Your Feelings About Vaccines Don't Trump Another Child's Medical Reality [View all]

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/28400-your-feelings-about-vaccines-dont-trump-another-childs-medical-reality

We are experts in what our children like to wear to bed, and what toy they’re favoring. We know their smiles, their sleep sounds and the way they mess up putting on their sneakers. But despite the platitudes thrown at mothers – that we’re doing the hardest job in the world and that motherhood is also being a chef, chauffeur and doctor – the truth is that we do not know everything about our children and what is best for them. That’s why we have real doctors. And no matter how condescended one feels by the medical establishment – and I’ve had that feeling myself – it does not excuse putting other children’s lives at risk.

Risking other children’s lives, and other parents’ pain, is exactly what you’re doing when you don’t vaccinate your child: you’re not just making decisions about your children’s health, but the health and safety of the children around them. Children like mine.

Layla was born extremely premature, and because of her low birth weight and underdeveloped lungs, her immune system was not up to par for years. She got sick more easily and more drastically than other children. The first two years of her life were filled with too many emergency room visits, doctors, shots, antibiotics and other medical interventions.

She was at such risk, in fact, that our pediatrician recommend that we keep her out of daycare and away from groups of children for as long as possible, so we cared for her at home for two years – a luxury we could afford but many other families cannot. But every time she played with a child at the park or a doctor’s waiting room, I was terrified.

So when I read quotes from parents denying any social responsibility to vaccinate saying things like, “My child is pure ... It’s not my responsibility to be protecting their child,” it makes me livid. Where once we said “it takes a village”, these days some people don’t care if the village burns to the ground so long as their precious snowflake is left standing.