Day 24: Why I Don't Plan to Vaccinate My Newborns (and It Has Nothing to do With Autism)

On the heels of the recent measles outbreak in the U.S., I've been seeing a lot of talk about how we need to push vaccinations even harder. There's been some legislation proposed that would eliminate those waivers parents can sign, so their kids can go to school without vaccinations. 

Most of what I've seen, though, are just angry, mean rants against any "idiot" parent who wouldn't "do the right thing" and vaccinate their child.

Because everybody knows, the way to change people's minds is by mocking, ridiculing, and insulting them, right?

The other thing I've seen is article after article, disproving the link between vaccines and autism.

We get it, ok? Vaccines have NEVER been proven to cause autism. There is a correlation between the rise of vaccinations and the rise of autism:

But there is ALSO a correlation between US spending on science stuff, and suicides by hanging.

So unless you want to argue that the government is paying people to hang themselves, I think we can all agree that correlation in no way proves CAUSATION.

You know what IS true about vaccinations, though? They're full of heavy metals. They're full of chemicals. Some of them are grown on the tissue of aborted babies. The studies proving that they're safe are paid for by the same companies profiting off of their sales. Does that mean I think vaccinations are bad, or deadly, or should never ever be given? No way. 

You know what I do think, though? I think that way too often, the problems with vaccines aren't discovered until years later. Not too long ago, they realized they were putting too much mercury in the vaccines, and they took a bunch of it out. Which is great! Except for the kids who got vaccinated before they figured that out.

A vaccine reduces a specific risk for your child, but increases other risks. The HPV vaccine, when given to young girls, can sometimes cause them to contract cervical cancer. Might they have contracted it anyway, down the road, if they hadn't been vaccinated? Definitely. Would it have happened at ten years old? Less likely. The Hepatitis B shot an infant receives at the hospital will usually protect that baby against Hepatitis B. But there is also a small chance that it could cause them to contract Hepatitis B, or cause a stroke, or cause a fever so high they have brain damage.

Everybody wants to protect their child. EVERYBODY. But vaccines aren't this magical thing some people seem to think. EVERY vaccine has a tiny chance of giving the baby the full-blown version of the disease it protects against--a disease that your baby wouldn't even be exposed to in any place except--you guessed it--the hospital or doctor's office where they received the vaccination.

Now for some people, I think vaccines are the better bet. If you're a traditional American family and you have your baby in the hospital, surrounded by foreign germs; you take your kid to daycare starting at two weeks old, where they're surrounded by snotty little boogermonsters; you feed your kid a steady diet of formula and pre-packaged snacks. Then it's a good idea to vaccinate. That's one way of doing things. It's a totally valid way of doing things, and you raise your kid that way because you love them and you're doing what you think is right. 

I go in for a different kind of lifestyle. I'm a weird, crunchy kind of gal. I want to give birth at home, breastfeed, and be a stay at home mom. I want to homeschool my kids until they're around 7. This is also a valid way of doing things, and I want to raise my future kids this way because I'll love them, and I'll be doing what I think is right.

For my lifestyle, I don't think vaccinating my infants would be smart. The vaccines themselves would be exposing my babies to germs they would never be encountering otherwise, and at an age where their immune systems are at their weakest. Once my kids are ready to go to a regular school with other kids, then I would take them and get them caught up on vaccinations. I have done a lot of research, and I don't find any convincing arguments about WHY all of these vaccinations have to be done when the kids are so tiny, except that the normal expectation is for the babies to be born in the hospital and go to daycare soon after.

I wish that in this debate, we could all just respect each other, and give people the benefit of the doubt. Instead of assuming that one group is a bunch of backwater hillbillies who don't care about the survival of our species, and the other group is a bunch of brainwashed sheep who believe anything the industrial medical complex tells them without doing any of their own research, why don't we all operate on the assumption that we're all just people, trying to do the best we can with the information we have?

And as far as the measles outbreak goes, I don't know what to tell you, except: stop getting so scared every time the news covers a big outbreak of sickness. Ebola, the swine flu, measles? These risks are MINUSCULE compared to the risk you take every day by driving a car, or sitting on your butt for longer than 20 minutes at a time, or eating saturated fats. They get news coverage because they sound so scary, and we're easily manipulated into panicking--and panic sells newspapers. Well, ok, not any more, but panic gets page views. Yes, it is heartbreaking that any parent has to watch their child die, especially from something like measles. But the chance of contracting measles is ALWAYS there: remember, the vaccine can CAUSE full-blown measles. That possibility is never going away. You aren't scared of measles: you're scared of the fact that you can't control life. You can't control everything that happens to your child. And it's ok to be scared of that. It's a scary fact. As soon as you love someone, you have to face the possibility that you could lose them. And maybe it's easier to get mad at a bunch of crunchy-granola hippies who won't vaccinate than it is to face that fact.