, would it be unwarranted, if we were experiencing the judgment of God? On the contrary, it is astonishing that God in his mercy has withheld judgment for so long, and it is astonishing that even now it is so gentle compared with all the brutal violence we have meted out on his innocent children. I expect that there will be much worse yet to come. There should be. I am not claiming any special insight or revelation from God here, I am not claiming that he has “told” me that this is judgment. I am simply putting two and two together to make four. How could such grave national sin fail to kindle the wrath of a holy and loving God? Child sacrifice, practised at a national level, is precisely the kind of behaviour that we see biblically provoking God to national judgment. So, Are We Under Judgment? There is of course a limit on how much we can know the mind of God or understand his ways. It would be impossible to say with certainty that x is definitely judgment for y. But in a sense, we do not need to know that. So long as we have identified y – significant unrepentant sin – we can and must go ahead and repent of it straightaway! We needn’t wait until we are sure that God is judging us in a special way for that specific sin! So we can skip this section: we know we need to repent. Even so, the kind of trouble we are experiencing is noteworthy for its similarity in form to what we know to be the judgment of God in Bible times and what God promised to inflict as judgment or as “wake-up calls” in time to come, in the last days. This, combined with the fact that we have sinned in a significant unrepentant way, strengthens the case that this is indeed the judgment of God. On epidemics and the judgment of God I can hardly do better than Peter Saunders’s extremely comprehensive biblical study. Please do read it. For me one of his most sobering and pertinent observations was this: Sadly, in the context of Revelation most people on earth missed the signs. We are told that in the face of these warnings they failed to repent: ‘The rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the work of their hands; they did not stop worshiping demons, and idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone and wood—idols that cannot see or hear or walk. Nor did they repent of their murders, their magic arts, their sexual immorality or their thefts.’ (Revelation 9:20,21) Murders, magic arts, sexual immorality and thefts. It is not difficult to see how these descriptions might apply today in our post-Christian West in the shadow of the sexual revolution and all its societal consequences. Not only did they fail to repent but later, when things got worse, they like the Egyptians before them, ‘cursed the name of God, who had control over these plagues’. (Revelation 16:9) I fear this is exactly what we are seeing today. Nearly a year on since Saunders wrote this piece, things have only gotten worse, and yet there is still hardly a murmuring of repentance, from the nation or from the Church. Indeed, we blaspheme the name of God, claiming that it is we who have control over the virus: we will defeat it by our own powers. Have We Repented? Since March of last year, our nation has largely continued to heap sin upon sin. Days into the first lockdown, DIY abortions at home began, and then the baby genocide started in Northern Ireland. It wasn’t long after that that the Government tore into the family unit with the “quickie divorce” bill. The Church has not been playing her part in being a prophetic voice and a spiritual lead to the nation. We have largely been silent and behind. The Church of England bishops found voice to condemn racism, Brexit, and Dominic Cummings, but not a squeak from any of them against the baby genocide. Even in the House of Lords none of the “Lords Spiritual” spoke up in defence the Northern Irish babies, and only 7 out of 26 of them voted against the genocide there. The Church has certainly performed many acts of charity, but charity is no substitute for repentance. When King David committed adultery and murder, he had to repent – it wasn’t enough to point to all the good things he’d done or was still doing. Various leaders have called for days of prayer, but these have generally been devoid of repentance. Some will say this is harsh but many of these prayers have in fact been pagan prayers – prayers for health and safety and deliverance but without repentance. I am not sure I will cope with hearing 2 Chronicles 7:14 misquoted one more time. Almost everyone leaves out the “and turn from their wicked ways”, and ignores verse 13 which points out that God sent the plague. But they love the idea of God “healing the land”, and they are happy to pray for that. We ourselves attempted to call a day of repentance amongst church leaders in the wake of our conference back in April. But we found that it was falling mostly on deaf ears, and we had to acknowledge before God that repentance was not something we could organise or force into being. We had to admit that repentance wasn’t happening. And it still isn’t. So, Is The Vaccine Our Way Out? How can it be? Isaiah 30:15 tells us plainly: “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength…” The verse finishes on a poignant note: “but you would have none of it.” It should be abundantly clear to us that the only and whole solution to our spiritual and moral crisis is repentance. Anything apart from repentance is at best futile but more probably aggravating the problem. We are looking to the vaccine, instead of repentance, for our help and salvation. Isaiah 30 and 31 tell the story of the Israelites failing to listen to the word of the LORD. They do not consult him, but instead carry out plans that are not his, and go down to Egypt for help. Because it is not God’s plan, the LORD says that Egypt will be “utterly useless” to them. “This is the opposite of waiting on the Lord,” says John Piper in his exposition of this passage. “When our way is blocked, and the Lord says wait, we better trust him and wait, because if we run ahead without consulting him, our plans will probably not be his plans and they will bring shame on us, rather than glory.” When it comes to the vaccine, there is a blockage that we should heed. Not only are we looking to it as an alternative to repentance to get us out of the crisis: there are ethical concerns to do with the vaccines themselves. They have been produced with the help of aborted fetal cell lines, and the practice of organ harvesting from healthy, wrongly killed babies continues today around the world. Jim Nicholls asks a good question: “Can we really attribute something of such questionable origins to God? Surely just the association with child sacrifice is enough to testify against these vaccines as being blessings from God… I believe just the very fact that these vaccines are linked with the practice of abortion should signal to us as Christians that there’s something not quite right here.” But instead of stopping and taking this issue seriously, giving it permission to derail the whole project, most of us seem dead-set already on taking the vaccine – because it’s meant to be the way out. We’re impatient. We’ve had enough of this pandemic. We’ll tolerate or find a way around ethical problems to do with the vaccine. But Nicholls is right to say: “let us not be driven by our desire to get our lives back to ‘normal’ or fear over what others might think of us.” These motivations – and plenty of fears over personal safety too, fear of death – are clearly wreaking havoc in the hearts and minds of many believers. Indeed, many of them cite these motivations out loud themselves, this is not my conjecture. How can we be sure that such strong motivations are not clouding or jeopardising a simple desire to please the Lord in all that we do? We must take seriously the warning of Scripture: impatience often gives birth to idolatry. It was when the Israelites “saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain” that they built the golden calf. At least, that was their perspective: God said that they were “quick” to turn away. I confess I am with Nicholls when he says: “I have winced when I’ve heard Christians giving thanks to God for the vaccine.” I don’t think we really know God as we ought to if we think that this is his gift to us, as if he would give us something out of the fruit of child sacrifice and it would be our way out of judgment for child sacrifice even though we are still not repenting of child sacrifice. Yes, Christians have been praying for the vaccine, and so it is unsurprising that they think that this is God’s answer. But as Rico Tice points out in his excellent book Honest Evangelism, watching what we pray for can actually help us to identify our idols. Yes: we can pray to the Living God for our idols. Shocking! The blending of the Living God and idols that he hates is nothing new. Aaron built an altar in front of the golden calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the LORD.” Sounds a little like some of our prayer meetings today. The fact that we prayed for this and it has come is no evidence whatsoever that it’s a gift from God. Indeed, there is so much evidence to the contrary. We are meant to be repenting, but instead we are turning to a vaccine that is itself produced with the fruit of the very practice we’re meant to be repenting of. Why is this not ringing alarm bells? In Conclusion I am not a holy man nor yet a man of prayer, but I think I know a holy prayer when I hear one. Back in November, during the second lockdown, my friend Dave Borlase spoke from the Bible on the need for repentance. He shared this prayer with us: “Lord, don’t take this pandemic away from us until we’ve learned what you want us to learn.” At that basic level, even if we were to lay aside ethical concerns to do with the vaccine, the absence of repentance alone means that the vaccine cannot be our “way out” of the crisis, not God’s way out. We still haven’t learned, we still haven’t repented. Even if the vaccine does appear to bring some form of momentary relief, it will not help in the long run or with the root of our problem; indeed, with its connection to child sacrifice, it may well drag us deeper into complicity, complacency, and compromise. We just need to repent.

