We’ve all heard the story before: The religious right is all up in arms about an HPV vaccine that could prevent cervical cancer and save the lives of thousands of women because they think it might encourage pre-marital sex.
Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will determine whether Gardasil — which has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a guard against the cancer-causing human papilloma virus, or HPV, for girls and women ages 9 to 26 — should be widely used. The panel’s decision would establish whether private insurers and the government would cover the cost of such vaccinations. By recommending that Gardasil be universally administered to girls ages 11-12, the committee can facilitate widespread vaccination and enable all girls and women to protect themselves from a sexually transmitted infection that the CDC says 80% of American women will have by age 50.
Opponents of the vaccine argue that abstinence is a “foolproof” alternative that negates the need for mandatory vaccination. These groups believe that vaccination will act to lower young women’s sexual inhibitions and promote risky sexual behavior, despite scientific evidence to the contrary.
Minus the “foolproof.”. A few things: First, rape. Second, an inability for conservatives to talk frankly about sex, leading lots of young people to equate “abstinence” with “virginity” and still put themselves at risk for STIs. Third, the entire history of the human race, throughout which there has never been a time when all people were perfectly abstinent until marriage. But I suppose these are just silly details.
Lunatic fringe, you say? Not anymore. Such beliefs are held by some Bush administration appointees. One of them — Reginald Finger, a medical doctor and a member of the CDC committee — is a believer in “just say no” as the preferred protection against HPV. Until last fall, Finger was a medical issues analyst for Focus on the Family, an ultraconservative group that advocates “abstinence until marriage and faithfulness after marriage as the best and primary practice in preventing HPV” and other sexually transmitted infections.
The group’s position is not based on science. Focus on the Family believes that abstinence “is better protection than any vaccine because it’s God’s plan for people before they are married.”
So the people who are making decisions about your daughters’ reproductive health are the same ones who would have her die of cancer as punishment for having sex. Feeling concerned yet?
The latest tactic of the religious right is to argue that they don’t oppose the vaccine per se, but that they’re against this “culture of vaccinations” in which kids are over-vaccinated and parents have no say in the matter. “It’s about choice!” they now argue. “These mandatory vaccines are an affront to privacy and individual rights!”
Putting aside the obvious question of, “Since when does the religious right care at all about privacy?”, we need to point out the fact that their argument is basically a non-starter:
Forty-eight states already allow religious exemptions for individuals wishing to forgo any kind of vaccination. Many states also allow a philosophical exemption for vaccinations. By saying they oppose only mandatory vaccinations, extremist social conservatives stealthily undermine the HPV vaccine — backing away from their earlier, more public general opposition — and continue to promote their religious beliefs at the expense of women’s health.
So if they don’t want to be vaccinated for religious reasons, they don’t have to be. But they use the ignorance of the general public as a weapon against the vaccine in general. Because it’s not just about their personal right, or even their childrens’ rights, to remain unvaccinated — they want to make sure that no one has access to this life-saving vaccine.
This is a familiar pattern. Administration appointees have delayed FDA approval for making emergency contraception available without a prescription. Yet, unprecedented federal funding has been dedicated to promoting abstinence-only programs — $206 million proposed for next year — that preach false and misleading information while ignoring vital sexuality education.
Much of this funding also has been allocated to “crisis pregnancy centers” — clinics run by antiabortion groups that design and promote curricula full of inaccuracies, scare tactics and gender stereotypes. A widely used curriculum, designed by the Tennessee crisis pregnancy center Why kNOw, for instance, suggestively asks students whether condoms are “just another stupid idea.”
And we wonder why we have such a high rate of unintended pregnancies and STIs.
By touting abstinence until marriage as salvation from the perils of premarital sex, the administration favors and funds religious advocacy. The fact is, many women do not remain sexually abstinent until marriage. More than 70% of the female respondents to a CDC survey reported having sex by the time they were 19. It would be one thing if this were merely a charged cultural debate on social mores, but the debate threatens to undermine girls’ health.
The fact that we’re even debating this is evidence of a pretty sick culture.
