By Wendy Ross Kaplan a LuxEcoLiving Advocate and contributor
A Parent's Right to Know
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.
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Nancy Chuda is a seasoned broadcast journalist, television writer/producer, talk show host and author. Her career spans over three decades having appeared on both national and cable television.
In 1971 she authored one of America’s first low-calorie cookbooks, How To Gorge George Without Fattening Fanny, published by Hawthorn Books. Appearing as a regular guest on Dinah’s Place, Dinah Shore’s ABC daytime talk show. And later on The Johnny Carson Show, The Today Show with Barbara Walters, Merv Griffin, Phil Donahue, and David Frost. In 1972, Nancy and ABC’s Good Morning America co-produced Michael Krause produced a cable program, The Low- Calorie Gallery, based on her best selling cook book. In 1975, hired by Warner-Amex as part of a creative team, she was responsible for hosting and producing content for Columbus Then and Now, a program, the invention of QUBE, an interactive television system which played a pivotal role in the history of American cable television. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUBE
In 1978 she developed a series for ABC’s Good Morning America based on an article which appeared in Mother Earth News magazine. The Integral Urban House, a case study project and model for a sound urban habitat sponsored by the Farallones Institute in Berkley California was the first example of green architecture ever to be televised.
In 1979, Nancy co-produced and hosted Sunnyside a Los Angeles based public affairs program viewed on the CBS affiliate station KNXT, From 1980-1984, she appeared on KABC’s Eyewitness News as entertainment reporter and film critic.
Her environmental advocacy began when her daughter was diagnosed with cancer. In 1990 she co-produced an Emmy nominated ABC Variety Special, An Evening With Friends For The Environment to benefit Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet one of the first national children’s environmental health advocacy groups in which she served as a volunteer.
Currently, she is the co-founder and President Emeritus of Healthy Child Healthy World, a non-profit organization established to honor the Chuda’s only child, Colette, who died in 1991 at the age of 5 from Wilm’s tumor a nonhereditary childhood cancer. She is also the co-founder of The Colette Chuda Environmental Fund, a donor-advised fund which supports major epidemiological research on children’s health.
Nancy has won numerous awards for her advocacy. In 1996, the California League of Conservation Voters Environmental Leadership Award, The Healthy Schools Heroes Award, presented to both her and her husband James Chuda by California Governor Gray Davis for their legislative efforts in securing The Healthy Schools Act which was signed into law in September, 2000. In 2003, Parent’s Magazine published an article Mom’s On A Mission and awarded Nancy for her environmental leadership for children’s environmental health.
She serves as an associate of the Director’s Council of Public Representatives of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and was appointed by President Clinton’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Donna Shalala, to serve as a member of the National Advisory Council for the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) a position she held for four years.
In 2010, along with her husband James she founded LuxEcoLiving.