This is the second of three blogs responding to John Stevens and Matthew Mason's analyses of the minority view against aborted fetal cell line vaccines put forward by myself and John Piper. The first part of my response is here; the third, which will examine John Stevens's pro-life strategy in the light of the history of successful social reform, should be out (God willing) next week. Cooperation, Appropriation, or Continuation? I found rather helpful Matthew Mason's dissatisfaction with the oft-cited concept of cooperating with past evil and focus instead on the idea of appropriating the benefits of past evil. This seems a more accurate description of the kind of situation whereby an evil has ended but posterity picks up the benefits provided through it, without condoning or cooperating with that original evil. The classic example would be using knowledge gained from (the now universally condemned and mercifully ended) Holocaust experiments. It has been common for Christians to speak of the use of these aborted fetal cell vaccines as though it were exactly that, and both Mason and Stevens characterise it as nothing more than the appropriation of the benefits of an evil long past. Mason clarifies: "if the use of stem cell lines involved a regular pattern of procuring tissue from newly aborted foetuses, the moral situation would be very different. But it does not." But here's the thing: it does. It's Not Over As recently as 2015, 9 fetuses were "obtained" in China for the production of a new fetal cell line, WALVAX-2. Planned Parenthood, the main abortion provider in America, is known to sell organs of babies for medical research. They alter the way in which they kill the babies so as to preserve the organs that are being requested. Looking for something closer to home? The Cardiff Fetal Tissue Bank and SWIFT tissue bank "collect human fetal tissues from the tissue products resulting from elective termination of pregnancy ('abortions'). In the consent process, the purposes of our research programmes to develop new therapies for patients with degenerative brain diseases are fully explained, and the women are asked to donate their tissues to these research programmes." We should also take a moment to acknowledge the huge number of victims of IVF: data collected in the UK over 21 years showed that 15 embryos were created per woman conceiving through IVF - a total of 3.5 million embryos. Of these, half were “discarded” (killed), whilst more than 800,000 were frozen indefinitely. More than 5,000 human beings were set aside for “scientific research”. "No new abortion was performed or utilised to develop the [Covid-19] vaccines," says John Stevens. But that is beside the point. The cell line developed from the kidney of a baby girl killed in the Netherlands in 1970s is part and parcel of the very same culture of organ harvesting from innocent babies legally killed that continues to this very day. So we are placing ourselves firmly within that ongoing tradition, instead of standing against it. We are opting into it, investing in it, entrenching it, normalising it. How can we claim that there is no connection between the use of these vaccines and the ongoing practice of baby organ harvesting around the world today? Especially when we remember, as Mason points out, that the HEK-293 cell line is not, in fact, "immortal", and will one day ask to be replaced. And how can we liken this to benefitting from the Holocaust, which ended 75 years ago, when we are still killing babies and harvesting their organs to this very day? How can the use of vaccines that depend on fetal cell lines communicate anything other than tolerance or endorsement of this ongoing exploitation of the bodies of innocent babies today? It hasn't stopped. It carries on. I feel like carrying on saying the same thing a million different ways because no-one seems to believe or want to engage with this uncomfortable truth! Rather than go on repeating myself, however, let me close with a non-rhetorical question: Matthew Mason, John Stevens, how can you speak of using these vaccines as appropriation of past evil, when organ harvesting from aborted babies for medical purposes in fact continues to this very day? To Mason in particular: since you say, "if the use of stem cell lines involved a regular pattern of procuring tissue from newly aborted foetuses, the moral situation would be very different," could you explain, now that I have shown you that it is part of a "pattern of procuring tissue from newly aborted fetuses", what that moral difference is?

