CNSNews.com reporter Penny Starr — who likes to make false, alarmist claims about how morning-after pills cause abortion — has a freakout about someone else’s supposed alarmist claim in a May 19 CNS article:
Dr. Vanessa Cullins, vice president for external medical affairs at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, says in a video that the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is a sexually transmitted disease that everyone will contract.
“In terms of sexually transmitted diseases, expect to have HPV once you become sexually intimate,” says Cullins, who is an obstetrician and gynecologist. “All of us get it.”
Starr’s only source of rebuttal is Dr. Donna Harrison, “executive director and director of research and public policy at the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists,” so you know it’s biased:
Harrison said an HPV diagnosis can “change a woman’s life forever.”
Harrison said she also is sexually active as a married woman but she has not contracted the virus because she is in a monogamous relationship.
“That is the safest way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases,” Harrison said.
Neither Harrison nor Starr mention Gardasil, a vaccine that can prevent HPV infections, but Starr’s fellow Media Research Center co-workers have been busy fearmongering about that. Her article, oddly, includes a picture marked as “HPV vaccine.”
Starr doesn’t seem to be upset that Planned Parenthood may be overstating the prevalence of HPV — even she concedes that “79 million Americans are infected with the virus” — but, instead, she’s upset that Planned Parenthood and the Centers for Disease Control are living in the real world, not in her right-wing Christian world, and do not mention abstinence as a way to avoid catching HPV.
Also, this Planned Parenthood video Starr is writing about is not a new one — it was released in 2009. Starr does not explain why it took her five years to write about it.