The most common cause of cervical cancer among women is the human papillomavirus or HPV. It kills abut 5,000 American women and hundreds-of-thousands of women abroad each year. Recently, Merck and Company developed a vaccine that if applied to young women before they become sexualy active prevents them from ever being infected with HPV.
Many tests have shown that this vaccine is almost 100% effective. It's a boon to women. The outstanding scientist and Nobel laureate David Baltimore said:
"This is a cancer vaccine, and immensely effective one. We should be proud and excited. It has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives every year."
Pretty straightforward, it seems. But not to the Republican religious zealots. They are holding up FDA approval. You know why? It's hard to believe, but they are against the vaccine because it may subject young women to greater temptation to have sex before marriage! As Leslee J. Unruh, the founder and president of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, said:
"Premarital sex is dangerous, even deadly. Let's not encourage it by vaccinating ten-year-olds so they think they're safe."
Never mind that studies have found that "abstinence pledge" programs do not work. As Michael Specter in the March 13, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, states:
"Eighty-eight per cent of those who took such pledges and had sex before the end of the study did so before marriage."
Religious zealots would rather women die from cancer than be subjected to the temptation of having sex. Wow. These are the same people that tell us these women have free will. From where I sit, their stymieing the availability of the cancer vaccine is a highly immoral act. Here's Baltimore again:
"We are talking about basic public health now. What moral precepts allow us to think that the risk of death is a price worth paying to encourage abstinence as the only approach to sex?"
A true moral person would do his best to help girls (and others) live. A moral person is kind, generous and helpful. A moral person would not immediately assume the worst about others. A moral person would never stand in the way of adopting a vaccine that may enrich a woman's life.
Religious zealots practice an immoral morality.
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