In the fourth and final instalment of a recent series of blogs on Covid-19 vaccine ethics, I went from commending a boycott of aborted fetal cell line vaccines as part of a consistent, integral, principled stand against the ongoing heinous practice of baby genocide and organ harvesting today, to arguing from 1 Corinthians 10 that it may be more than just a good idea; it may be a biblically mandated necessity for Christians to refuse the vaccine. I made the case clearly and boldly according to my understanding of the passage, and yet tentatively: "I eagerly invite discussion over this because if my reading is right, the implications are huge: this is not a freedom of conscience issue but one in which Christians are called to take a clear stand: there is one right answer. If I’m wrong I need to be shown that I am wrong in order to prevent me from causing all sorts of harm." To their credit a number of brothers and sisters took me up on this invitation - first Mark Pickering and Jennie Pollock from CMF in a very helpful Zoom conversation, and then more recently John Stevens and Matthew Mason in their analyses of the minority view put forward by myself and John Piper. Whilst in all of these interactions much more was tackled than just the 1 Corinthians 10 issue, and I plan to return to those things in a subsequent blog because they are terrifically important, I want to take this opportunity to thank them all for their gracious, thorough engagement and for one correction in particular, which I accept and which changes the import of this passage with regards to us and vaccines today. In short, for those familiar with the arguments I've been putting forward, it doesn't change what I say in blogs 1, 2, and 3, but it does mean that I am rowing back slightly from going so far as to say that there is a biblical "must" given by this passage. I no longer think that. Before I go on to outline the correction, let me just be clear on why I'm doing this. I agree wholeheartedly with John Stevens when he says that "we need to be extremely cautious before binding the consciences of others if Scripture is not absolutely clear." I've been persuaded on this particular point that Scripture is not "absolutely clear" in the way that I thought it was, and so I have a duty before God and before my readers (all three of them) to retract and correct to the best of my understanding. Matthew Mason says a similar thing when he warns against going "beyond what may legitimately be deduced from Scripture". This can cause people to do the wrong thing, or to do the right thing for the wrong reasons (which can in some cases make it wrong), or to do the right thing for the right reasons but then be plagued by false guilt. As Mason says, this would be "no light thing". I am not an elder or a pastor of a church, but I am sure there is some sobering way in which I come under the same fearful category of being judged more harshly as someone who teaches (James 3:1). So again, this is important. The correction is this: Whereas I argued that we are in a situation analagous to a Corinthian Christian being told that their meat had been offered to an idol in worship, and therefore should refuse on account of the conscience of the unbeliever in question, so as not to communicate approval of idol worship, in fact our situation is different in rather a significant way. Back then, for these freshly converted Corinthian Christians and their still-pagan friends and neighbours, there was a clear and common understanding of what idol worship was and what it meant for meat to be offered to an idol. So when it was raised specifically in conversation (1 Corinthians 10:28), the Christian's response carried a certain inevitable and unmistakable evangelistic weight. Our situation today is different: there is not a clear and common understanding in society at large of the connection between these vaccines and child sacrifice (though the information is out there), and we are not being told in a deliberate and personal way about this connection in a way similar to the conversation envisaged in 1 Corinthians 10. Indeed, on the contrary, the Government and media are working rather hard to trivialise and divert attention away from the abortion connection, including with a hefty dose of strawman "fake news busting". So in terms of direct evangelistic witness, which is I think what 1 Corinthians 10 is primarily about, the "must" does not apply to us in the same way. There is not that shared basis of understanding upon which the refusal of the Christian is so necessary evangelistically. However, and this is where I will fire back a challenge of my own, that lack of shared understanding, far from letting us off the hook, should trouble us deeply. The widespread ignorance and cover-up of mass baby killing and organ harvesting today, and of its connection to medicine today (including these vaccines), should be intolerable to us, because of love for these most vulnerable of image-bearers. Rather than breathing a sigh of relief that child sacrifice and organ harvesting are so far from the minds of the unbelievers around us that we're free to take the vaccine without fear of giving the wrong message, we should be working to create that understanding, to produce that crisis of conscience, to use this as an opportunity to show people what they're not seeing and what they don't want to see. To use a quote attributed to Bonhoeffer: "Not to speak is to speak; not to act is to act." Merely accepting the status quo is not acceptable. This is my challenge: neutral doesn't exist, and the question "Is it sin (to take the vaccine)?" although an important question may not be the only or indeed the most important question. I think there has been an over-emphasis generally on what we might call the "personal piety" aspect to this issue - "is it permissible?" - rather than on the more outward-looking, activistic concerns - "is it beneficial?", i.e., what is the very best thing we can do to end the genocide. That is why I say I want to row back from what I said earlier only "slightly". I cannot from this specific Scripture give an absolute "no" for all Christians on this, but neither do I want to suggest that it is a free-for-all, a preference issue, "everyone must do what they feel is right", with no real consequences or true accountability before God. I truly believe that mass-scale acceptance of this vaccine represents further entrenchment of a culture of organ harvesting from babies (which continues today), and so it is no trivial matter when Christians take part in this - even if I cannot prove from this particular passage that they must not. It was right of my brothers and sisters to correct me on 1 Corinthians 10. But I beg them and others not to stop there, content that liberty of conscience has been restored. There is so much more at stake here. If I asked my child to hold the door open for someone, and their reply was, "But do I have to? Will I be punished if I don't?", I would take them to task for asking the wrong question, for having the wrong attitude. It's not just about "must"s: "should"s matter too. If we really care about people, positive concerns ("How can I love them best?") will drive us at least as much as negative ones ("But is it sin not to?"). We should be looking to please our Lord as best we can, and do the most that we can against the greatest evil of our day, not simply asking whether a connection with evil is remote enough for us to get away with it. For my part, I venture to suggest that if we saw child sacrifice as it really is, if we felt about it as the Lord does, and if we realised just how prevalent it is today and how deeply connected it is with organ harvesting and widespread global medical research today, we would not be asking how close we can get to its fruit but rather how far away from it we can possibly "flee" (Psalm 37:27), and how much more we can do to "expose" it (Ephesians 5:11). These are biblical attitudes connecting with the facts - even if there isn't a go-to proof-text that neatly approximates our precise situation. But, to those who think differently, who think for example that refusing the vaccine is not the way to lift the lid on today's great injustice, I still ask this: what are we doing to bear witness against this great evil? (Follow-up post...)

