You might think that social conservatives, especially those in the so-called “pro-life” crowd, would welcome the use of a new vaccine that is virtually 100% effective against two deadly strains of cervical cancer that account for 70% of such cancer deaths and that kill over 3,700 women each year. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong.
“Because the vaccine protects against a sexually transmitted virus, many conservatives oppose making it mandatory…,” so says this article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/31/MNG2LFGJFT1.DTL [1]
Because of the vaccine’s very high efficacy, health professionals want to make the vaccine mandatory for all girls, but social conservatives, whose knee-jerk reaction is apparently to oppose anything that makes sex safer for women, worry that the vaccine might encourage pre-marital sex; so, they favor “pro-choice” — i.e., letting parents chose to not give the vaccine to their daughters. In a move that can only be described as screaming with hypocrisy (given their support for government interference in healthcare decisions about birth control and abortion), they object to the government overruling the parents’ decisions about giving children this potentially life-saving vaccine.
In other words, according to conservatives, it’s OK for the government to overrule a parents’ decision when the parents want to protect their daughter’s life with effective birth control or an abortion, but it’s not OK for the government to overrule a parents’ decision when the parents want to jeopardize their daughter’s life by denying an important anti-cancer vaccine. How twisted do the “family values” need to be to arrive at that dichotomy?
So, here’s my question: even if the conservative argument is valid — i.e., that denying your own daughter a proven, life-saving, anti-cancer vaccine actually would discourage her from having pre-marital sex — why would anyone with an ounce of moral conscience consider this an acceptable way to deter pre-marital sex? On what sick moral scale does a risk of premarital sex outweigh a risk of death?
And what is wrong with conservatives that they believe their own failure as parents (namely, their inability to convey to their children their moral values against pre-marital sex) should be compounded by allowing them to endanger their childrens’ lives by denying this vaccine? Indeed, doesn’t the fact that they want to deny their daughters access to this vaccine automatically discredit them as competent parents? And what about future vaccines? If an AIDS vaccine is ever found, will social conservatives oppose that, too, just as they have opposed sex education and the distribution of condoms in public schools?
And if their decision to deny this vaccine to their child ever leads to the death of their daughter (or of other families’ daughters), exactly how do they square their decision with their so-called “moral values?” Indeed, how do they even live with themselves?
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