Seems to me, that if you’re a pure-as-the-driven snow virgin until you get married to someone equally as sexually inexperienced and chaste in the eyes of a fundamentalist god, that you have every right, from the vantage point of blissfully bouncing on your sanctimoniously holy and blessed marriage bed, to withhold a lifesaving cancer vaccine from your daughters — and everyone else’s daughters, too.
Let me back up for a second: I just read (in the Kansas City Star) that Bay Area assemblywoman Sally Lieber “has introduced legislation that would require girls to be immunized against HPV before they enter the sixth grade.” It looks like here in California we’re joining the ranks of nine other states (the most recent being D.C., Virginia and Maryland). I had this as one of my top sex stories of 2006 but it looks like it might be a hot one for 2007 as well, especially in light of this snip from last week’s Time article, An STD Vaccine For All Girls?:
“HPV is an increasingly common sexually transmitted disease and one that scientists say is linked to 70% of all cases of cervical cancer. Gardasil, the first vaccine to fight cancer, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration last June. The CDC says the vaccine has been tested, is safe and goes a long way toward preventing the deadly cancer which is estimated to have affected 9,710 women in 2006, killing 3,700.
But not everyone is happy with the move by state legislators to make the vaccines mandatory.
‘I had no idea that this would engender the kind of uproar that it has,’ says Kentucky state Rep. Kathy Stein, a Democrat who this month became the Bluegrass State’s first woman to chair the powerful House Judiciary Committee. ‘Some parents might be cautious before giving a vaccine that is fairly new to a child and I can understand that. But many, many conservative groups — and I won’t say Christian groups, but many of them are — say it is the parents who have a right to decide what happens to [their] children. They argue that if you are good folks who raise your daughter to be chaste and pure until she reaches her marriage bed, she won’t need this.” Link. (See also: More states introduce HPV mandate bills)
And if she’s not, who cares what happens to her. Right?
