Info at link.
Personally, I don't see the opt-out as very different from exercising other choices that must be made repeatedly.
WHY should someone have to get permission from a government body NOT to do something?!
That report from the AAPS is from 2005 and was in response to the specific method of mandate that Perry ordered. For the record, his method was wrong-headed.
If the Texas legislature decided to mandate Gardasil with an opt-out, they could do so effectively while respecting parental rights and not requiring a renewal of the opt-out form. (They could also require private schools and physicians to accept the opt-out.)
We shouldn’t have to get permission from the government to abstain. But ... sometimes our freedoms (choices) must be exercised rather than assumed. That’s not to say it’s right, just that it’s an actuality.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think we disagree on anything other than the effectiveness and potential benefits of Gardasil.
My original objection to your post was concerning the prevention of 4000 annual cervical cancer deaths versus 6,000,000 cases of HPV (or 600,000 if you consider only 10% to be legitimate/necessary)
This reminds me of the case where a 17-year-old guy had cancer and had tried the chemo and was so sick from it he just didn’t even want to live. He and his family researched an alternative therapy that they believed was very effective and chose to do that. A social worker reported the parents for child abuse, for not insisting that he do the chemo and/or radiation therapy. So the parents had the choice of doing what they and their son believed was best and have their son taken away from them and put under the care of a social worker who would force him to do the chemo etc.... or just agree to do the chemo etc that made their son suicidal.
IOW, they literally had no option of saying no to medications that a social worker thought they should have.
Great choice, huh? If this was an issue of whether a full-term, fully-born infant who survived abortion would be given food, the government would insist that it was the woman’s choice whether she abused that child to death, all in the name of “my body, my choice”. But when it’s a decision that truly only affects the one making the decision - no innocent life being forced into death by somebody else’s choice - there’s no such thing as personal choice.
This is literally the government forcing drugs down a kid’s throat. Here in Amerikkka.