I’m also the last person to act as if autism is the end of the world. I have two autistic children. But autism is, other things being equal, an unfortunate thing, and we shouldn’t deliberately do anything that we know will cause it (again, other things being equal; if I had a choice between increasing the risk of autism and increasing the risk of an epidemic of measles, I’d choose the former, although it might depend on how strong the risk was in each case). The issue for me isn’t whether we should seek to avoid increasing occurrences of autism. It’s whether we should believe discredited pseudo-science that there’s any connection between autism and vaccines to begin with, and I think the answer is a clear no.

So I don’t think this argument will succeed, but I think that for empirical reasons. It’s not in principle wrong to recognize a bad effect of a procedure you already believe to be wrong and then use that bad effect to argue that there’s now an additional reason to oppose it, and it’s not fear-mongering about vaccines, because he’s not arguing here not to get vaccines, just that those who make them have done so in an immoral way, and we’re now seeing bad results.

Sure, by spreading fears about vaccines and autism. Jeez Colin. Shame on you for associating the Christian ethic with this irresponsible nonsense.

The people who take the organs are not those who murder the person. The people who use the stem cells are not necessarily those who discard the embryos.

It’s wrong to murder people for organs or embryos for stem cells. But it’s not wrong to use those organs or stem cells just because the death was an instance of murder.

So I’m not seeing why you think it’s a bad analogy. It seems like the moral issues are parallel according to pro-life assumptions.

The good argument is that there is no evidence that vaccines (whether made with animal or fetal DNA) cause autism. And people who rely on a pool of vaccinated people to keep their kids safe are making it less safe for everyone, their kids included.

The guy who started the whole vaccine scare turned out to have fabricated all his research and has now been exposed as a complete fraud, with journals now retracting his journal articles. The reason autism diagnoses have increased is because the diagnosis process has gotten better, they’ve noticed variation in the autistic spectrum involving a much wider variety of people, and they’ve therefore been applying the category to people who would have been considered just a little odd until very recently but who now fall into the autism spectrum.

They now have a test that looks at something like 60,000 genes that they know have connections with autism. The last few years have produced study after study showing heritable genes to be involved, not mutations or alterations purely due to environmental effects.

Meanwhile, those who don’t vaccinate their children will ultimately cause the deaths of pre-vaccination-age children who will die of diseases that had pretty much been eradicated but that have returned due to the irresponsible parents who listen to this kind of nonsense. It hasn’t happened yet in the U.S. with the recent string of outbreaks of measles due to non-vaccinated children, but it’s only a matter of time before it does lead to death with some formerly-eradicated disease or other.

As for the life issue, the question should rather be this: which is worse, to kill people by not vaccinating your children, or to use dead matter already killed that happened to belong to fetal human beings who shouldn’t have been killed? The only reason you should choose the second is if you think it’s better to let people die from need of vital organs than to use the organs of organ donors who were murdered.

(I’m not saying this to justify putting fetal matter into the vaccines. Obviously that’s not necessary to have the vaccines, and it should be protested, with pro-life doctors seeking to provide an alternative without the fetal cells. But what I’m saying should apply to those who use the vaccines, given that they are the only ones available.)