Iyow - in your own words

As some of you may know, the FDA has approved Guardasil, Merk’s groundbreaking and lifesaving HPV vaccine.

You may have seen the seemingly random commercials that aired before approval of the vaccine (and I assume, in anticipation of its FDA approval). It shows a number of women, in various wholesome environments, repeating, with surprise on their faces, “Cancer is caused by a virus? I had no idea!”

It’s believed that up to 80% of cervical cancer cases are caused by HPV. The new vaccine is a ground-shaking health improvement for women.

So great, everything is hunky-dory now, right? We vaccinate everyone, and an awful form of cancer is, if not eliminated, then at least made much much rarer, sparing millions of women unneccesary pain and suffering!

Ah, not so fast.

The thing is, the vaccine is most effective if administered to pre-teens, and that’s where the trouble really starts. Certain religious groups are going out of their way to make sure that pre-teen girls are not automatically vaccinated. The rationale is that if you provide protection against HPV, then you remove one of the repercussions of having sex.

That’s the thing about abstinence-only theory, it’s generally based on fear – the idea that if you have sex when you shouldn’t, then bad things will happen to you.

This is personally what I was taught growing up in the Christian church: If you have sex, then bad things will happen to you. And while it didn’t stop me from having sex, it did instill a low-lying panic, that every time I had sex I was going to die a horrible painful death, despite my very responsible behavior (thanks to a thorough sex education despite my church’s best efforts otherwise).

Fear works…at least for a while. And HPV is one of the last sex boogeymen. The scary STDs of the olden days are curable or mostly preventable. The pill prevents unintended pregnancy – and there’s always Plan B in a pinch, which is undergoing it’s own sociopolitical travails at the moment. Condoms work to prevent, well, almost everything most of the time, including the more recent spectre of AIDS.

While sex and the inherent risks of intercourse should be taken seriously, sex is relatively safe these days. HPV was believed to be one of the few things that could not be prevented by condom use, so it was one of the few remaining Scary Things About Having The Sex. The rationale goes, then, that removing this danger will cause a 100-fold increase in freqent and regular Preteen Animalistic Fracking.

So I started thinking about all the other things in our culture that remove the repercussions of our actions, and that maybe we need more good old-fashioned fear instead of all these little safety nets we have no business relying on. I think we should re-examine all of the following, and consider returning to the good old days when actions had real and dangerous repercussions…

Safety Lighters

We’ve all seen the repercussions of safety lighters. There’s now a safety lighter in every stroller, teenagers eat them for lunch. This is unacceptable. People no longer appreciate the repercussions of fire.

If you teach your child about fire safety, then the child or teenager should NOT be playing with the lighter, anyway, so why do we need safety mechanisms? And if they do get hold of one, then they are breaking the rules anyway, so they probably deserve to set themselves on fire.

And if you are an adult who accidentally triggered one of these babies, well, you should have been more carefull walking around with that thing in your pocket so casually. Lighters should be taken seriously, and only used in certain places at certain specific times, and you deserve whatever happens to you.

Safety Caps on Prescription Medicines and Toxic Chemicals

Nothing teaches a child to stay away from toxic liquids and drugs than to watch another child die painfully. Sacrificing a few children will teach the others not to touch.

And again, if you are an adult digging around under the sink for that extra box of garbage bags and accidentally knocked a loosely capped bottle of lye on your hands, well, that’s what you get for not organizing your cabinets better and having so many different bottles in your cabinet.

Seatbelts

When you get in a car, you know the risks of being in an accident. You should accept and face those consequences, namely that if you decide to look down and change the radio station for too long, you will fly through the windshield of your car. Removing this safety feature will make people take driving far more seriously, and, I believe, substantially cut down on the number of accidents and freeway cell phone conversations.