A large number of women who stay chaste until marriage get infected with HPV too -- it is the most common infection on earth, and 80% of American adult women are infected. If you decide not to permit your 9 year old to get immunized against HPV / cervical cancer, you're suggesting not only that you're confident that she will never once have sex outside of marriage, but that her future husband won't either.
That may be an ideal, but it's hard to enforce. Giving your kid a deadly cancer seems like a high price to pay.
Why worry? It can be detected with a simple pap smear and can be easily treated. I'd rather she take that route than inject something into her body that can't be removed later.
What? 80%? FReeper please.
AK: My post needed a Sarcasm Tag.
However, you without question the most pragmatic person on FR and almost always correct.
And yes, in refusing to provide their daughter with the vaccine, they are taking a gamble with their daughter's life. It is almost as if they are saying that cervical cancer is due punishment for girls who choose to have sex prior to marriage as well as women who do not marry men who are not virgins.
And it's the parent's choice, and the kids, not the nanny state.
Exactly.
She may never have sex outside of wedlock, but most men are (asymptomatic) carriers of the virus, which would naturally include most future husbands.
So is it okay to contract HPV once your married? Will the virus be any less virulent/carcinogenic just because you have a ring on your finger?
"Giving your kid a deadly cancer..."
According to the American Cancer Society, not ones to discount the threat, between 1955 and 1992 the death rate from cervical cancer in the US declined 74% due to pap tests. Pap tests can detect pre-cancerous cell changes and treatment can prevent their development. Death rates from cervical cancer continue to decline, on average, 4% a year due to pap tests and subsequent treatment.
Yet, you would say that if I am unwilling to inject this substance in my daughter, which may have unforeseen, even deadly effects 20 or 30 years down the road, I am sentencing her to certain death? Untrue.
I will encourage my daughter to be abstinent before marriage and to get regular paps once she begins to have sex. That has virtually a 100% detection and cure rate these days. No need to inject substances whose long-term effects are unknown.
The vaccine doesn't have to be given at 9 years old. 18 or later would work just fine. (Or earlier, if you're worried about your child's behavior...)
Every vaccine has risks. If you aren't going to have sex outside of marriage, and will only marry those who have the same values, the inherent risks of the vaccine aren't worth it.