by Jeanne Deaux

Created on: January 23, 2008

I have considered the issue of Gardasil vaccination for some time, because I have a three-year-old daughter and this will affect her someday. My first impulse was to refuse the vaccination because of the health and safety issues I have seen raised about the drug. However, in the main, we are weighing a sudden fainting spell against disfigurement and death. I think the answer's pretty clear.

I'm aware the FDA approves drugs which are dangerous. Prescription medications kill over 100,000 Americans a year. Drug companies are not always forthcoming about risks (as with Imitrex for migraines), or doctors want to keep using a drug for a purpose for which adequate safety has not been established (as with Cytotec when used off-label in obstetric applications), or the patients themselves misuse the drug in question. But these reasons are not sufficient to completely dismiss a drug as useless in the application for which it is intended.

The social questions surrounding Gardasil are troubling as well. For instance, does it really matter whether vaccinating a teen girl against HPV will let a teen boy "off the hook" concerning responsible sexual behavior? If he wants to be risky, that is his problem; we should not put off helping our daughters protect themselves in the mistaken assumption that being careless will force boys to be responsible. For another example, some people believe HPV vaccination will encourage girls to be sexually careless. If you're going to wave a gun around without checking to see if it is loaded, which is better: to wave it around while the safety's on, or while it is off? If a parent refuses to vaccinate their daughter on the grounds that she will have sex if she's protected, that parent is saying they would rather see their daughter die than give up her virginity. What a horrific attitude to have about one's own child.

Parents are the guardians of our children, not their owners. It is our responsibility to take care of our children's bodies until they are old enough to take over that job themselves. Cervical cancer is a known killer of women. If we now have an effective weapon against this disease, and if it is most effectively utilized before a girl reaches adulthood, then by all means that is when we should use it. And this is the truly moral stance; morality, after all, is more about how we treat one another generally than about how many sex partners we've had by age eighteen.

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