SINCE WRITING THIS PIECE, WHICH REMAINS BELOW IN ITS UNEDITED FORM, I HAVE RECEIVED SOME HELPFUL PUSHBACK AND HAVE RESPONDED TO IT HERE. PLEASE DO NOT READ WHAT IS BELOW WITHOUT ALSO READING THE UPDATE/CORRECTION. YOU MIGHT AS WELL JUST GO STRAIGHT TO THE UPDATE/CORRECTION. So far in this series of blogs I have been commending boycotting the vaccine as a good idea, a great opportunity for the abolition movement to give a powerful message to the watching world. But would it be going too far to say that this is a necessity for Christians? The refrain from almost every Christian I have heard speaking into this is that, above all else, this is a conscience question and everyone must be free to make up their own minds. We mustn’t put pressure on people one way or the other by suggesting that ours is the “Christian” way. Let’s take a look at 1 Corinthians 10:23-33. “I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but not everything is constructive. No one should seek their own good, but the good of others. Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience, for, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.” If an unbeliever invites you to a meal and you want to go, eat whatever is put before you without raising questions of conscience. But if someone says to you, “This has been offered in sacrifice,” then do not eat it, both for the sake of the one who told you and for the sake of conscience. I am referring to the other person’s conscience, not yours. For why is my freedom being judged by another’s conscience? If I take part in the meal with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of something I thank God for? So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God— even as I try to please everyone in every way. For I am not seeking my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved. There is freedom of conscience here – you can eat anything sold in the market without having to worry about where it’s come from. At face value, this would seem to suggest that we don’t need to worry ourselves too much about the provenance of consumer products today, such as a vaccine. But hang on, there’s more. A deeper principle is at work: it’s not just about what you have a right to do as an individual in isolation, it’s about how it affects others, especially unbelievers, particularly their conscience: “not everything is beneficial…not everything is constructive. No one should seek their own good, but the good of others.” Before someone says that taking a vaccine is for “the good of others”, note that Paul is not talking here about “the good of others” healthwise or financially or in terms of feelings, but in terms of their conscience, and their understanding and reception of the gospel: “so that they may be saved”. There is a clear instruction here to the Corinthian Christians: If you are told that the meat was offered in sacrifice: “do not eat it.” This is now a command, not a suggestion. It’s no longer a freedom of conscience issue, but has been taken over by the superior principle of love for neighbour. It has to be understood in the context of that relationship. To eat something that you have been told has been offered in sacrifice communicates endorsement of that act of idolatry, and that is why it is forbidden, because it misrepresents the gospel and causes the other person “to stumble”. They will interpret it as suggesting that Christians are able to accommodate idolatry at the same time as worshipping Jesus. Applying this to today: we need not worry ourselves about the provenance of every single product we consume. But if we know, if we are told, that something has been produced with the fruit of child sacrifice, as these vaccines have been, and especially if that child sacrifice continues today with society’s blessing (and therefore ours by default), as it does, then unless I’m mistaken this passage of Scripture issues a command, not freedom of conscience. The command is this: do not partake of it. Not so much because of our conscience, but because of the conscience of those around us. It is to avoid communicating (and the tepidity of our stand against abortion only reinforces this message) that we are comfortable with, tolerant of, even willing to benefit from, child sacrifice. We misrepresent Christ if we show indifference toward child sacrifice, or if we consider our own health interests to be superior to opposing and ending the genocide. Simply keeping our heads down or staying neutral is not an option: we need to communicate proactively that child sacrifice is wrong and needs to be stopped. I eagerly invite discussion over this because if my reading is right, the implications are huge: this is not a freedom of conscience issue but one in which Christians are called to take a clear stand: there is one right answer. If I’m wrong I need to be shown that I am wrong in order to prevent me from causing all sorts of harm. This is Part 4 of a series of blogs responding to the recent Evangelical Alliance webinar on the ethics of the Covid-19 vaccines. I'm grateful to the EA for hosting this timely and stimulating online event. A recording of the event, together with a written introduction from the EA and accompanying papers, is available here, so I won’t spend virtual ink summarising who said what. Instead, in this series of blogs, I want to pick up on a few specific points, offer some personal reflections/analysis, and then suggest how we might helpfully advance the debate in a new and different direction. Read Part 1... Read Part 2... Read Part 3…

Some of us have been looking at this whole ethical question as consumers, perhaps in an overly individualistic way, wondering how much moral taint our personal sensitivities can bear from something we consider to be an isolated moment in the past rather than something that is part of a wider culture still here today, in which we all participate by default and towards which have moral obligations. We are taking cooperation with past evil as inevitable and asking how remote or proximate it has to be for us to be able to put up with it. But what if we approach all this rather differently? What if we see ourselves as, instead of end-of-the-line consumers: prophets, evangelists, activists, reformers? What if we engage the question of how to end today’s greatest injustice? What if we start from there? We have seen how the exact same injustice that killed that Dutch baby girl and exploited her organs persists today. It ought to be a top priority of Christians in our generation to see an end to this injustice, just as the abolition of the slave trade was for those at the end of the 18th century. We should be on the lookout for opportunities to take a stand, expose the horrors, and make life more difficult for the abortion industry. We should be eager to apply pressure, we should be willing to be persecuted and suffer. We should be praying for tools with which to communicate that we find this injustice intolerable. If this is our starting-point, if this is our attitude, the decision of whether or not to volunteer ourselves for a brand new, global vaccine produced with the use of a cell line derived from a wrongly killed Dutch baby girl’s kidney presents us with a unique, possibly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The eyes of the world are on this vaccine and what people will do with it. If we refuse this vaccine expressly because of its relationship with the wrongful killing of babies, what a powerful message that will communicate to the watching world. In doing so we would be putting our money where our mouth is, accepting persecution and perhaps some level of personal risk, and declaring that we care more about ending this injustice than all the values that the culture around us would press us to adopt. Conversely if we volunteer ourselves to take this vaccine, what will we communicate? We are happy to “benefit” from the fruit of an injustice that is carrying on this very day in our very own nation and around the world. We are happy to narrow our scope and claim that what happened in