Why I Was Anti-Vaccine-- and Why I Changed My Mind

Note: the following is a transcript of a discussion I had in October of 2014 on a conference call with Voices for Vaccines. The conference call was a follow-up to three popular articles written by the women who now run Back from Nature. To hear my story (and those of Megan and Maranda), you can listen online for free.

The short answer to what drew me to the vaccine movement is that I

suffer from clinical anxiety. But, really, my feelings were so much

deeper than a sense of nervousness or worry. Motherhood completely

stunned me emotionally. When I became a mother, I felt like I would

prefer to die that moment than to live with the possibility of outliving

my children. I felt this total sense of panic and shock at the very idea

of anything happening to my kids. I wasn’t prepared for just how much

love I was going to have for my kids, or for the fact that I couldn’t

imagine living without them.

I was not emotionally ready to confront the fact that we live in a very

dark and scary world, or to grapple with the knowledge that, for all of

human history, mothers who loved their children just as much love mine

have had to survive losing them. It was much easier to believe that

diseases like smallpox and measles weren’t that big of a deal, than to

confront the amount of agony and loss that we’ve collectively

experienced as a species. So, the lies told by the anti-vaccine movement

were incredibly comforting to me. I really wanted to think that

so-called “childhood illnesses” had never been a big issue, because I

didn’t want to live in a world where they really were as deadly as

science and history tell us. I didn't want to live in a world where, for

hundreds of thousands of years, mothers had been forced to bury their

children much, much more often than we do today.

When I read the accounts of parents online who claimed that vaccines had

made their kids autistic, it created a perfect storm. The typical

narrative was that a completely normal, healthy, bright, neurotypical

child received a vaccine-- usually the MMR vaccine-- and, hours later,

was suddenly profoundly autistic. I know now that autism rarely, if

ever, happens along that pattern, but at the time, the idea was

unnerving for me. These parents spoke about their autistic children as

if they had suddenly ceased to be human—as if they’d stopped feeling,

thinking, and communicating. I read accounts by several parents who said

that it was exactly like losing a child, or worse. As you can imagine,

that played into my fears. I couldn’t handle the idea of a child I loved

suddenly being unrecognizable and unresponsive.

The anti-vaccine activists also seemed so much warmer and more welcoming

than people who were serious about vaccination. I think that the

pro-vaccine movement sometimes bites itself in the butt by mis-judging

the motives of anti-vaccine parents. I remember reading one pro-vaccine

advocate who said, “If you don’t vaccinate, you must not love your

children.” I’m sure that he meant well and I’m sure he really believed

it, but statements like that only further alienated me from any desire

to vaccinate my child. The fact is that I did love her, deeply, and I

was afraid for her.

I feel very lucky that I had someone who was willing and able to say the

things that I needed to hear. As I mentioned in my article for Voices

for Vaccines, my daughter’s first pediatrician had really taken a

no-nonsense attitude with me. She didn’t say that I was stupid or that I

didn’t love my child, but she did say that I was lucky because I grew up

in a time when vaccine-preventable illnesses were rare. She was an older

woman and she told me that she grew up seeing her peers paralyzed by

polio or being sick for months with whooping cough, and that she envied

the fact that I had the luxury of living in a time and place when those

diseases were extremely rare. It kind of threw me for a loop, because

this wasn’t a big, mean pharmaceutical company trying to sell me

something. This was a mother who understood how afraid I was and who

wanted to help me protect my child. She also had this way of putting the

science of vaccines into common-sense language. She didn’t talk down to

me or assume that I was stupid, but she did take what looked like an

impenetrable haze of medical terminology and make it accessible. That

really helped me feel much more comfortable having my daughter

vaccinated, even though it was a few years before I fully came to my

senses and embraced vaccines entirely.

It didn’t come to me all at once, but if I had one “Eureka!” moment, it

was when I first started having my daughter seriously evaluated for her

developmental delays. She was two and a half and I’d been given a

referral to a neurologist in Birmingham, which was about an hour’s drive

from where I was living. One of my very dear childhood friends lived

there, and when she heard I was going to be in Birmingham, she asked if

I wanted to get together, since we hadn’t seen each other in over a

decade. We were catching up and I was telling her about how I was

terrified that my daughter might be autistic. My friend said, “I’m sure

you remember that I had a lot of trouble when we were kids. It wasn’t

until pretty recently that we found out I have Asperger’s syndrome.”

--So here was someone I had known and loved since I was seven years old,

and she was telling me that she had this condition that I’d heard so

many parents describe as some horrible curse. It suddenly occurred to me

right then and there that autism wasn’t some terrible thing that robs

parents of their children. It’s just a different kind of neurology. I

thought, “Well, if my daughter grew up to be just like one of the best

friends I’ve ever had, I wouldn’t love her any less or any differently.”

Knowing that my friend was on the autism spectrum completely erased my

fears of my daughter being the same way, because it gave autism a human

face instead of making it this mysterious condition that terrified me.

Even if I’d still believed at that point that vaccines had some slim

chance of causing autism, autism was something that I was capable of

accepting as a possibility—and I’m glad that it was, since my daughter

did turn out to be on the spectrum herself.

I think that if there’s one thing that I would want to say to other

parents who fear vaccines, it’s that I understand that vaccination is

scary. I understand wanting to live in a world that isn’t teeming with

diseases that can take our kids from us. But, whether we want to admit

it or not, the world is dangerous without vaccines, and we are very

lucky to have access to them.