Gardasil

[Aliantha]

Gee, I thought this was going to be a serious discussion.

Personally I have had my kids vaccinated for pretty much the standard stuff such as polio, tetanus etc. I live in a country which has had the foresight to encourage people to do so in the past and now childhood measles and things like polio and tetanus are virtually unheard of.

Yes there are risks, but if I lived in a society that didn't encourage vaccination, my children would have had a much higher risk of blindness from measles or becoming cripples thanks to polio.

I very rarely take my kids to the doctor unless they're really sick. I value their own immune systems working for them and in our household we prefer to try and relieve the symptoms of common illness rather than take drugs which in most cases are unnecessary.

These are my arguments for vaccination and I would probably recommend my daughter have this injection. That being said, it wouldn't be necessary till she became sexually active, so there's every chance that I'd leave the decision up to her to make. After all, if a person is old enough to be responsible for thier sexuality, they're old enough to be responsible for their sexual health.