Inoculation against HPV is particularly important for ensuring that girls and women who are victims of rape or incest are protected from contracting the potentially deadly virus. To be truly effective, the vaccine, like sexuality education, must be given to all teens well before any become sexually active.
Yes. And I’d like to emphasize the “all teens” — that would include boys.
Let’s hope the advisory committee makes the right decision. I have faith that they will.
(And as a side note, have I mentioned lately how much I love the LA Times? Back in the day when I wanted to be a journalist, my big dream was to get a job with them. Lordy they’re fantastic.)
Similar Posts:
- Common Sense Prevails by zuzu June 29, 2006
- Countdown to June 8th by Jill May 19, 2006
- HPV Vaccine Approved! by zuzu June 8, 2006
- Give Me Abstinence, or Give Me Death by Jill October 6, 2005
- Great, now I can jab rusty nails in my feet! by Jill March 1, 2007
There is also some evidence that shows one can pick up HPV through sharing damp towels, and other things that go along with your typical college or camp communal living situations.
It’s probably rare, but it happens.
And then the reverse idiocy goes into effect: she has HPV, therefore she’s a slut.
It is criminal to fight a vaccine that can prevent cancer. No matter what your loony religious views are, ANY step forward in treating ANY cancer is a step towards finding ways to treat ALL cancer.
But we already knew how gleeful and happy the religious nutters are when women they don’t like get cancer. Ever do a Race For The Cure and see the “pro-life” people protesting and hurling insults at women who, OMIGOD, are supporting a cure for breast cancer – most of whom have HAD breast cancer or are related to someone who has, too? Because breast cancer is caused by abortion, therefore women deserve breast cancer and it’s their own fault.
And you can bet your bottom dollar that if HPV caused testicular cancer, the religious right would be footing the bill for every male in town to get the vaccine.
The older I get, the more I realize how STUPID a large portion of the adults I used to idolize are.
At least when I got “sex ed” it was straight up “You fuck, you’re sinning, and it will surely ruin your life, hope of a future marriage, and end you up in hell.” There was no soft sell or pablum about condoms being stupid or girls having to control boys’ desires. We all knew what condoms were and how horny we all were. The point was plain old repression of desire based on a commitment to live the faith, not this utter distortion of fact and reality . Believing god is watching every time you masturbate is, I think, healthier in the long run than believing lies about birth control and the opposite sex. The former is a belief that should not be affecting
Whoops–
The former is a belief that should not be affecting anything but your relationship and your diety. The latter is a lie about how the world works and assumes young people are going to willingly turn into stupid-bots for the lord.
I think the conflation of recommended and mandatory by this and lots of other articles is false and dangerous. The ACIP can recommend the vaccine (i.e. suggest it’s a good idea), but it doesn’t get to decide whether the vaccine becomes mandatory (i.e. whether people are obliged to be vaccinated).
As you’d expect it’s more complicated than this. The entire point about mandatory vaccination is to make not being vaccinated burdensome. In some places you have to object to *all* vaccination to get the exemption, in others you have to ‘prove’ your religious belief by getting a letter from a church, or be a member of the right church, most places don’t allow objection on non-religious grounds. If there were no problems with people who don’t want to be vaccinated not being vaccinated, mandatory vaccination wouldn’t exist. The whole point of it is to get people who otherwise wouldn’t want to be vaccinated vaccinated.
This is pure hyperbole. For all my bitching I do love this site. But you really get carried away sometimes. This is a total exageration. The overwhelming majority of the religious right do not want to make sure that no one has access to this life-saving vaccine.
Lastly, the vaccine hasn’t been licensed for use in boys and hasn’t been shown to protect then from any disease. So it shouldn’t be given to them.
Right. The leaders of the religious right are the ones invoking the “mandatory” language as a scare tactic. I don’t think that anyone said that the ACIP gets to decide whether or not the vaccine is mandatory.
Well, sure. And I think that a vaccine which could erradicate a virus which leads to cancer is a pretty good contender for a mandatory vaccine. It should be difficult to opt out of.
