Most of us women probably know someone who has had, if not full-blown cervical cancer, at least "suspicious cells" that she had to have scraped out of her cervix. As a lawyer for domestic violence victims, I see young girls every week, many of them pregnant, who have had "bad" pap smears. Heck, in law school, I once had a pap smear misread and had to be re-tested. The week I had to wait for my test results was agony. Would I ever be able to have kids? Was I going to die of cancer? Had they caught the cancer in time? I didn't know. After all, 4,000 women in the U.S. die of cervical cancer every year.
Two drug companys have come up with a vaccine for the HPV virus, the sexually trasmitted disease that causes gential warts and is responsible for 70% of cases of cervical cancer. Wow! A godsend for woman, right??
Guess who doesn't think so? No, come on! Guess!
The Nation knows. . . .
The Christian right doesn't like the sound of this vaccine at all. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful," Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, "because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex." Raise your hand if you think that what is keeping girls virgins now is the threat of getting cervical cancer when they are 60 from a disease they've probably never heard of.
Why, you ask?
Christian conservatives have a special reason to be less than thrilled about the HPV vaccine. Although not as famous as chlamydia or herpes, HPV has the distinction of not being preventable by condoms. It's Exhibit A in those gory high school slide shows that try to scare kids away from sex, and it is also useful for undermining the case for rubbers generally--why bother when you could get HPV anyway? In 2000, Congressman (now Senator) Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who used to give gruesome lectures on HPV for young Congressional aides, even used HPV to propose warning labels on condoms. With HPV potentially eliminated, the antisex brigade will lose a card it has regarded as a trump unless it can persuade parents that vaccinating their daughters will turn them into tramps, and that sex today is worse than cancer tomorrow. According to New Scientist, 80 percent of parents want the vaccine for their daughters--but their priests and pastors haven't worked them over yet.
Culture of life? How does this fit into their culture of life? As the author of the article, Katha Pollitt poiints out:
Faced with a choice between sex and death, they choose death every time. No sex ed or contraception for teens, no sex for the unwed, no condoms for gays, no abortion for anyone--even for that poor 13-year-old pregnant girl in a group home in Florida.
This is one of those issues that I think is appalling to mainstream Americans, but simply isn't getting the press it deserves. Please consider calling your congressional reps about this issue.