Boy What A Tangled Web We've Woven! Vaccinating For Behavioral Diseases.

Ok, so what's the answer? As a young girl, I remember when the birth control pill first came out. Women in my neighborhood rushed to put their 14 yr. old daughters on the pill, the premise being that it would regulate their menses. I think an underlying motive, was that it would also relieve a parent's fears of the embarrassment and hassle involved with their teenage daughter's possible pregnancy.  The result was that these girls, almost immediately, became sexually promiscuous! I do not exaggerate. My girlfriends who began taking birth control pills, lost their virginity ex-post haste. 

Now, today, the question is whether or not to vaccinate our pubescent children against a widely prevalent sexually transmitted disease, known as Human Papilloma Virus (HPV). It is only through willful behavior that the disease can be contracted. Today's parents must now decide, as with the women of the early days of the Pill, whether or not they need to give something to their child, which is really a behavioral concern.

First of all, as I can personally attest, my girlfriends whose mothers put them on the pill, were given a sort of subliminal message that their mothers had already assumed their daughter would not remain a virgin. The result was that they definitely did not remain virgins. A similar dilemma presents itself with a parent choosing to vaccinate their child against a sexually communicable disease.  Once again, what is the child to interpret from this?

The tangle to this question though is not easy to avoid. Today, more than ever before, even children from the best and most faith-filled families have been succumbing to peer pressure to become sexually active. And even if your son or daughter remains a virgin till marriage, there is no such guarantee with their future spouses. So, with the numbers of the CDC showing astronomical rises in the occurrence of cancers that are caused by HPV, does a concerned and loving parent take the risk of vaccinating a child against possible future behavior, not only on the part of their own child, but on the part of their child's future spouse? What are the risks to this vaccine? And once again, as with the pill, will this choice send a message to the child that the parents have already assumed they will be sexually active before marriage?   Oh what a tangled web are the consequences of sin!  Yes, let's call it sin, because that is what it is!

Well, I would like to at least give parents one equation here to this question. And that question regards the efficacy of the vaccine itself. First of all, the HPV vaccine has been being widely used without sufficient evidence as to whether or not it is even effective! Moreover, the vaccine has been reported to have caused multiple deaths and other serious side-effects.

Of course, people get sick and some people can die from all vaccines. It's a numbers game. Small Pox was successfully eradicated due to an aggressive world-wide campaign of immunization. I recall as a child, the Polio epidemics, which would keep my mother scared out of her wits half the time, whenever we kids got a sore throat. She was extremely thankful for the Polio vaccines which came out against the disease. The efficacy of both the Small Pox and Polio vaccines greatly outweighed their risks.

So, in my opinion, the bottom line is still the risks verses the results.  If parents are going to be forced to decide whether or not to vaccinate their child for a "behavioral" disease, and all the subliminal messages that gives their child, shouldn't they at least be assured that the vaccine's effectiveness outweighs it's risks?