I think it was fairly clear from the article and from my post that it’s the leaders of the religious right who we’re talking about. The vast majority of people support this vaccine, including religious people and conservatives. But it’s the religious, right-wing leaders who are opposing it. And they represent the religious right.
Because all single women are really only just “pre-married”, maybe?
To me, it would seem that to see a vaccine that can prevent cancer as a good thing would be a no-brainer! Alas, things are never quite so simple, are they?
I know there is an ongoing controversy about the advisability of using any kind of vaccines, but that controversy seems to derive from concerns over the use of thimerosal (an organic compound that contains mercury) in vaccines to prevent contamination by bacteria and other microbes. I don’t know how much overlap there is between the anti-vaccination camp and the leadership of the Religious Right, but I don’t find the anti-vaccine arguments of either group persuasive.
The people who are opposed to vaccines as a general principle tend to present arguments that are more rooted in emotion than in science. Moreover, those people seem to give no serious consideration to the issue of the herd immunity that is necessary to protect the larger population from the illness against which a vaccine immunizes its recipients. As such, in addition to being seriously questionable under basic scientific principles, the anti-vaccine arguments are rooted in a kind of selfishness and extreme individualism that I find repugnant. Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, the anti-vaccine camp seems not to weigh the serious risk of contracting a particular disease against whatever statistically very small risk there might be related to receiving the vaccine.
The arguments against the HPV vaccine suffer from all the flaws that plague the arguments of those who oppose vaccines generally, plus a few more. The idea that vaccination against HPV will encourage pre-marital sexual activity is hard to take seriously. Absent some very strong empirical evidence showing a causal relationship, I cannot even see any merit in discussing this claim. It defies logic and common sense. Any reasonable person would want to reduce their risk of getting cancer–any kind of cancer. To say that people who want to prevent cancer are going to be sexually promiscuous seems absurd to me.
Additionally, the talk about abstinence is problematic. Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument here, that HPV can be communicated from one person to another solely through sexual activities. I actually agree that abstinence has a lot of value and, if one could unequivocally guarantee that a given person would never engage in sexual relations with a person who could give them the HPV, then abstinence seems preferable to injecting the body with a foreign substance. However, as we all know, life doesn’t work so easily. For all kinds of reasons, people simply will not practice abstinence all the time, without fail. Those reasons are so well known that I won’t bore anyone here by trying to list them. Again, abstinence is great, if one actually abstains. If one does not, then the abstinence objection to the HPV vaccine is as flawed as the suggestion that a person’s wanting to protect herself from cancer will lead her to engage in premarital sexual activities. To put it bluntly, those objections make no sense to me.
Finally, while I have avoided the religious issue thus far in this comment, I want to close by saying that espousing an attitude that is at once immoral and anti-Christian. It is immoral because it needlessly causes suffering. It is anti-Christian because it flies in the face of the “love your neighbor as yourself” teaching that Jesus presented. To condemn someone to a risk of preventable cancer in the pursuit of an ideology is wrong, shockingly and inexcusably wrong.
I don’t think evoking mandation is a ‘scare tactic’. There are people – you are one of them – who want the vaccine made mandatory. So it’s perfectly legitimate to raise it something which is being campaigned for and oppose it. The article you linked blurs recommentations and mandations between the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs.
So how can you also use the “if they don’t want to be vaccinated, they can get an exemption” argument? Aren’t you suggesting mandatory vaccination isn’t a big deal, since people who don’t want it can get out of it, while at the same time being signed up to make it difficult/impossible for them to do this.
Can anyone provide a single quote from a leader of the religious right where they say they want no-one to have the vaccine? That is such a stupid position I really have difficulty thinking that anyone with a wide following would subscribe to it. But I may be wrong…
And they have power because they have powerful friends. A few judges on the Supreme Court, for instance, listen to them. Senators in powerful positions do, too, as do a number of political appointees in high positions. These are the people who will make the rules, and those rules will be very difficult to change. Oh, the president seems to side with them on many of these issues as well.
