Sarah Price Brown: When The Los Angeles Times reported Friday on a breakthrough vaccine to prevent cervical cancer, the newspaper raised a cause for concern. “Vaccinating children against a sexually transmitted disease could inadvertently be perceived as endorsing promiscuity,” Thomas H. Maugh II wrote, quoting a Christian conservative doctor who claimed that giving the vaccine to girls might send them the wrong “message.” Maugh may have been justified in giving voice to a religious perspective in an article about science. After all, some Christian conservatives abstinence advocates have spoken out against the vaccination (which immunizes against HPV, the virus that can cause cervical cancer), arguing, as did Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, that the vaccine was “potentially harmful,” “because [young women] may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.”

Still, Maugh waits until the end of his piece to slip in this religious opposition, as if it were the counterweight to all the previous evidence about the benefits of the vaccine. By giving the religious conservative the last word, Maugh lends authority to his argument. In doing so, Maugh suggests there are two ways to look at the vaccine: On the one hand, it can be good. On the other hand, it can be bad. Such relativism does not belong in a piece announcing a medical discovery that could save many of the 250,000 lives lost each year to cervical cancer.