the ‘70s has no bearing on what is happening now. We are happy to allow the ongoing mass slaughter of babies so long as we don’t consider ourselves to be “proximate” to it, directly involved. I say "happy", because most of us do and say nothing about it, or at least nothing costly. Here is an opportunity to do something costly, and social reform was never achieved without cost. I understand that some want to accept the vaccine but continue to express a preference for vaccines that do not use fetal cell lines (these do exist but are not currently being considered for us by the UK Government). I would have to question how strong a message they think that really puts across. Will the Government feel any great urgency to source ethically uncontroversial vaccines when they observe that even those who express opposition to fetal cell lines are prepared to accept these ones? I don’t think that would get through my priority filters if I were in Government. They are happy enough, I would say to myself. Boycott the Vaccine One of these days an opportunity will come along for us to pay the price and make a stand and drive towards the end of abortion. What if this is it? Some will contend that acting against the Government’s and society’s strong encouragement inhibits our witness and makes us out to be trouble-makers. We need to ask ourselves quite simply: whom are we seeking to please? Since when did we think Christians were meant to be popular all the time, or never violate the values of the surrounding culture? As for social reform specifically, can we find any example of success in overturning an accepted injustice without disruption, inconveniencing others, being misinterpreted and demonised as making things worse for everyone? There needs to be pressure, it needs to be made uncomfortable for those perpetrating or enabling the injustice to carry on. Whilst we think about protecting the NHS, does it ever occur to us that this is the same organisation that is commissioning the baby genocide? Did we ever think about applying pressure to the NHS, rather than seeking to relieve pressure from the NHS, in order to see an end to this injustice? When we insist that we should trust and obey a Government that is just trying to do its best and is acting in good faith, are we forgetting that this is the Government that thinks it’s ok to kill thousands of healthy babies every week? I fear that our perspective and affections have been fed to us by the culture around us: we are dancing to their tune. We need to be clear that it is never “the right time” for a disruptive, costly boycott. We can be sure that not all those who put food on the table by the sale of sugar thanked their neighbours who participated in the Sugar Boycott of 1791 or felt loved by them. But there was a bigger picture to consider: the slave trade had to be stopped, and the boycott sent a powerful message. Some grocers reported sugar sales dropping by over a third, over just a few months. Meanwhile the sale of sugar from India increased ten-fold over a two-year period. One James Wright, a merchant of Haverhill, Suffolk, announced to his customers on March 6th, 1792: Being Impressed with a sense of the unparalleled suffering of our fellow creatures, the African slaves in the West India Islands...with an apprehension, that while I am dealer in that article, which appears to be principal support of the slave trade, I am encouraging slavery, I take this method of informing my customer that I mean to discontinue selling the article of sugar when I have disposed of the stock I have on hand, till I can procure it through channels less contaminated, more unconnected with slavery, less polluted with human blood... Had his message been more akin to what we are hearing today – that the source wasn't ideal and he would prefer a more ethical one but was happy to carry on unless one presented itself – there would of course have been no pressure, and there would have been no change. He was prepared to pay a personal price in protest against the injustice of his day. In more recent history, activists cared enough about animal welfare to boycott The Body Shop until it brought about change in 2017. Consumers speak with their actions much more than with their words. They vote with their wallets. Someone will retort that the pressing obligation of this hour is to try to protect people from the virus. Certainly, we should always be looking to do what we can to protect as much life as possible (though note: even the Pfizer CEO does not claim that their vaccine prevents transmission). But allow me to close with this question: Have we been persuaded to care more about ending the virus than we care about ending the baby genocide? Honestly, which do we care about more? Not that the vaccine or the boycott guarantees their ends respectively, but in our hearts, which is top? If we actually care more about ending the virus (c. 1.6 million "natural" deaths so far) than we do about ending the baby genocide (c. 45 million voilent deaths every year), what’s gotten into us? This is Part 3 of a series of blogs responding to the recent Evangelical Alliance webinar on the ethics of the Covid-19 vaccines. I'm grateful to the EA for hosting this timely and stimulating online event. A recording of the event, together with a written introduction from the EA and accompanying papers, is available here, so I won’t spend virtual ink summarising who said what. Instead, in this series of blogs, I want to pick up on a few specific points, offer some personal reflections/analysis, and then suggest how we might helpfully advance the debate in a new and different direction. Read Part 1 on the Consequences of Assumptions Read Part 2 Why the Mainstream Christian Approach to Covid-19 Vaccine Ethics is Mistaken Read Part 4 Vaccine Ethics: Black and White, or a Conscience Issue? What does the Bible say?

If there is such a thing as the mainstream Christian approach to the ethics of vaccines that use aborted fetal cell lines, it appears to be this: one has to consider how “remote from” or “proximate to” the original injustice in question one is. There are degrees of separation. In the case of the HEK-293 cell line (used in the development and testing phases of the Oxford vaccine, and in the testing phase of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines), it goes something like this: The one who killed the Dutch baby girl in the 1970s did wrong. The one who harvested tissue from her must have cooperated closely with that original wrong (the killing) and in the eyes of some committed an additional wrong by taking her organs without consent. Then as the cell line was sold from company to company down through the decades, a chain of diminishing proximity to the original evil was established: the company that makes use of the cell line today is somewhat removed from the original evil, and the one who receives their vaccine even more so. The mainstream approach concludes that when it comes to receiving vaccines such as Pfizer, one is sufficiently remote from the original injustice for it to be permissible. A Christian Medical Fellowship spokesperson at the recent Evangelical Alliance webinar said that CMF’s position was that moral concerns with these vaccines were “negligible”; another speaker confirmed that he himself would take the vaccine, even the Oxford vaccine if others didn’t become available quickly enough. None of the speakers expressed a personal objection to taking the vaccine or indicated that they wouldn’t take it. What clinches it for them appears to be this: because the HEK-293 cell line is “immortal”, using it does not create demand for fresh aborted tissue, so we are not encouraging further acts of evil, only drawing good out of a past act of evil. I want to argue that what HEK-293 represents is anything but a past act of evil. The very same injustice rages on today. The mainstream line of thinking is dangerously flawed in two ways: Tunnel Vision First: our scope is far too narrow. It may be true that the global scientific community will never feel the need for