Today, in Disgusting Actions of the Religious Right...

[eruthros]

We have this.

Of course! Vaccinating for an STD that kills 3,500 American women a year is basically telling girls to go out and have sex before marriage! Why didn't I think of that? (Also, does this mean that vaccinating for rabies encourages people to go out and be bitten by dogs?)

I just. I mean, I understand the issues parents can have with the concept of sex and their children. But ... cervical cancer. (And anyway you could get HPV from your husband, too. I mean, 80% of adults have been infected with HPV at at some point in their lives.)

Le sigh. It's a sad thing when I see people agitating for mandatory vaccines and think "oh, well, I guess that's to prevent parents from endangering their children by refusing to get it." Yeeesh.

Comments

[eruthros]

No, totally -- it's the places where people don't get regular pap smears that this is a real problem. And I hope that the vaccine gets widely, widely distributed -- I mean, cervical cancer kills an approximate 200,000 women yearly, or something, and the if the vaccine performs as in clinical trials that could all be eliminated.

I wasn't going to bring up rape and incest, because I have this notion that the fundamentalist Christian family groups don't really think of them as things that happen to Christian girls who are raised well. (Which, if true, is a whole 'nother example of what's wrong there.) It's still a good point, though, for the pro-vaccine side; people don't just get HPV through consensual sex.