FREEDOM FOR WOMEN.

Throughout my blog I have analyzed what Canada’s current HPV policies means for and to women. As a result I have adopted a liberal feminist’s view, insisting on freedom as a fundamental right for women. However, in examining and often reexamining the surplus of issues associated with women, feminism and HPV I have been forced to redefine my own concept of freedom. Freedom for women has become an extremely convoluted subject within Canada in the year 2008 as women’s personhood is legally recognized, suffrage has been achieved, and freedom of choice has prevailed. With women having been granted these obvious rights, the oppression of women within Canadian society has become much more subtle. Canada’s position on vaccination of HPV has therefore become a microcosm for the implicit oppression which women face today.

Many complexities exist in attempting to truly understand what freedom means within the context of the HPV debate. Is freedom, as the public information campaign for the vaccination contends, ‘opening your eyes’ to cervical cancer and being ‘one less?’ or is freedom having the right to choose between vaccination or preventative measures such as pap testing, condom use, and partner choice? I, as a liberal feminist would argue for the later. True freedom within the twenty first century is found in women having the power of choice. The proponents of this vaccine would argue that this freedom is granted as women or more aptly the parents of young girls can deny their daughter the vaccine. However in evaluating if women are truly free within this choice I must question if all girls who choose preventative measures as their combatant against HPV have equal access to doctors for regular pap tests and condoms. Within Canada’s overwhelmed health care system, granting all women and girls, including marginalized populations access to sexual health tools, would be essential in giving women freedom in choosing whether or not to vaccinate themselves or their daughters.

Education and information surrounding the vaccine is also necessary should women be granted true freedom. Freedom to choose whether or not to vaccinate is NOT found in the current public health campaigns’ bombardment of advertisements on young women, which fail to address the scope of issues (which are discussed in prior posts but include the limited scope of the testing of the vaccine, the actual likelihood of HPV leading to cancer, the failure to vaccine young men, and the personal tools one can use to avoid contracting HPV or having it escalate to cancer. In educating women, that if they value their lives or their daughters’ lives and do not want to cope with the enormity of cervical cancer they should just get vaccinated, and ignoring ALL the other issues associated with the vaccine, women are not given the freedom to make an educated choice. Instead the politics of fear are used to push and pressure young women to assume the physical and often financial repercussions of the HPV vaccine for themselves and for their partner. Now where is the freedom in that?