a fresh source of something like HEK-293 specifically, but it is not in any way true that we have left behind us the practice of exploiting the bodies of wrongfully killed unborn children for medical advancement. It still happens today. In America, Planned Parenthood the main abortion provider is known to sell organs of babies for medical research. They alter the way in which they kill the babies so as to preserve the organs that are being requested. How is it, exactly, that we are speaking of harvesting tissue from a wrongly killed baby as if it’s a one-off, past injustice that won’t be repeated again? Something we can safely benefit from because it only happened 50 years ago? Here in the UK we practise embryo research. We also, in IVF, kill humans deemed to be less genetically desirable and favour those deemed to be genetically superior: a brutal form of eugenics. This is different in form from tissue-harvesting but the principles are the same: we treat unborn children as matter to be exploited for medical advancement, rather than as people with rights and dignity. Mass-scale, international uptake of vaccines that use this kind of tissue communicates tolerance or approval of the ongoing culture of treating unborn children this way. It is totally flawed to see HEK-293 as representing only a single instance of past injustice, akin to benefiting from, say, information gleaned from Holocaust experiments. It is the fruit of the very same culture that persists today, the injustice continues, unlike the Holocaust and its experiments which stopped long ago. We all with one voice condemn the Holocaust and its experiments now, meaning that there is no danger that making use of information that came out of that egregious evil would encourage it to continue – because it has already stopped. But the killing and exploiting of unborn children is still going on, and it still enjoys the approval of global mainstream consensus, meaning that by default we lend our assent to it, our support through taxes, and all the more if we volunteer ourselves for vaccines produced on the very same assumptions and with the same materials. Our culture has not yet turned from this kind of behaviour. In choosing to see HEK-293 as having nothing to do with this wider, ongoing culture, we are in danger of being like the Pharisees who strained out a gnat but swallowed a camel (Matthew 23:23-24). They tithed their spices with their atomistic approach to individualistic righteousness, but missed the bigger picture, what mattered most to God: justice, mercy, faithfulness. If the Holocaust were carrying on today, would we really say that moral concerns to do with a cell line from a victim a few decades ago were “negligible”, simply because that specific experiment wouldn’t be performed again? Wouldn’t it embolden the perpetrators to carry on, knowing that we are quite happy to tolerate what they are doing, so long as they aren’t carrying out the exact same experiment they did decades ago? Wouldn't that be pedantic, arbitrary, negligent? Missing the Point Second: the other major flaw in this approach is that it just misses the most important point. Biblically, there is a case to be made that God cares about how human bodies are treated after death, but there is no doubt at all that he cares deeply about the shedding of innocent blood. The chief injustice in the case of harvesting of tissue from killed babies is the fact that babies are being killed in the first place, regardless of what happens next. Let’s be clear: even if our use of HEK-293 did one day produce demand for a fresh cell line of a similar kind, it would not directly bring about the death of one single baby. Why? Because tens of thousands of healthy babies are already being killed worldwide every single day. There is no shortage of freshly killed babies. If a doctor wants a freshly killed baby, they know where to find them. The Dutch baby girl killed in the ‘70s wasn’t, so far as we know, killed for the purpose of research; neither are those whose body parts Planned Parenthood are selling today. The reason for her abortion back then is the same as the reason for most abortions around the world today, including those who yield tissue for medical advancement: unknown, any, none. So not only is our tissue-harvesting culture from killed babies the same as it was back then: more importantly, our culture of killing babies is the same as it was back then, only more prolific. The injustice rages on now with precisely the same conditions as back then in most Western countries: legalised, industrial-scale, medically executed killing of babies, for any or no reason. The fact that we consider ourselves morally untainted by all this so long as we’re not “cooperating proximately” with it (which we define narrowly as directly encouraging the procurement of fresh fetal cell lines) tells us a lot about our perspective when it comes to injustice all around us and our obligations in the face of it. We think somehow that the ongoing industrial-scale killing of babies in our own nation doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with us. What would Jesus say? I think he would say that we are proximate to this ongoing injustice, and we do have obligations, because these babies are our neighbours. This is Part 2 of a series of blogs responding to the recent Evangelical Alliance webinar on the ethics of the Covid-19 vaccines. I'm grateful to the EA for hosting this timely and stimulating online event. A recording of the event, together with a written introduction from the EA and accompanying papers, is available here, so I won’t spend virtual ink summarising who said what. Instead, in this series of blogs, I want to pick up on a few specific points, offer some personal reflections/analysis, and then suggest how we might helpfully advance the debate in a new and different direction. Read Part 1 on the Consequences of Assumptions Read Part 3 A Fresh Approach: from Consumers to Activists Read Part 4 Vaccine Ethics: Black and White, or a Conscience Issue? What does the Bible say?

This is Part 1 of a series of blogs responding to the recent Evangelical Alliance webinar on the ethics of the Covid-19 vaccines. I'm grateful to the EA for hosting this timely and stimulating online event. A recording of the event, together with a written introduction from the EA and accompanying papers, is available here, so I won’t spend virtual ink summarising who said what. Instead, in this series of blogs, I want to pick up on a few specific points, offer some personal reflections/analysis, and then suggest how we might helpfully advance the debate in a new and different direction. Starting-Points and Inclinations I think it’s worth noticing what appears to be the broadly shared leaning of the hosts and panellists. This is an observation, not a criticism. We all approach this topic (as any) with preconceptions. But we should try to be aware of these, question them, and appreciate the way in which they might influence where we go next. The event started on this footing: Lives and livelihoods are at urgent risk and a vaccine protecting us from COVID-19 appears to offer hope of recovery for both. So the imminent mass-roll out of a vaccine looks like good and welcome news! Yes? Hopefully so, but… The default here seems to be an adoption of the Government’s and much of the mainstream media’s narrative, but there’s another side of the story to consider. Certainly some lives are at “urgent risk” due to Covid: if someone is very elderly or already has pre-existing conditions, “urgent risk” may well be an appropriate descriptor. (Many of the same people are also at urgent risk from other causes of death.) But even accounting for these people, there is a 99% survival rate for people who catch the virus. Of those who die, the average age at death is above general life expectancy and 90% have one or more pre-existing conditions. The death stats we are bombarded with on a daily basis in the UK, don’t forget, are people who’ve died with Covid-19, not necessarily from Covid-19: there is a big (but largely ignored) difference. All this to say: are we quite certain that Covid-19 merits the unspeakably costly level of attention we are giving it? Does it really warrant a global, possibly quasi-mandatory vaccine, and ruinous lockdowns? There are surely other contenders for such attention: what about malaria, which kills otherwise healthy children, or tuberculosis, which has killed about as many people this year as the Covid-19 death toll worldwide – and we’re talking about people who’ve died from, not with. And then there is the global baby genocide which is claiming something like 50 million lives a year – about 30 times the Covid-19 death toll. Indeed, according to the WHO the TB death toll could be even greater this year because of our response to Covid-19, which leads us onto another consideration: what about all the excess deaths caused not by Covid-19 itself, but by our responses to Covid-19? 