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Day 618: Barefoot, Pregnant & Sick

is what condoms and vaccines would keep our young women from, but that doesn’t matter to conservative Texan state legislators.

Texas governor backs down on HPV vaccine effort

Texas Gov. Rick Perry said on Tuesday he is backing down in his effort to require that pre-teen girls be vaccinated against a virus known to cause cervical cancer after the state’s legislature overturned his order.

The February order would have made Texas the first U.S. state to require that girls receive the Merck & Co. Inc.’s vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV) so they can enroll in sixth grade, when most students are 11 or 12 years old. But social conservatives opposed it, saying it would lead to sexual promiscuity.

HPV is the leading cause of cervical cancer and genital warts, and the vaccine, which is completely effective against the more common strains, is most useful only when administered to pre-teens. Whether they plan to be sexually active in their teenage years or not, the vaccine protects girls into adulthood. But, let’s be real, these are school-going children kids in their hormonal years, sans chaperones and au pairs, whom we cannot expect to fight natural urges and keep hands off one another. What’s worse – responsible, protected sex or infected and infectious young adults?

Earth to conservative legislators:
– No kid is going to say, “I have access to condoms and vaccines, therefore I am going to have sex more often.”
– No kid who wants to have sex is going to abstain because of the lack of condoms and vaccines.
– You are the purveyors of irresponsible behavior in American youth.

Good grief, our lawmakers are deluded, so self-centered and deluded, that they would sacrifice the well-being of their young to placate their equally idiotic constituents.

6 comments… add one
  • spocko May 8, 2007, 4:41 PM

    Well the kids don’t vote for them, so they think that they are safe.

    I wonder if they would be doing the same thing if it was BOYS who had to get the Vaccine?

  • Maitri May 8, 2007, 4:42 PM

    Well, they send a lot of our boys to die in Iraq so I don’t think that matters. It really makes you wonder who we gave the reins to and why.

  • liprap May 8, 2007, 5:45 PM

    If it were boys, they’d probably have ’em done when they do selective service registration or something…which means there wouldn’t be as much pol posturing in order to keep women on sexist pedestals.

  • Ray May 8, 2007, 9:36 PM

    I wonder if Perry is still going to keep all the money he got from Merck.

  • GentillyGirl May 9, 2007, 3:14 AM

    Sweetie, you don’t get the mindset of the cross-wearing crowd. They are just as bad, and probably crazier than the bomb-wearing Islamics.

  • liprap May 9, 2007, 5:36 AM

    ANY kind of orthodoxy with power behind it is gonna mean idiocy and harmful actions or inactions, as the case may be. And, in terms of the double standard as it applies to soldiers in battle, they are still sent into war with condoms in their rucksacks, and nobody has protested about THAT that I know of.

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