Against HPV vaccine mandate: Guttmacher and me?
CBS News posted a column today entitled, “The unlikely antivaccine alliance,” detailing the strange bedfellows in the fight against mandating the HPV vaccine: vaccine opponents, social conservatives, anti-corporate groups, anti-big government groups, and most surprisingly, women’s groups.
The story quoted me:
The face of the undeserving ill, according to the moral conservatives, belongs to Illinois State Senator Debbie Halvorson, who, as co-sponsor of a bill to require the vaccine in her state, admitted that she herself had HPV and underwent a hysterectomy because of precancerous cells. Pro-abstinence bloggers and columnists see this as permission to grill her regarding her sexual history: “You would think she’d focus on her behavior that caused her to contract that sexually transmitted disease,” Jill Stanek wrote in the online Illinois Review. “Halvorson could discuss the number of sex partners she has had in her lifetime and how each one increased the likelihood of contracting HPV…whether it was her husband who passed HPV on to her after sleeping with other women…[or] if Halvorson contracted HPV through rape, she could discuss ways to avoid rape.”
It is untrue that social conservatives think HPV victims don’t deserve help, but that characterization from MSM is not surprising.
That quote, in context, was taken from a post, “Debbie does….” A “Debbie does, II” followed, detailing Halvorson’s involvement with the group Women in Government, which is financially backed by Merck, maker of the HPV vaccine. I also wrote a WorldNetDaily.com column.
Most enlightening is why women’s groups like Planned Parenthood’s Guttmacher Institute are not on board with this mandate….
Finally, the backdrop to all these conversations is one unfurled by women’s health advocates, who insist that we set the current action in a historical context. Walking around with the DES-Thalidomide-Dalkon Shield pharmaceutical disasters in the back of their minds, some worry that Merck’s profit-driven rush to mandate this drug may prove problematic. “There’s merit to questioning industry’s motives in this case,” says Heather Boonstra, public policy analyst at the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on sexual health research and analysis. “Because Merck itself has pushed so hard to make the vaccine mandatory, there’s a bit of skepticism about industry’s motives.”
Guttmacher is the research arm of Planned Parenthood.
Less than one-hundredth of one percent of the U.S. population dies cervical cancer – 0.009%. Enough to mandate vaccinating half the U.S. population against the sexually transmitted disease causing it?
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
I just don’t understand how on Monday you can say that no one has a right to tell a woman what to do with her own body, but on Tuesday you can tell a woman she has no choice but to have this vaccine?
It just goes to prove that people on the side of PP, abortion, free-sex, and etc. are irrational. Their arguments are irrational – their reasoning is irrational – To me, this is proof positive that Satan is behind the whole thing. That a group of otherwise seemingly intelligent people can cling for so long to something so obviously insane shows me that something evil and insidious is behind it.
What I don’t really understand is the rush to only get women immunized from HPV. Men are carriers of HPV as well and it would make sense to vaccinate all vectors against the disease.
HPV is a common virus, and many variations of HPV are not transmitted sexually, but cutaneously. The major risk is the type of HPV you pick up and if it infects cells in the uterus.