Dialogue: Epidemic? No, screening's our liberalisation

Let me begin my championing of cervical screening by sharing a small piece of information that you'd probably prefer I kept to myself.

I know a large number of people who've had colposcopies. Just think about this for a second. In any random group of, say, 10 of one's female cronies, there will be at least two who've had a colposcopy, a cone biopsy, what-have-you (you tend to get on to these topics after the fourth or fifth wine). Nobody's ashamed of it. It's an operation that seems very commonplace.

It is, too. The Health Funding Authority reported purchasing about 24,000 colposcopies nationwide in its last reporting year. Like abortion, it's an operation that bulks reasonably large on the female cognitive landscape. Everyone's had one or knows someone who has.

Now, a few of you will think that's another way of saying that I know a lot of sluts. I know you guys. You'll be packaging up copies of endless studies that link female promiscuity to cervical cancer, plus the usual crate of Bibles, to send me in the hope that I might wake up to myself.

Save yourselves the bother on this occasion. Female promiscuity is (and probably always was) part of the landscape. Most girls of one's acquaintance have notched up 10 to 20 sexual partners by the time they're 30. That seems about average.

But anyway, you see my point. Females today are sexually liberated. They see (or perhaps I should say saw, I'm talking pre-Bottrill here) cervical smear tests, and any treatment they have thereafter as an integral part of that liberation.

The bottom line (no pun there) is that a comprehensive cervical screening programme stands as a tacit acknowledgement that women shouldn't have to pay the ultimate price for sleeping with half of Auckland. A comprehensive screening programme speaks of, if you will, a societal open-mindedness on the topic of female morals.

It is thus that I become a little concerned when I read others calling the point of cervical screening programmes into question. It feels as though they're making some sort of political statement about the average female's right to believe that she shouldn't have to pay for sharing it round.

Such commentators don't always make negative statements about female sexual liberation. What they do, though, is use crises like the Bottrill one to call the whole concept of screening into question.

Germaine Greer is probably the best (non-local) example. Boy, is she getting old and confused. In The Whole Woman, a 350-page ode to the female victim mentality she published last year, she has a truly daffy chapter on the subject of cervical screening.

She tries to argue that smear tests have been oversold, and are largely inconclusive and have achieved very little apart from putting the fear of God into women, raining on sexual liberation's parade and so on.

Her argument seemed to be that because relatively few women developed cervical cancer each year (she estimated about 5000 in Britain), it was better to turn a blind eye to them, in the interests of saving those who didn't have it unnecessary fear.

She claimed testing had created "an epidemic of terror" among women when, in fact, it has been nothing of the kind. I don't remember a single female friend, colleague or acquaintance ever once telling me that she was nervously awaiting the results of a smear test.

People always think they're going to be fine (which is, I grant you, a cruel irony in light of the current test-reporting debacle).

We go back for a reason - the reason being, of course, that having a regular test is better than having none at all. How else do you explain the fact that most deaths from cervical cancer take place mainly in places like Africa, Asia and Latin America, places where very few women are tested?

Why use the current test-reading scandal as an excuse to suggest that screening has not been - for the most part - wildly liberating and important?