I've been meaning to write about this for awhile but haven't been able to crystallize my feelings on it into one succinct, readable package. Now, Tristan Taormino has written it for me. (Warning: Her other columns may be the sort of thing some of you wouldn't appreciate at all, but she's dead on right about the HPV vaccine so I refuse to shy away from linking to her.)The only thing that she left out is this: It is my firm belief that if a sexually transmitted virus caused prostate cancer in men and we had a vaccine for it, the vaccine would be encouraged and paid for by insurance without any hoo-hah or fanfare. Boys would get the vaccine along with the others they get sometime between the ages of nine and twelve, and no one would think twice about it.
Oh, but let our girls remain at risk to a form of cancer that we've found to be completely preventable. I still can't fathom why anyone would fight against access to the vaccine (because let's face it, for our nation's poor, if the choice is between paying the rent or for a vaccine, they'll choose to not live on the street and gamble on the HPV) because it is for a sexually-transmitted virus.
Yep, that needle sure is carte blanche to our daughters. No matter what else we say or teach them, the shot is a tacet, "go ahead". Every other moment that you've spent with them was wasted, because we all know how important the word of a needle is to a girl over everything they've learned from their parents growing up is. Never mind the fact that there are such horrors in the world like non-consentual sex. Nope, I'm sorry, girls. If you don't make it to your wedding night wearing your chastity ring, no matter whether it was consentual or not, we think you should have to take the risk of dying of cervical cancer because of it. We'll protect you from measels and mumps and whooping cough, from rubella and smallpox. But cervical cancer? Hey, if you get it, you brought it on yourself.
I dare anyone to give me a good reason why this isn't just madness. I just want to hop in a time machine and go live a couple hundred years in the future. Maybe by then another comet will come near enough to the Earth to make these modern-day dinosaurs extinct.
(Yes, I know the vaccine exists and it's perfectly legal for me to foot the bill and pay for a course of it to be administered to my daughter at the appropriate age. Rest assured that I will be doing just that. However, we could wipe out HPV in a few generations the way we wiped out other viruses if the use of the vaccine was wide-spread. The only way for that to happen is if the cost is covered by insurance, because to some people, $360 is still a lot of money to drop at the doctor's office.)
2 comments:
There was an article about this in my local newspaper about this today. They said that most health plans cover it
The problem is, of course, that government-funded programs will not cover the cost of the injections, because of pressure put on the largely-Republican (overlords) politicians by their religious power base.
This means the people who would be most strapped having to pay for it on their own are the people for whom it will not be covered.
I have to question the morality of people who can look into their daughter's eyes and say, "There is a mistake you can make that I think you should die for." I have to further question the morality of people who would make that decision for a bunch of people who don't have the money to fix it otherwise.
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