Should 11-year old girls be mandated to get HPV vaccine?

Is it me or is there something wrong with the logic of the Gardasil debate? In a nation that has been reluctant to allocate public resources to teaching safe sex to our high schoolers, the move toward universal vaccination of pre-adolescent girls against a sexually transmitted disease seems illogical. Is the thought that we will teach them to abstain, but if that does not work, no need to teach them anything else -- they can just go ahead and have sex with impunity, as long as they are protected against HPV by the vaccine? What about unwanted pregnancy? What about HIV and other sexually transmitted illnesses? And how can we collude with such taciturn matter-of-factness in normalizing the idea that 11 years is an OK age for a child to make her sexual debut?

The manufacturer of Gardasil, in the name of public health, is calling for the government to mandate this as yet another vaccination required for school entry. This may make sense in a third-world country, where access to Pap smears is poor and the chances of using a condom are culturally slim, but in the US this seems over-the-top. How about instead, in the name of public health, halting the confusion of conflicting messages about sexual activity?

I know that once my kids are teens I will have very little to say about how they exercise their judgment. What I can hope for is that through honest dialogue I am preparing them now for the decisions they will be making on their own. One of the lessons we emphasize is that actions have consequences. Pushing Gardasil as the solution to a culturally created problem takes personal and societal responsibilities out of the equation. Yes, we may avoid a few cases of cervical cancer and even deaths from it, but we will have forgone the opportunity to teach our children to exercise their personal choices, responsibility and common sense. Moreover, we will be promoting further the culture of "a pill for everything", a philosophy that has brought our healthcare "system" to the brink of bankruptcy and our nation to unprecedented rates of bad behavior.

In view of the recent questions about the vaccine's risk-benefit profile, caution is needed more than ever. Vaccines should be mandated for highly infectious diseases spread via casual contact, likely to cause unmitigatable and frequent morbidity and mortality, and only if their benefits outweigh their risks. Gardasil fails this entire formula: HPV is pretty hard to get, cervical cancer is nearly 100% curable if detected early, and the vaccine's risk-benefit profile is in question. It is entirely clear that HPV is not smallpox. Let's stop pushing this false panacea on our kids and get back to teaching them the valuable skills and judgment that will serve them well as good people and responsible citizens of our nation.