4.4 million cancer scans have been missed in England compared to last year due to our response to Covid-19. Many are not going to hospital for treatment because they have been convinced it’s not safe and are dying at home instead. There is a suggestion that lockdowns have led to an increase in suicide. And all this is before the significant trickledown effects of poverty are felt as who knows how many livelihoods are lost – with all the negative health and social impact that this will have. There is at least a case to be made that lives, literal lives, are at “urgent risk” because we are holding our breath for a vaccine at the cost of almost everything else. The promise of a vaccine, therefore, would not be the solution so much as part of the problem, especially as the Pfizer CEO does not even claim that it definitely prevents transmission. As for livelihoods being at urgent risk and the vaccine being the solution: this is how the Government has decided things should be, but there’s no a priori reason why it should be so. We don’t tell people that they can only keep their livelihoods if they vaccinate against the flu, or stop smoking, or lose some weight. This is a social contract set up by the Government, and we should at least question it rather than nod along with it. It’s no laughing matter if you are a single working parent who loses their only job because the Government has decided you can’t have it until there’s vaccine – or until it’s rolled out everywhere – or until we’ve observed it’s actually effective – or only so long as there isn’t another pandemic. Why This Matters If we accept the equation as put to us by the Government, that Covid-19 is the most serious concrete problem facing the world today and a vaccine is the only answer, it is inevitable that we will want to make the vaccine work, and we will be tempted to see ethical qualms as obstacles to be overcome rather than something we give the right to put the brakes on the whole thing entirely. Is it possible that this is why so few Christians are coming out against vaccines that use aborted baby cell lines, or even asking the question? They have been convinced that the vaccine is fundamentally necessary and fundamentally good, and that weighs more heavily than other considerations? Many – including some of the panellists at this EA event – rightly state that “the ends don’t justify the means”. But it’s not long before we find ourselves in “the greater good” territory: “Yes, this vaccine was unethically produced, but look at all the good it would do or harm it would prevent if I took it.” How different really are these lines of thinking? We may not expressly justify the means but we accept the means. And if we agree with the mainstream narrative that this vaccine is the greatest good in living memory, how much “bad” would we need to identify in order to derail it? But in fact, I am not convinced that “the greater good” is the right way to go about things - though I'm sure it's sincere and well-intended. It is too similar to the kind of thinking that keeps quiet about evil because it might upset people or damage relationships: some of us won’t talk about abortion for example because (we say) it will put people off the gospel. What gives us the impression that we have the perspective to weigh almost infinite possible outcomes and decide in favour of “the greater good”? Are we in a place to make that judgment? Do we know the future? Instead, we need to return to: What is God’s will? What is biblical? What is Jesus-like? And we must leave outcomes to God: we just need to do the right thing. Even if the mainstream narrative about Covid-19 and the vaccine is right, it would still be incumbent on us to listen to God and simply do the right thing, against social pressure if necessary and whatever the outcome. But we do need to be honest about the clouding effect of such social pressure and threatened outcome. We’ve been here before: in 1967 we believed those who told us that legalised abortion would be “the greater good” or the “lesser of two evils”. We didn’t look to the Bible, we didn’t think it through ourselves. We went with the flow. Walking in the Counsel of the Wicked One final word on assuming the mainstream narrative: we need to be careful whom we are allowing to become for us a moral authority, in this and then in other areas. In the “recommended reading” list (and I know that recommended reading doesn’t equal approval, but these are listed uncritically and some of the ideas found within them resonate with what some of the speakers said, so they do seem to be supporting documents rather than contrary), is a document from the World Health Organisation about sifting “information” from “misinformation” and “disinformation”. In this document, the WHO admits that it is working with major digital companies and social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube to censor what it doesn’t deem to be true or helpful. This should trouble us. What gives the WHO a monopoly on facts or opinions about Covid-19? The WHO is a key global leader in accelerating the baby genocide, calling it healthcare, and wants to drive the pan-sexual revolution into primary schools worldwide. They have also failed to call China to account for covering up Covid-19 in the early weeks and months of the pandemic. Of course, none of this means that everything the WHO says is false, but should we really accept the assertion that they are the global custodians of truth about healthcare, including this virus? That they have the right to censor others? Also in the recommended reading list is an “ethics expert” called Giubolini who argues in favour of post-birth abortion, that is, the killing of newborn babies. Is this the kind of person who belongs uncritically on an evangelical recommended reading list? What does he know about right and wrong? God can use Cyrus and he can speak through a donkey: I am not saying that we cannot benefit or learn from unbelievers. But we need to be extremely discerning about the (often unspoken) assumptions that underpin their entire worldviews, especially when it comes to questions of ethics. There is no such thing as an “expert” in ethics, but especially not someone who is unregenerate and dead in their sins, living in steady rebellion against and denial of the God who alone is good and dictates what is right and wrong. If it seems like I’m making a mountain out of a molehill here, it’s because more damage can be done by our assumptions than by our conscious deliberations. The people we listen to, the narratives we swallow, the fears and hopes we adopt, influence our destination far more than we care to realise. In 1967, we believed made-up numbers for backstreet abortions and we believed the lie that legalised abortion would be better for everyone. We did not consult the Lord. Here we are, 9.5 million slaughtered babies later – and countless others damaged by abortion. Read Part 2 Why the Mainstream Christian Approach to Covid-19 Vaccine Ethics is Mistaken Read Part 3 A Fresh Approach: from Consumers to Activists Read Part 4 Vaccine Ethics: Black and White, or a Conscience Issue? What does the Bible say?

