Conservatives love to talk about abortion being murder. They talk about baby's skulls being ripped out. Well, scientist made the "morning after pill" so that an egg wont be fertilized, even if sex occured few days before.
But would the Radical Right celebrate the "morning after pill"? After all, less skulls would be ripped out.
But nope, the issue isn't baby skulls, the issue is sexuality.
And now there's talk about the HPV (an STD different from HIV) vaccine.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050530&s=pollitt
Wonderful, you are probably thinking, all we need to do is vaccinate girls (and boys too for good measure) before they become sexually active, around puberty, and HPV--and, in thirty or forty years, seven in ten cases of cervical cancer--goes poof.
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The Christian right doesn't like the sound of this vaccine at all. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful," Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, "because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.
Raise your hand if you think that what is keeping girls virgins now is the threat of getting cervical cancer when they are 60 from a disease they've probably never heard of.
So if we have the "morning after pill" to prevent pregnancies and a possible vaccine to prevent an STD, why should we be pee-ing in our pants about promiscuous sex? Hmm? Hmmm?
To the Radical Right, the issue isn't teenage pregnancy or STDs, the issue is having them tell us how to run our lives.
Christian conservatives have a special reason to be less than thrilled about the HPV vaccine. Although not as famous as chlamydia or herpes, HPV has the distinction of not being preventable by condoms. It's Exhibit A in those gory high school slide shows that try to scare kids away from sex, and it is also useful for undermining the case for rubbers generally--why bother when you could get HPV anyway?
So that means they dont mind having "sinners" (those who participate in non-marital sex) getting a horrible disease, just so they can say "we told you so".
What next, banning of football helmets
With HPV potentially eliminated, the antisex brigade will lose a card it has regarded as a trump unless it can persuade parents that vaccinating their daughters will turn them into tramps, and that sex today is worse than cancer tomorrow. According to New Scientist, 80 percent of parents want the vaccine for their daughters--but their priests and pastors haven't worked them over yet.
On the 13-year old girl in the homeless shelter who wanted an abortion
She was too young to have sex, too young to know her own mind about abortion--but not too young to be forced onto the delivery table for one of the most painful experiences human beings endure, in which the risk of death for her was three times as great as in abortion
And back to the abortion example?
If preventing abortion was what they cared about, they'd be giving birth control and emergency contraception away on street corners instead of supporting pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions and hospitals that don't tell rape victims about the existence of EC.
Conclusion
"It all comes down to the evils of sex," says Trussell. "That's an ideological position impervious to empirical evidence
