By Wendy Ross Kaplan a LuxEcoLiving Advocate and contributor
You pack your 12-year old a lunch, go through the last minute parent-love/instruction exercise, hug, wave, and watch your darling child go off to school in the morning. What you don’t know is that medical personnel at school will have the right to inject a vaccine into his or her body without your knowledge or even your consent. Assembly Bill 499 gives 12-year olds the right of responsibility for their own sexual medical treatments without parental permission or knowledge. Why would the government endorse taking away parents’ rights to make such important medical decisions for their minor children?
Assembly Bill 499 sits on Governor Jerry Brown’s desk awaiting his signature by September 30th 201l. If he vetoes the bill, parents retain their rights to informed medical decision-making for their children. If he signs the bill, which is expected, 12-year olds will have the right and can consent to take the controversial Gardasil vaccine at school or elsewhere without parental consent or even their knowledge. Taxpayers and the State will pick up the cost of the inoculations.
Getting parental consent is necessary to take 12-year olds on a school field trip or to administer a Tylenol at school, but why would a law be passed skirting parents’ right to know or decide if they want their children vaccinated? Your children’s bodies do not belong to the State. This is both a health and rights issue.
Gardasil has been a controversial vaccine since it entered the scene in 2006 with an attempted mandate for its use by Governor Rick Perry in Texas and reported health side effects on girls worldwide. It claims to prevent the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) for types 6, 11, 16 and 18, however, it only claims to prevent the two types of HPV that cause cervical cancer in girls 75% of the time. It does not cure cervical cancer. Once only targeting girls, the makers of the vaccine are now targeting boys as well for sexually transmitted diseases.
Since HPV is a sexually transmitted disease associated with behavioral lifestyles like sexual contact, it is not communicable between children through casual contact in classrooms, like other contagious diseases, such as polio, measles, and other childhood diseases. (See link to list of required vaccines for California school entry for 2011-2012: http://eziz.org/assets/docs/IMM-231.pdf.)
Parents of young children feel strongly about the issues surrounding a vaccine for sexually transmitted diseases, since religious beliefs, cultures and personal ideologies differ. However, since there are other approaches to sexual safety measures, a State-mandated, overkill vaccination approach, which removes parental supervision and choice, crosses personal lines of freedom of choice and gives more authority to the State than to the parent, not to mention ballooning the profits of Big Pharma. In 2006, Merck and pro-forced vaccine proponents tried to ram through Gardasil mandates in California. They were unsuccessful in their efforts then, but the efforts of lobbyists may pay off if Governor Brown signs AB 499 this month.
When parents are given information of risks and options, informed consent ethics and freedoms will not be trampled. When parents are allowed to exercise informed consent to risk-taking, they also exercise personal responsibility for the consequences of taking the risk for their children and place it where it belongs, rather than giving the State authority over the bodies of their children.
But the bottom line is that parents of minor children should have the decision-making ability to choose medical treatment for their children and be informed that this vaccine is being offered to their children. They can either consent or opt-out, but not if they won’t be given knowledge or a choice in the matter, and vaccinations are administered without notice or transparency.
12-year olds are hardly mature enough to make significant health decisions that can affect their long-term wellbeing.
The weight of a powerful pharmaceutical company, Merck, is behind the push to inoculate children and young adults from ages 9 to 26. Now California wants to make 12-year old children responsible for their own sexual medical decisions, employing the use of fear and intimidation to induce them into taking the vaccine in schools and by-passing the rights of their parents to make those important medical decisions. Parents have an inherent right to protect and care for their children. The State of California wants to take that away from them with a stroke of a pen.