A good satire of this is the Decency Rules and Regulations Manual. It’s at http://www.homelanddecency.com. In it, women are required to be joyful at becoming pregnant over and over and over again. . . .
Can I find a quote where they flat-out say, “No one should ever have this vaccine”? No. But I can find a few where they say, for example, that “this vaccine will be marketed to a segment of the population that should be getting a message about abstinence. It sends the wrong message” and that they wouldn’t vaccinate their own daughters. Or how about this:
Emphasis mine.
Some of them have the good sense to pay lip service to the vaccine because it’s politically expedient for them to do so. But they make it clear that they don’t actually support it.
When it comes to vaccinations, those which prevent the worst diseases are usually mandatory (polio, etc). Entire diseases have been wiped out because of mandatory vaccinations. While I strongly believe that things like the flu shot should be voluntary, a vaccination which could prevent the deaths of thousands of women should be mandatory.
Well, “difficult” and “impossible” mean two very different things, don’t you think? It’s difficult to opt out of getting your MMR vaccine, but it’s not impossible. As it should be. I think the same should apply to the HPV vaccine.
So obviously I can still use the “If they don’t want the vaccine, they can opt out of it” argument. They can. It just won’t be easy, and it shouldn’t be easy. Is this really so confusing an argument?
Oh, and I’d just like to point out that saying, ““This isn’t as much about morality as it is about good medicine. If you don’t want to suffer these diseases, you need to abstain, and when you find a partner, stick with that partner” is essentially arguing “Abstinence or Death.” Which is pretty sick.
I agree. To take it a step further, assuming that there is value in abstinence (and I really think there is), the more reasonable position is to advocate the HPV vaccine plus abstinence in appropriate cases. That way, at least theoretically, women could receive two layers of protection from the HPV that can lead to cervical cancer. Of course, the abstinence part would not appeal to everyone, but advocates of abstinence could very reasonably promote it as an extra layer of protection to cover any cases wherein the vaccine might not be effective for some reason. That seems like a win-win situation to me; pro-abstinence people can still promote their viewpoint, while we keep the vaccine available for everyone.
I just cannot see how someone could object to this vaccine. I’ve got a pretty darned good imagination, too, but I just can’t see it.
I have to wonder, a Parent takes a child to get vaccinated against a whole host of maladies like small pox and TB. Now the HPV vaccine gets thrown into the mix. In order for this “message sending” effect to take place the parent would have to tell the child that one of the vaccines is to prevent a know consequence of sexual intercourse. How does that conversation go exactly?
Little girl: Mommy why to I have to get these shots?
Parent: Well, to protect you from you from getting diseases.
LG: Like what kind of diseases?
P: Well a lot of different kinds but one in particular is one that prevents you from getting sick after having sex with an infected boy.
LG: Mommy what is sex?
Orac is the expert in the anti-vax department. Anti-vaxers are wingnuts, no question about it. Their arguments are based on bad and incorrect science. It’s not difficult at all to opt-out of the MMR vacccine – the anti-vax wingnuts will be happy to show you how.
The vaccination for diseases that are preventable with proper behavior thing is interesting. Look at the history of the Hep B vaccine for some insight. hep B, for the most part, is preventable with proper behavior. Excepting those children who live in a household with someone with hep B, children are not likely to get the disease. Most cases of the hep B are transmitted through sexual behavior or drug use (I said most, ok, don’t start hammering me with every exception you’ve ever read about). These behaviors generally start in adolesence, so it could be argued that vaccination of infants is not necessary. However. Educational efforts on safe sex and needle use did not make a dent in the number of hep B cases. Voluntary vaccination also did not make a dent. It wasn’t until mandatory vaccination was in place that a drop in hep B cases was observed. the whole story can be read by searching around the CDC web page. I expect a similar story with HPV.
Vaccination of boys has been deemed cost-ineffective. Boys don’t die of cervical cancer. In the world where vaccines are cheap and there is plenty of money for public health measures, this might seem trivial. In the world we have, cost is an issue. HPV is not like the flu or mumps – you don’t get it just by close proximity to an infected person. Thus herd immunity considerations are different.
