HPV

As a student of human behavior and epistemology, your recent article, “Health, morals at center of debate over cancer vaccine” caught my eye. With the advent of a new vaccine to prevent the spread of HPV, and thereby prevent many cervical cancers, Michigan is at the leading edge of an interesting healthcare debate. As you mentioned, the Michigan Senate has introduced a bill that would require young Michigan girls to receive the vaccination before the sixth grade, and some people are opposed to the requirements on “moral grounds.”

If we are to listen to Bill Kiewiet, of the Alternatives Women’s Care Center, this is clearly an “issue of morality.” Now if by that he means we have a moral obligation to ensure the health of our children, or even to reduce the available pool of potential carriers of the virus, I totally agree with Mr. Kiewiet. But my sense is that he and others primarily have another kind of morality in mind – one that is perplexing to me.

The rationale for opposing the bill seems not to be primarily motivated by libertarian thought, or suggestions that government is overreaching into the private lives of citizens – though admittedly that criticism is offered, and might even be defensible to some degree. No, the shaky philosophical position they are taking says that by eliminating the cancer-causing virus from our children, we might encourage sexually promiscuous behavior in our young women. I suspect that this is the core of what they mean by “morality.”

So why is that position shaky? Let’s look briefly at the underlying assumption of that position. First, let’s assume that a clear, potentially fatal consequence of unsafe sex can be removed – in this case HPV. That might be an oversimplification of the science, but I ask your indulgence to stipulate the point. Second, let’s stipulate that removing that fatal consequence of cervical cancer actually does increase carelessness and promiscuity in children’s sexual behaviors during adolescence – a far less clear assertion, but again we’ll accept it to illustrate the point.

It then follows that those opposing this bill on purely “moral” grounds are essentially saying that they would prefer to leave in place a potentially fatal consequence to “immoral” or careless behavior. That statement cannot be reasonably refuted, though I would offer an extrapolation to further illustrate my point.

When it is this easy and inexpensive to remove a fatal consequence of sexual relations, as is the case of this HPV vaccine, I would argue that such a position is philosophically very close to the same as suggesting that if there is not a potentially fatal consequence to having sex, we should create one and implement it. After all, we like having it there.

Unfair extrapolation you say? Perhaps. But not by much. To me, the failure to remove a fatal consequence, when we can easily do so, is morally equivalent to putting in place a fatal consequence when there is not one in the first place.

If that is how these people define morality, I’d suggest they look again at the source of their morality; and the same goes for the Catholic Church’s approach to condoms in AIDS-ravaged Africa.

Which leads me to one final point. It seems plausible to me that, based on often theologically-unsupportable views, a great many people who claim to value human life, do so only after they’ve prioritized their false idol of celibacy. And if that’s true, it would seem that their misreading of sacred texts has created an even greater cycle of sin in the process.

Stephen L. Gibson