Tennessee mother wants to ban 'pornographic' book about Henrietta Lacks

It's a story that touches on bioethics, racial inequality, and medical breakthroughs, but one Tennessee parent says The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is "pornographic" and should not be read by high school students.

Henrietta Lacks was a black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951. When she was hospitalized, her cells were taken for research purposes without her consent or knowledge. Called HeLa cells, they were the first human cells to reproduce in culture, and ended up being shared among researchers and used to come up with the polio vaccine, in vitro fertilization, and more. Jackie Sims of Knoxville acknowledges that The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks does discuss important medical issues, but is written in a way that made her 15-year-old son, who was required to read it over the summer, uncomfortable. "I consider the book pornographic," she told WBIR. "It could be told in a different way. There's so many ways to say things without being that graphic in nature, and that's the problem I have with the book."

Sims said she was especially appalled by a passage about infidelity and another part where Lacks discovers she has a lump on her cervix. Her son has been granted permission by his school to read a different book, but Sims said she doesn't want any students reading it — a stance that bothers fellow Knoxville parent Shelly Higgins. "I respect each parent's right to decide what they want their child to read," she told WBIR. "I really do. My major point is: don't take that opportunity away from all the students." Higgins encourages other parents to read the book all the way through before forming an opinion.

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