I’m burned that the HPV vaccine is only for women 9-26 – b/c women who are older probably already have it b/c they are sluts. Yep, that’s the argument. I can’t remember which news story I read which gave the “sexually active women probably already have HPV infections” line. Of course, it’s inconceivable that a woman over 26 might be a virgin, and it’s inconceivable that a sexually active woman might be practicing safe sex. Granted, condoms have a failure rate, but so do vaccines. I would get this vaccine even if I had to pay the full price myself, but unfortunately, I am a 27 yr old slut.
“I personally object to vaccinating children against a disease that is 100% preventable with proper sexual behaviour.”
But her “proper sexual behavior” isn’t everyone’s proper sexual behavior.
What kills me, though, is not just that they believe teenagers can and will be abstinent, but that they don’t acknowledge that teenagers will become adults.
Come on, RedStaters, you know you divorce more than BlueStaters. And why do you divorce? Adultery. So even if a woman is an abstinent youth, and marries another abstinent youth, her husband could have an affair and infect her. According to fundie logic, she will have done nothing wrong, but she’ll still be infected and may still get cancer.
Of course, we can call her a slut anyway b/c she had teh sex, and I guess ever having teh sex should be considered a risk, eh? Married or not, women shouldn’t ever ENJOY it. Even when we need to have teh BAY-BEES. Teh bay-bees don’t really need Mom after she’s finished her job as incubator, do they?
Why? Does vaccination make it not preventable with “proper sexual behavior?” This is another case of deliberately sustaining a bad thing so as to control people’s behavior: “Nooo, you can’t make sex safer, because then sex will be safe, and then we won’t have any reason to threaten people into staying abstinent!!!! WAAAAHHH!!!” I repeat my analysis from yesterday: what is it terrorists do, again?
Also, I should like to take a moment and introduce Ms. Unruh to this concept that’s generally known as rape. 100% preventable, my evil sinning slutty liberal ass.
They do this?
http://www.cdc.gov/std/HPV/STDFact-HPV-vaccine.htm#ninetotwentysix
The vaccine’s only for women 9-26 because that’s the only age group they’ve tested for safety and effectiveness.
Hey, I didn’t say they weren’t stupid, just that they weren’t stupid enough to say no one should ever have the vaccine.
Yes, the “pro-lifers” show up at the Race For The Cure races and promote the scientifically refuted crap about abortions causing breast cancer. Can you imagine? I mean, here are these women, some still in the process of fighting their cancer, others who have battled it, and still others who have lost mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, etc. to it, and they’re basically met by these creeps with the message that they probably caused their own breast cancer by having an abortion. Nice, huh? And if anyone dares to tell them their presence and tactics are inappropriate, they claim they’re being harrassed by the pro-choicers.
Don’t 80% of women have HPV by age 50? Pointing out that “women who are older probably have it” isn’t calling them sluts; it’s describing reality.
And the whole not approved for older women thing.
This is like the Dark Ages, you know, when clerics used to persecute midwives for helping alleviate women’s suffering during childbirth, because women ought to be “paying for the sins of Eve” through their pain.
They don’t just want to punish women for having sex (or sharing a towel, or living in a dorm), they want to punish women for being women.
That is it in a nutshell.
Nik, one of the major reasons some public health organizations (and some bloggers) want the HPV vaccine to be mandatory is because mandatory vaccines have to be covered by private insurers. If it’s an opt-in vaccination you have to request your child get, the insurer will likely make the parents pay the full amount. If it’s an opt-out vaccination where the child gets it unless the parent says no (like the various other childhood vaccines out there, all of which parents can choose to not let their children get), then it’s covered.
so nik, why did they only test women 9-26 for effectiveness? hmm? that’s only the proximal reason, not the ultimate reason. the ultimate reason is that as a prophylactic vaccine, only young women are targeted. older women probably already have the virus. of course, this reasoning ignores women over 26 who either have never been sexually active or who have consistantly practiced safe sex.