IMPORTANT CORRECTION Since original publication my attention has been drawn to some crucial facts to do with the Pfizer vaccine in particular which I had overlooked in error. Please accept my sincerest apologies. Below is a corrected version, based on my most recent understanding. I was recently asked to speak for 8 minutes at an online conference on the ethics of the upcoming Covid-19 vaccines. Here's what I said... A recent Tweet from the Secretary of State for Health, Matthew Hancock, declared that “hope” would soon be injected into millions of arms all over the UK. He was talking, of course, about Covid vaccines: the subject of the most fervent prayers of pagans today – and not a few Christians too. But what actually is it that they propose to inject into your arm? Certainly not “hope” as we know it: hope, we know, is a person, Jesus Christ, and his effectiveness is 100% for all who receive him, no bad side effects! I don’t know which arrival you’re holding out for in the days in which we live but I’m holding out for Jesus. I’m looking forward to his soon coming. I’m not holding out for a vaccine! We are not like those who live and die without real hope, or whose only hope is in this life: health, safety, wealth, worldly achievements, the esteem of men. Nevertheless, I don’t think vaccines are inherently bad, they can be good, but it all depends on the facts. So: what’s in this thing? Pfizer, Oxford, and Moderna There are of course many different vaccines currently in development but I want to focus chiefly on the ones that the UK Government seems at this moment most enthusiastic about: Pfizer, Oxford, and Moderna. Given how limited my time is, I urge you to do your own research, starting perhaps here or here - I can only give the briefest of introductions. Pfizer was not "developed" with the use of a cell line derived from a healthy baby intentionally killed by medical professionals many years ago, but it was "tested" in one - HEK-293. Many, including prominent Catholic pro-life bio-ethicists, see a morally signicant distinction between a cell line being used in the development stage and one being used for final testing, and categorise Pfizer as "ethically uncontroversial". However, I cannot see what morally significant difference there could be. Although there is heavier involvement where development is concerned, testing is still an integral part of the overall process: the vaccine would not be released without this being done. (There are also other concerns about the ethical record of Pfizer, including proven charges of bribery.) The Oxford vaccine uses HEK-293 both in the development and in the testing stage. As you’ll no doubt be aware, finding out the facts on vaccines is becoming very difficult, because Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and our Government are all by their own admission censoring and taking down anything they consider to be “anti-vax” or “fake news”. Given our Government’s understanding of what counts as “the science”, this is of course very problematic and concerning indeed. What it means is that some scientifically correct facts – and certain opinions or questions – will be deemed “fake” or “dangerous” or “unhelpful”, and will be book-burned. One recent example of this is to do with the Oxford vaccine. If you try Googling it, you will find multiple articles at the top of your search declaring something along the lines of: “Oxford vaccine does NOT contain aborted baby cells: fake news busted”. What happened here is that a certain video went up on Facebook claiming that the Oxford vaccine contained MRC-5 cells – cells derived from a certain aborted baby. As a technicality – we’re pretty much on semantics here – it was only tested in MRC-5 cells, and it was a different aborted baby cell line, HEK-293, that was used more extensively in the actual development of the vaccine. It is also a misleading truncation to say that the vaccine actually contains aborted baby cells; rather it was developed in those aborted baby cells. On the basis of these technicalities alone, the video was dismissed as fake news – and Facebook took it down. But the reality is that the Oxford vaccine in its development does rely heavily on cell lines taken from a baby girl killed in the womb many years ago. What is HEK-293? This is the name given to one specific “aborted fetal cell line”, a constantly reproducing line of human cells used in the development of vaccines all round the world. This cell line originates with a Dutch baby girl, apparently perfectly healthy until she was killed by a Dutch doctor in 1972. Cells were taken from her kidney and cultured [whether this happened while she was still alive we don't know; we also don't know whether she was killed in the womb and then removed or removed from the womb and then killed]. The identity of her parents and the reason for this abortion are unknown – meaning that it might have been with this purpose in mind that the girl was killed. Certainly, the doctor would have had to premeditate his harvesting of the organ tissue before the killing of the baby in order to be adequately prepared for the time-sensitive action required. The Oxford vaccine has been developed in this wrongly killed baby girl’s kidney cell line. Moderna, like Pfizer and unlike Oxford, does not fundamentally rely on the use of fetal cell lines for its development, but does use HEK-293 cells in its testing. Moreover, as pointed out in this document citing several sources, Moderna did use HEK-293 at various points in the development process itself as well. In this helpful presentation, you can see that there are vaccines in development around the world that do not use fetal cell lines at all - but none are currently being considered for distribution in the UK. She Had a Name Some will say that benefiting from something wrong in the past doesn’t mean you are complicit in that wrong, and given that they’re not obtaining fresh cell lines from babies aborted today, it can’t be argued that you are encouraging more of that specific injustice by benefiting from cell lines obtained in that way. Perhaps. But we are complicit now in the wrong killing of hundreds and hundreds more babies like her daily in our nation alone. Did you know that you and I are funding a genocide, if we’re UK tax-payers? This state-sponsored genocide of babies in the womb continues today. Healthy babies like that little Dutch girl are killed every single day by the much-lauded NHS. And largely, we say nothing. That’s how we’re complicit. We stay silent – and in a sense we “benefit” from our complicity (i.e. silence). We appease the culture – hoping that they won’t hurt us too. And indeed, this is how we evade persecution, this is how we "benefit". We continue to betray the voiceless, for whom we are commanded by God to speak. So here’s where my wife and I stand on vaccines that use aborted cell lines, such as MMR, and that wasn’t an easy decision. How can we look anyone, much less God, in the eye and say that we oppose the genocide as it is today, if we at the same time “benefit” from the fruit of that same genocide? Wouldn’t my opponents be justified in calling me a hypocrite? “You say you oppose abortion for any reason, but what have you just had injected into your arm?” God forbid. Or, for those of us who do not speak up for the babies in our nation, what would taking this vaccine represent? It would be a powerful symbol of our whole approach to this genocide. Even, a confirmation. Whatever moral authority the UK Church still has to speak out against this genocide – as we’ve largely failed to do for decades – will surely be finished off if we, wholesale, inject our arms with the fruit of this very genocide. Wouldn’t Satan be delighted? Wouldn’t the orchestrators of the baby genocide rejoice? Such a Time as This Since March the Government in our country has allowed DIY, at-home abortions. We’ve seen more babies than ever killed this year – more than 4,000 a week. Go to HancocksHealthcare.com for more info. Is this the time to be accepting compromise, taking a moral lead from our Government, and declaring with our actions that we are indeed living for this world and according to its standards? Or is this the time to lift up our voice, trust God, and defend the defenseless: come what may?