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.
