On Dec. 13, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court denied an application from 20 New York health care workers to be exempted on religious grounds from the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The challengers, all but one of whom were Catholic, had claimed that because the three available vaccines had all been derived from or tested on cells acquired from aborted fetuses, the mandate “imposes an unconscionable choice on New York healthcare workers: abandon their faith or lose their careers and their best means to provide for their families.”
To these health care workers, that the fetal cells had been obtained from cell lines decades old made no difference, nor did it matter that the vaccines contained no material from aborted fetuses, nor even that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as well as other religious leaders, including the pope, had announced that receiving the vaccines did not violate ecclesiastical law. “Our love of neighbor should lead us to avoid giving scandal,” the chairmen of the Committees on Doctrine and on Pro-Life Activities wrote, “but we cannot omit fulfilling serious obligations such as the prevention of deadly infection and the spread of contagion among those who are vulnerable just to avoid the appearance of scandal.”
The court’s majority, which in something of a surprise included Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, did not issue a written opinion. But the likelihood is that the nature and magnitude of the health care crisis weighed on their decision, just as it had weighed on Catholic Church leaders.
