My Journey Away From the Anti-Vaccine Movement

My son was as calm as a cat on a cushion when I undressed him for his two-month checkup. I lay him on the examination table in his fuzzy, sky-blue cloth diaper and watched as the nurse injected him with one vaccine after another. I knew them by heart. Hepatitis B. Diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis. Haemophilus influenzae, type B. Pneumococcal conjugate. Inactivated polio. The nurse gave them like a clockwork machine: needle, Band-Aid, needle, Band-Aid. He fussed until he tasted the sweet-flavored rotavirus vaccine, given by mouth.

“The doctor likes to wait a few minutes, just to keep an eye out for reactions,” the nurse smiled, “She’ll be here to check on you in a little while.”

The door closed and I brought my son to my breast, where he looked up at me helplessly, sighing those last few tears away. I felt myself drowning in a flood of emotions: the postpartum hormones, the feel of his tiny body in my arms, the way he looked to me for comfort. Vividly, I remembered a doctor’s visit six and a half years before—a lifetime ago, it seemed—and started crying.

My daughter’s two-month checkup was completely different from my son’s. I had marched into the doctor’s office full of youth and panic, a bold “NO VACCINES” note written on her intake forms. I didn’t want a shot going anywhere near my daughter. I had seen the stories online: horrific tales about healthy children getting an injection and immediately becoming vacant, unresponsive, screaming monsters. I had heard all about what vaccines did to kids: autism, autoimmune disease, behavioral outbursts, brain damage, life-threatening allergies. I wasn’t going to let my daughter become a statistic.

The first pediatrician my daughter saw wasn’t exactly polite about a twenty-one-year-old Google University graduate fighting a crusade against immunizations. When I spouted my speech about “too many, too soon,” the almighty Doctor Sears, and the rising rates of autism, she rolled her eyes and snapped, “You’re a lucky kid. You’ve never seen a child choke to death on his own snot from whooping cough. And I sure hope it stays that way. I have, and it’s not pretty.”

The pediatrician gave a series of fast, scientifically solid rebuttals to every single concern I raised about vaccines. She said that autism rates weren’t going up—just autism diagnoses. She said that the vaccine schedule was created by experts who spend their whole lives studying pediatric immunology, and that they know a bit better than the crunchy mom cliques on the internet. She said that vaccines work, and that I was gambling with my daughter’s life by refusing them. Every word she said made sense, but I still clung to my convictions like a talisman: no vaccines for my kid, because vaccines cause autism.

It was just two months later, and with no immunizations in between, that the same doctor examined my daughter and frowned. She pulled out a pen and wrote down a phone number.

“This is Early Intervention,” she said, “This baby has some developmental delays, and you need to get in touch with them for help.”

“What? How?”

“We don’t know what causes developmental delays. But it’s obviously not vaccines, huh?”

I felt my stomach sink. I had done everything right. How could something be wrong with her? I had eaten nothing but organic food when I was pregnant. I hadn’t touched tuna. I had taken my prenatal vitamins. I had agonized through twenty-three hours of labor without a single Tylenol. I was breastfeeding exclusively. These things were supposed to happen to other people—people who do things wrong. They weren’t supposed to happen to me.

The developmental delays became more and more pronounced. Even with physical therapy, my daughter was clumsy and awkward, struggling to balance her body when she crawled and stood. She couldn’t walk until she was sixteen months old, but by that point, she was already copying sentences she heard other people say. She wouldn’t look me in the eye, and she was extraordinarily anxious, screaming at the top of her lungs every time I tried to put her down.

Still, I buried my head in the sand for as long as I could, believing her apparent intelligence somehow negated her increasingly obvious disabilities. When she was two and a half, I wanted to show the world that she was intelligent and could memorize nearly anything. Looking to the Internet for validation, I got out my camera and started recording.

“Can you say ‘To be or not to be…’?” I asked her.

My chubby-cheeked toddler flapped her arms up and down and recited the entire famous soliloquy from Hamlet.

