Well, I think even some orthodox (seemingly orthodox at least) ethicists have said that after a certain point…the medicine becomes so far morally removed from the original act that you can use it in good conscience.
I believe that this was in the context of a Catholic university that was using stemcells from a line that was 40 years old, or something. They had not killed the original embryo, they were just using the cell-line that had propogated for 40 years. They concluded that it was morally removed enough at that point from the original murder to approve it:
John Haas, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston, said the ethical issues surrounding the use of fetal cells, embryonic stem cells and cloning are the most controversial facing the church. “I don’t see the moral difficulty in using these cell lines, because you’re not contributing in any way to the abortions, which took place decades ago,” Haas said. “However, there is the risk of leading people to think that [some Catholic institutions do not] consider abortion to be a great evil and are indifferent to it and willing to work with tissue that result from that kind of action.”
In weighing how to handle the issue, Georgetown looked to the debate of a decade ago, when many Catholics became aware that cells from an aborted fetus were used to originate cultures used to manufacture chicken pox vaccine and measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. Since then, a measles-mumps-rubella vaccine has been developed without cells from an aborted fetus, but the chicken pox vaccine is still made with the same cell line.
Church officials concluded that the benefits of widespread immunization significantly outweighed the drawbacks of using aborted fetal cells, said FitzGerald.
“The connection to the abortion was distant and remote enough to say that this in no way encouraged or facilitated further abortions,” he said. "The good was a proportionately strong enough argument to say, ‘Do this.’ "
Now, I don’t know who these “church officials” were who decided the measels vaccine was okay, and I don’t know how much I trust
Georgetown’s ethicists (I know, Im cynical about the jesuits) but I can understand their logic. Killing a fetus to get stem cells is wrong. And using stem cells from a newly killed fetus makes it seem like you condone it, and is participation in evil. But at a certain point…if you didnt kill the original fetus and don’t encourage the killing of more, and just years later use the cells derived…it is morally removed.
So although we must oppose the research and new killing of embryos…and initially stay away from the treatment…at a certain point, if no new embryos are killed and the cell-lines simply are self-sufficient…I think it can be morally removed.
I mean…we can’t stay away from all results of evil. We have to stay away enough and early on to not condone it…but we cannot correct all evils in history, because all events ultimately have evil in their causative chain. God brings good out of it. The ends don’t justify the means…but once the sinful means have already been committed, we must try to bring as much good as we can out of the bad situation (as long as we distance ourselves enough from the evil means so as to not appear to be condoning them)
Once it becomes morally removed enough…we can’t always go back and correct all evils in history.
Otherwise, we’d be obligated to give all sorts of land back to the Native Americans (which initially we should have done when we broke the treaties in the first place…but by now so much time has passed…we are not really obligated to correct it).
I mean…everything we do is going to be ultimately traceable back to some evil. But only immediate results should be shunned. At a certain point, the past becomes clouded and the thing is morally removed.
Otherwise I could buy no product because I know that at some point there was evil involved.
Some products I wont buy because the evil is immediate: they used slave labor to make it or something.
But sometimes it is more removed: the company still exists because it used sweat-shop labor 50 years ago, and the profits thus made allowed it to open the new branch which makes the product that I want today. At this point, I’d say enough time has passed that I don’t have to have any scruples about condoning evil.
When stem cells become “morally distant” from the original murder…I don’t know. Do they ever? I can’t say…but ethicists and church officials thought 40 years for the Georgetown stem cells, and even merely 10 years for the measels vaccine, was enough time passed to approve their use.
