This speech was delivered at the March for Life Convention on January 21, 2003, and appears as a special to Catholic Exchange.

Suppose ten of America’s most popular vaccines were cultured on the bodies of Jews murdered by the Nazis. I bet you can predict what would happen. Scientists and physicians from around the world would begin a petition protesting the existence of these vaccines. The state of Israel would demand the cultures be flown to Tel Aviv for burial. As soon as possible the FDA would import and license alternatives. Meanwhile, the federal government would allocate millions of tax dollars to speed efforts by American companies to produce new cultures. If the vaccines were not immediately removed from the market, an organized boycott would transpire. In the midst of all this, suppose the media revealed the manufacturers of these vaccines actually collaborated with the Nazis to acquire the cultures. In fact, these same companies still have ties to a secret ring of Nazi-party doctors and have created additional cultures from other Jews killed as recently as 1985.

Would you boycott these vaccines? Would you write the pharmaceutical companies and demand they manufacture alternatives? Would you help spread the word by passing out petitions and literature? What would you do?

The scenario described above is true. The ten vaccines, however, are not derived from victims of the Nazi Holocaust, but the Abortion Holocaust. These vaccines — in different combinations — immunize against chickenpox, hepatitis A, polio, rabies and rubella. Specifically, the vaccines are cultured on — and thus contain — aborted fetal tissue from two babies known only as WI-38 and MRC-5.

The WI-38 culture was developed in 1962 from a three-month-old unborn girl aborted in Sweden. The fetus was chosen solely for the purpose of creating a vaccine culture. The parents of WI-38 were married and had the abortion because they felt they had too many children, which in Sweden probably means two.

The second vaccine victim is MRC-5, a fourteen-week-old preborn baby boy aborted in Great Britain in 1966 for “psychiatric” reasons.

In spite of what you may read elsewhere about these vaccines, neither WI-38 nor MRC-5 are “immortal” — which means one day the cultures will die and need to be replaced. Thus a third culture, known as PER.C6, is currently being tested for use with several new vaccines. PER.C6 is derived from an unborn eighteen-week-old baby aborted in the Netherlands in 1985. The PER.C6 abortion was completely voluntary, and in the words of the scientist who created the culture, performed “simply because the woman wanted to get rid of the fetus.”

Development of the rubella vaccine actually involved not one, but twenty-eight abortions. Twenty-seven abortions were performed to isolate the virus and one abortion (WI-38) to culture the vaccine. The live rubella virus was not detected until the twenty-seventh abortion, which indicates the preceding twenty-six abortions were performed on perfectly healthy babies. Yet, in 1962, two separate U.S. research teams isolated the virus without performing a single abortion. In Japan, researchers obtained a live virus by simply swabbing the throat of an infected child. Likewise, alternative vaccines cultured on animal cells or chick embryo are widely available in other parts of the world.

But if no medical or scientific necessity can excuse these abortions, why were they performed? Three words: Fetal Tissue Research. Almost a decade before Roe v. Wade, long before anyone had even heard of embryonic stem cells, pharmaceutical companies — supported by the National Institutes of Health — used these vaccines as a means of institutionalizing fetal tissue research. Ever since, the popularity — and profitability — of these vaccines have been used to excuse additional forms of fetal tissue experimentation.

Unlike other, more remote, types of fetal tissue research, abortion-tainted vaccines directly implicate us all in the culture of death. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more insidious means of forcing people to unintentionally cooperate with abortion than by mandating the use of vaccines containing aborted fetal tissue. I say force . . . because in every state children must be vaccinated to attend school. Parents are thus often denied the right to refuse to use these vaccines — in spite of the serious ethical — and safety — problems they pose. While substitutes are available for some of the vaccines, no alternatives exist for the chickenpox, rubella and hepatitis A immunizations.

As we gather here tomorrow to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we can only wonder what might have been if parents and doctors had joined together in the years prior to 1973 to protest the manufacture of these abortion-tainted vaccines. No doubt, most people did not know — and still do not know — that these vaccines even existed.

I began today by asking what you would do if you knew about these vaccines. Allow me then to leave you with this question: What will you do?