Roe’s Collateral Damage

By Ken Concannon
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 3/29/07)

For more than 33 pro-lifers have been warning that the wholesale acceptance of abortion mandated by the Supreme Court’s abortion decisions 34 years ago would ultimately lead to other assaults on innocent human life in the form of infanticide and euthanasia. But little has been said about the collateral damage emanating from our abortion culture, namely the willingness to expect immoral behavior from society at large and the reluctance to make moral judgments relating to personal behavior.
The basic premise upon which the Roe decision based its abortion right was “privacy,” a privacy that guaranteed to women, and men, the right to behave as sexually irresponsibly as they wanted to, even if continuation of their sexual recklessness required them to kill their own unborn children. Given the Roe license to behave badly we now have a society that does exactly that. And because it is a generally accepted license we expect bad behavior and we’re afraid to criticize it.
The Roe license to bad behavior has created problems never imagined by right-to-lifers 30 years ago. The most recent example is, as I write this, sitting on the desk of Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, waiting for his signature.
By substantial majorities of both Democratic and Republican legislators the Virginia Assembly voted to amend the state’s vaccination requirements for school children to include Gardasil, a vaccine which, according to its manufacturer, protects sexually active women from four strands of the human papillomavirus (HPV), two of which cause cervical cancer. The vaccine is supposedly most effective when applied before women become sexually active, which is why the new vaccine legislation is targeting prepubescent little girls.
The new legislation -- which when signed into law will become effective next year -- requires little girls to be vaccinated with the vaccine before entering the sixth grade in either public or private schools. Parents who choose to do so may opt their daughters out of the HPV vaccination requirement once they have read material provided by the state that describes the link between HPV and cervical cancer.
The state’s information packet, however, fails to inform parents that the vaccine may not be safe for our children. In a press release issued last year National Vaccination Information Center president Barbara Loe Fisher said that “Nobody at Merck [the manufacturer], the CDC or FDA know if the injection of Gardasil into all pre-teen girls - especially simultaneously with hepatitis B vaccine - will make some of them more likely to develop arthritis or other inflammatory autoimmune and brain disorders as teenagers and adults.”
Inherent in this legislation is the assumption, obviously believed by most state legislators, that virtually all our teenage girls will become sexually active long before marriage. The expectation of bad behavior, namely teenage promiscuity, is the excuse for ignoring the unknown dangers to their health that could be caused by the vaccine.
Of course, mandating the potentially dangerous Gardasil vaccine is only the most recent example of the Roe bad behavior license at work. Evidence of Roe detritus is all around us, and we don’t have to look very far. Pornography works its way into homes through television sets and personal computers. Movie theatres, which before Roe were safe havens for family entertainment, are now outlets for a constant stream of sleaze spewed out by Hollywood. And if children play outside unsupervised they are targets for a pedophile community whose populati on has exploded since Roe.
What was once universally frowned upon as perverse sexual activity is now celebrated on a number of college campuses during the month of October as Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) Pride Month. Thanks to the liberal elite the GLBT community has succeeded in elevating itself to the status of an oppressed minority. Anyone who publicly says anything negative about homosexual activity is accused of hate speech and labeled a bigot. This, too, affects our children.
The primary victims of the abortion culture have always been children – the nearly 50 million unborn aborted since the Roe decision and the untold millions born innocent into a society determined to lure them into sexual irresponsibility. To protect our daughters from one possible consequence of the promiscuity they are being lured into, our wise legislators have decided to inject a potentially dangerous chemical into them while they are still innocent. If only our legislators could figure out a way to protect them from society.

Concannon is a freelance writer from Manassas.

(c) Copyright 2007 by Arlington Catholic Herald