No Ethical Alternative
Three IMB-Mandated Vaccines that Leave the Pro-Life Conscience No Way Out
“Sent Home” told the story of missionary families pulled from the field — and those kept from reaching it — by an IMB vaccine mandate that treats a prudential medical judgment as a non-negotiable condition of service.
The argument there concerned conscience in general: The right of a father to decide, with his physician, when and with what to vaccinate his child. For some of these families, the objection is narrower and sharper than parental autonomy. It is a pro-life objection — and it is the one the institution is least equipped to hear.
As that essay detailed, the IMB has already proven willing to carve exceptions into the 32-dose pre-2026 schedule it enforces — it exempts the COVID-19 and HPV vaccines outright — just not the exception a pro-life conscience would need most.
Three of the vaccines the IMB requires are produced using cell lines that trace back to abortion.
Let me state the fact precisely, because the truth is damning enough without exaggeration, and because nothing discredits a pro-life argument faster than overstating it. No vaccine contains the body of an aborted child.1 But the rubella component of the MMR vaccine, the varicella (chickenpox) vaccine, and the hepatitis A vaccine are grown in two human cell lines — known as WI-38 and MRC-5 — that were established in the 1960s from lung tissue taken from two aborted children.2 Those cell lines have been cultured in laboratories ever since.
No new abortion is performed to manufacture these vaccines, and the cells dividing in a vial today are many generations removed from the children they originated from. What remains is not tissue but lineage — a medicine whose existence and ongoing production descend, unbroken, from a deliberate killing.
That is enough to trouble a Christian conscience, and it has troubled many.3
The question is not one of contamination but of cooperation — a category the church has reasoned about for centuries. Sharing in a wrongdoer’s deeds is formal cooperation and always sinful. To supply some remote, unintended contribution to an evil committed by someone else, long ago, is material cooperation; Christians throughout history have not regarded all instances of this as sin.4
Whether a believer may in good conscience receive a vaccine descended from an abortion he abhors is exactly the kind of question on which serious, Bible-believing Christians land in different places. Some accept it to help guard against disease. Others cannot bring themselves to partake of the fruit of a killing, however distant. Scripture does not adjudicate between them.
What sets the IMB’s mandate apart from an ordinary disagreement is this: For these three vaccines, there is no alternative.5
Merck no longer markets standalone measles, mumps, or rubella vaccines, and the only products licensed in the United States for measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, and hepatitis A are the ones grown in these cell lines.6
A missionary who objects cannot request the ethically untroubled version, because none exists. He cannot vaccinate his child against measles without the rubella component cultured in WI-38. The mandate does not merely ask him to accept a medical judgment he doubts. It asks him to do the very thing his conscience forbids — and leaves him no other alternative but to comply.
The choice the IMB hands a pro-life family is therefore stark: Cooperate with an abortion through vaccine compliance, against conscience, or be sent home.
In April 2020, the IMB published a position paper on vaccines and the sanctity of life. In it, they acknowledge the basic facts described above. Namely, that “two cell lines used in the production of some vaccines can be traced back to children killed by abortion several decades ago.”
The Medical Department gives three reasons why this origin does not make the current use of these vaccines morally unacceptable:
The decision to abort the children was entirely independent from the decision to use the cells from the bodies of those children to create the vaccines. The abortions took place without the thought or purpose of using the tissue for research or medical treatment.
No further abortions have been required or involved in producing these vaccines. There is no ongoing use of new fetal tissue in vaccine production in the United States.
This situation is therefore analogous to transplanting the organs of murder victims to save the lives of others. The murder victim’s organs are available because of a morally reprehensible deed, but their use to benefit someone else does not make the recipient or the transplantation team complicit in the murder. There was no cooperative action between the murderer and the medical team or the recipient.
These are not careless reasons. Many thoughtful Christians find them persuasive, and a believer who does may receive these vaccines with a clear conscience. But notice what the reasons are: A careful judgment about a hard question — not a command of Scripture. The Medical Department weighed the matter and reached a conclusion. That is precisely what conscience is for. The error is not in the IMB’s reasoning; it is in requiring every missionary to reach the same verdict.
This is where the matter becomes more Baptist than medical. Southern Baptists confess that “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and He has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are contrary to His Word or not contained in it.” The Baptist Faith and Message states this, and so does — almost word for word — the 1689 London Baptist Confession that confessional Baptists have held for three centuries.7
The conscience answers to God where Scripture has spoken. Where Scripture is silent, it answers to God still — freely, with no man and no institution standing in His place. The permissibility of remote material cooperation with a decades-old abortion is precisely such a place. Scripture has not closed it. The IMB has — and has made its closure a test of fitness for the field.
An institution built by pro-life churches, sustained by pro-life giving, and sending missionaries to proclaim the God who forms children in the womb should not be in the business of requiring those missionaries to violate their consciences over abortion.
The families described in “Sent Home” did not ask the IMB to abandon its concern for missionary health. The pro-life families among them ask something narrower: Do not make the violation of a pro-life conscience the price of obedience to the Great Commission.
That is a reasonable ask. It is a Baptist ask. And for a convention that calls abortion by its right name, it should not be a hard one.
“COVID-19 Vaccines Don’t Contain Fetal Tissue,” FactCheck.org, July 1, 2022, https://www.factcheck.org/2022/07/scicheck-covid-19-vaccines-dont-contain-fetal-tissue/.
“Human Cell Strains in Vaccine Development,” History of Vaccines, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, accessed June 14, 2026, https://historyofvaccines.org/vaccines-101/how-are-vaccines-made/human-cell-strains-vaccine-development/.
For a more extensive treatment of this moral issue, see Douglas Wilson, "The Challenge of Unethical Vaccines," Blog & Mablog, September 30, 2019, https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/the-challenge-of-unethical-vaccines.html; Edward J. Furton, "Vaccines Originating in Abortion," Ethics & Medics 24, no. 3 (March 1999): 3, https://www.immunize.org/wp-content/uploads/talking-about-vaccines/furton.pdf; R. Albert Mohler Jr., "Friday, June 7, 2019," The Briefing, podcast, June 7, 2019, https://albertmohler.com/2019/06/07/briefing-6-7-19/.
The framework of cooperation with evil (distinguishing formal from material, and proximate from remote cooperation) is most fully developed in the Catholic casuistic tradition, but belongs to the broader inheritance of Christian moral reasoning and is employed by Protestant ethicists as well.
Concerning hepatitis A, a plasma-derived immune globulin (GamaSTAN) offers prophylaxis untainted by any abortion-derived cell line, but it is not a substitute for the vaccine. It confers only short-term passive protection; for post-exposure use, it must be given within two weeks of exposure to be effective, and it is licensed as prophylaxis rather than as an alternative to vaccination. It is a temporary stopgap, not the durable immunity a mandate requires. See Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Clinical Care of Hepatitis A,” accessed June 14, 2026, https://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis-a/hcp/clinical-care/index.html.
The only measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, and hepatitis A vaccines licensed in the United States — M-M-R II, ProQuad, Varivax, VAQTA, and Havrix—are produced using the WI-38 or MRC-5 cell lines. See “Human Cell Strains in Vaccine Development,” History of Vaccines (cited above), and “Vaccines, Abortion & Fetal Tissue,” Ohio Right to Life, accessed June 14, 2026, https://ohiolife.org/issues/vaccines_abortion_fetal_tissue/.
The Baptist Faith and Message (2000), art. XVII; cf. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), 21.2.
Thank you! I am disillusioned with government, healthcare and religious institutions. (But still very involved in my church)