“Okay, now do ‘If we shadows have offended…’”

She spun around in a circle and said all the final lines of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

This went on for nearly hour while I prompted her to recite a half-dozen other soliloquies, poems, speeches, and storybooks, ending with a flawless recitation of the Preamble to the Constitution. I turned the camera off. Proud of her accomplishments and certain that such an intelligent child couldn’t possibly have anything wrong with her, I uploaded the video to YouTube. It was a few days before anyone found it. There were a few thumbs-ups and one thumbs-down, and then the first comment:

“That kid is autistic as hell. Does the mom not know?”

I deleted the video from YouTube, and then from my camera, and cried. I had my head hung low when I went to her next checkup.

“How’s she doing?” the pediatrician asked.

“How’s she doing?” my daughter parroted.

“She’s doing… great,” I said. “She’s so smart and so sweet, but I think she has autism.”

“She’s so smart and so sweet, but I think she has autism,” my daughter agreed.

The pediatrician nodded slowly. “We’ll see. We’ll get you in to see a neurologist.”

There was a long pause. My daughter had gotten a few vaccines that the doctor had managed to convince me to consent to—“just the really important ones,” I had told myself. But I couldn’t deny that she had developmental delays long before she’d gotten a single shot. I couldn’t deny that I had made a mistake. I couldn’t deny that vaccines hadn’t injured my child, and that she was simply born with any differences that she had.

“I’m ready to get her caught up on her shots,” I finally said, shaking.

The pediatrician looked like she was ready to hug me or leap into the air with joy, but instead she smiled and said, “Let’s get started, then.”

Shot by shot, my toddler—my beautiful, funny, smart, loving, clingy, crazy toddler—was injected with those miracles of medicine, weapons in the war against childhood mortality. As I watched her get that first round of shots, I felt a deep pang of regret, realizing just how naïve and ignorant I had really been. I held her in my arms to comfort her and thought about how lucky I was to live in a time and place where my mistake didn’t cost my girl her life. I thought about my grandmother’s sister dying of diphtheria at three, and about children in India left crippled by polio even today, and about outbreaks of whooping cough that were starting to make a comeback in the U.S. because of parents like me, who were afraid of vaccines.

When the low fever and fussiness passed, my toddler wasn’t any more, or any less autistic than before. With a series of therapies and books and special attention and sensory toys, she continued blossoming in her own quirky and undeniably different way and, over the course of the next several years, went on to become a precocious reader, a champion for the rights of animals, an amazing writer, a kind and caring friend, and, eventually, a doting big sister.

When I brought my son home from his two-month checkup, my daughter, then six and a half years old, was waiting for him. She clumsily ran to us with his rattle in one hand and chirped, “Did he have to get vaccinated today?”

“Yup,” I said, putting one arm around my daughter while cradling my son in the other, “Lots of them.”

“It’s okay, sweet boy,” she cooed at him, kissing his little nose, “Shots are very important. They keep you from getting sick. We don’t want you to get sick, because we love you.”

“When you were his age,” I confessed, “You actually didn’t get any vaccines.”

“Why?”

“I thought they would give you autism.”

My daughter cocked her head incredulously, holding my son’s tiny hand in hers. “Why would you think that?”

“Because I was silly. Some people on the Internet had told me that shots cause autism, and I was silly enough to believe them.”

“Couldn’t I have gotten sick?” she asked, a little sadly.

“Yes. You could have. I made a big mistake, but we’re lucky you didn’t get sick.”

“Very lucky,” she confirmed, then added matter-of-factly, “It’s okay that I have autism, but it wouldn’t have been okay if I had gotten sick or if I had died or something.”

I closed my eyes and savored the feeling of my two perfect children in my arms: my brilliant, quirky little girl and my calm, thoughtful little boy.

“You make me proud, kiddo,” I smiled.

“You make me proud, too, Mama.”

Motherhood is the most powerful force of nature. It has turned teenage girls into mature women. It has turned wild partiers into responsible mothers. It has turned reckless texters into cautious drivers. And it transformed me. I began as a frightened child who feared vaccines almost as much as I feared autism, but I am now a fully dedicated advocate for the rights of autistic people and for the medical miracles that can keep our children safe from disease. I am grateful every day that I learned from my mistakes and that I’m blessed with the opportunity to help prevent other parents from making the same mistake