Posted on Sun, Feb. 04, 2007

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Shunning vaccine won't stop teen sex

ISSAC J. BAILEY

A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

The odds are that one day my daughter Lyric, who is almost three years old, will begin having sex.

The overprotective father in me doesn't even want to think about that reality, doesn't want to consider that that day may come before her 35th birthday.

No, I'm not joking, such is the warped way sex screws up our rational thinking.

The stork didn't drop Lyric or my five-year-old son Kyle on the front porch. (Yes, I also want my son to wait a looooong time before he has sex.) Though I don't have first-hand confirmation, I imagine my 10 siblings and I weren't dropped off by the stork either. Nor did the stork have anything to do with the creation of my colleagues or the strangers at the supermarket or the pastor in the pulpit.

Sex, as they say, happens.

And it begins a lot sooner for most of us than we'd care to admit. Most of us have sex before we turn the tassels on our high school graduation caps. And most of us - to the tune of more than 90 percent - don't wait until we walk down the aisle.

Those are cold, hard facts, the kind that have been with us since the curious children of cavemen snuck behind secluded rocks to do naughty things and our grandparents did the same in '57 Chevys.

Sex happens.

That's why it is disturbing that anyone would try to block the widespread use of a vaccine that can possibly eliminate cervical cancer on the incredibly short-sighted basis that it might somehow increase premarital sex. Let me reiterate quickly: More than 90 percent of us have premarital sex.

But those are the kinds of concerns being bandied about by Silver Ring South Carolina, an organization that promotes abstinence until marriage.

"The concern would be that it would give the impression that if you get the vaccine, that you would somehow be safe to have sex," Kevin Caiello, Silver Ring administrative director, told The (Columbia) State.

A bill has been introduced to the S.C. General Assembly to mandate that 12-year-old girls be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus, a sexually-transmitted disease that causes cervical cancer in women. And if we allow any group, no matter how well intentioned, to get in the way of the possible elimination of a cancer, we should be shamed and ridiculed.

Teenagers know that sex can lead to unwanted pregnancies and scarred souls. So did we, and we had sex anyway. Mandating the HPV vaccine won't make teenagers want sex more.

But it could save their lives. And that's reason enough to approve it.