2.02.2006
Global Godbothering
Sometimes I forget that the United States isn’t the only place in the world with crazy Christians.The other day, Twisty (patriarchy-blamer extraordinaire) wrote about Australian "godbags" who want to prevent girls from being inoculated against HPV lest they take that as license to slut around. I’m not kidding, here’s an actual quote from Senator Barnaby Joyce:
"There might be an overwhelming (public) backlash from people saying, 'don't you dare put something out there that gives my 12-year-old daughter a licence to be promiscuous',"
I know that the threat of HPV stopped me from even thinking about sex when I was a teenager. Actually, that’s a lie; when I was a teenager, I didn’t even know what HPV was. And I’m willing to bet that since there are an estimated 24,000,000 (yes, that’s 24 million) HPV positive Americans I’m not alone in my teenage ignorance. HPV is often asymptomatic, and because the virus can reside in the skin, condoms are not entirely effective in preventing it. According to the CDC, by age 50, at least 80% of women will have been infected with HPV. There are 6.2 million new HPV infections every year.
Did I happen to mention that HPV is the cause for almost all cases of cervical cancer, a disease that kills nearly 4,000 women every year? The other day I wrote about the real anti-choice agenda--controlling the lives and bodies of women. Still need proof? Senator Joyce admits to being "personally very circumspect" about whether he would inoculate any of his four daughters against HPV should the vaccine become available. He’s "circumspect" about giving them a vaccine that would virtually guarantee that they will never get cervical cancer. He can’t decide if his daughter’s lives are worth living if it means that they might (gasp!) walk down the aisle without their hymens intact. He’s wants to sacrifice women’s lives in pursuit of unattainable goal—government mandated virginity. He wants women to die. And he’s not the only one. Wendy Wright, executive vice president of Concerned Women for
Think about it for a second—we have the opportunity to virtually eliminate a form of cancer that kills thousands of women in the United States every year. This would be the first cancer ever eradicated, and we can do it in one generation. If every baby born today was inoculated against HPV, not one of those beautiful baby girls will ever face the threat of cervical cancer.
Do you think Senator Joyce and Wendy Wright would oppose an HIV vaccine on the grounds that it might possibly encourage girls to have sex? And, if they did, do you think anyone would think they were anything other than certifiably batshit crazy? But the fringe right aren't too concerned with HIV (after all, it only kills the godless fags, right?), but mention birth control (including abortion) and the HPV vaccine, and they've suddenly got a whole lot to talk about. Do you think its a coincidence that pregnancy and cervical cancer only affect women?
At the expense of being inexcusably longwinded, I feel the need to note that the Aussies aren’t the only other place with crazies; the Brits are pretty insane, too:
An opinion poll from January conducted by Ipsos MORI found widespread public support for greater restrictions on abortion, particularly among women. Almost 60 percent of all women polled want to see greater restrictions on abortion access. 47 per cent want to see the current limit of 24 weeks reduced, while ten percent of women want to see abortion banned entirely, "under any circumstances."
Oh sweet Lord in heaven. No abortion under any circumstances?! Rape victims should be forced to bear their rapists’ children? What about incest victims? Thirteen-year-old girls raped by their fathers, brother, uncles, teachers, neighbors? Women who will die if they carry a pregnancy to term? Women with cancer—should they have to forego chemotherapy and radiation rather than terminate a pregnancy and save their own lives? Women whose pregnancies are high risk for serious and debilitating conditions? Manic depressive women who cannot take prescribed medications for their conditions, since they run the risk of seriously harming the fetus? None of these women deserve to live? Not one of these women deserves the right to her own bodily integrity? Ten percent of Britons are prepared to issue death sentences to pregnant women without even a thought about how it might impact their families or society as a whole. Ten percent of Britons are so sure of their own moral superiority that they would deny a basic human right to women, so convinced they are that they know better than the woman whose very life is at stake about the responsible and appropriate course of action. Ten percent of Britons think they are qualified to determine whether a woman’s life is worth saving. Pro-life indeed.
I won’t even get into Italy’s banning of RU-486, the Columbian manipulation of children to uphold abortion bans, or Canadian pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception. And all that was just this week…
Labels: Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries
annamaria at 2:07 PM
