Vaccinatons
For us, parenting has largely been cut and dry. We know how we want to parent and that’s how we parent. Without question, breastfeeding is best for both my son and myself so I breastfeed him and not a drop of formula has passed his lips. Without question, hitting is wrong and we don’t hit, spank or otherwise physically punish him. Without question, requesting unnecessary genital surgery to be performed on newborns who cannot consent is wrong and our son is intact.
Yet, beyond those issues that are cut and dry for us, there has been the issue of vaccination. I realize that for many people the issue of vaccinations is cut and dry. You don’t or you do. Vaccinations are either a godsend of modern medicine, or they’re a lie.
The issue was never that clear to us. When I was pregnant I dutifully accepted the RhoGam shot though later we learned that my husband and I share the same blood type and rh factor making the shot unnecessary. When our son was born we dutifully accepted the Hep B vaccination despite the fact that neither of us were at risk for Hep B and it was doubtful that my newborn, in the first hours of his life, would begin having unprotected sex or shooting heroin. Indeed we vaccinated him on schedule through his fourth month. After all we weren’t bad parents, were we?
Yet, each time we went to have him vaccinated, we grew more and more wary. Why weren’t we given the vaccine package inserts? Why wouldn’t the nurse answer our questions or respond to our concerns?
At four months we stopped. Knowing that we weren’t traveling for some time, and recognizing that though we can always choose to have our son vaccinated in the future but we can’t undo vaccines that have already been given, we wanted to reevaluate our choice.
What we learned changed our minds about vaccines altogether. Many vaccines are poorly tested including the newest vaccine: Gardasil. The CDC has changed the diagnostic requirements for certain vaccine-preventable diseases such as polio, so that illnesses that would have been counted as related to polio prior to mass vaccinations, were not counted after mass vaccinations thus falsely lowering the the number of cases and creating a misleading correlation between vaccination and illness. Many diseases like measles and chickenpox are relatively benign when caught during childhood and vaccines do not always provide perfect immunity for the diseases they are attempting to protect against. Not to mention the side effects for which achieving financial compensation is extremely difficult and, at times, impossible.
This post isn’t about that. This is our son’s story.
When he was a year old, eight months after his last round of shots, we noticed a small knot in his right thigh. We brought him to his check up and his doctor ordered an ultrasound. Though the ultrasound showed a clear image of the knot no one knew what it could be and we were told to keep an eye on it to see if it grows. Fortunately it appeared benign. So we watched and waited and watched and waited. And it grew and grew.
We followed up with a second ultrasound and an MRI and still no one could tell us what it was until three doctors later when it was determined to be a reaction to his 4-month vaccination. His body had reacted to the injury of the vaccinations–and it is an injury–by walling off the injection site. We had a choice: either have the lump surgically removed or pursue alternative treatment. So we chose to pursue alternative treatment. Conventional medicine had done enough to our son already.
We went with a homeopath who offered a series of remedies to counteract the vaccines and the lump on our son’s leg began to disappear. Yet after a while it returned, became large, red, inflamed and sore. At one point it was the size of a lemon. Feeling that the homeopathy was possibly failing, I called a pediatric surgeon. While waiting for him to return my call and set up an appointment for surgery, the lump developed a blister top and that eventually popped and began oozing large amounts–as in cups–of goo.
It healed but it left the scar that you see in the picture above. We’re still continuing our education on vaccinations and we will not vaccinate our son in the future or any future children we may have. We were lucky too.
August 30th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
I am not a mommy- yet- and until I took an environmental ethics class during my first semester as a grad student, I didn’t even realize that NOT vaccinating was an option. Another woman in the class had a young son who she chose not to vaccinate, and she happily shared her reasons with me, along with how she is dealing with the reactions of other parents and doctors. This is one topic my husband and I will have long talks about before we decide either way. Thanks for your post, and your willingness to share.
August 30th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
I haven’t vaccinated my 4 kids and grow more convinced of the rightness of my decision every year, as I see more of my children’s peers become sick with chronic cough/asthma, autism spectrum disorders, diabetes and other chronic diseases.
You’re right - vaxxing isn’t as cut and dry as other “natural parent” choices though. I honestly respect any parent who makes an educated decision, either way.
August 30th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Yikes, that’s scary. I started out saying we’d delay vaxes… then okay, we’ll only do this vax and that vax when they’re 5 or so… and now it’s ‘oh my goodness that stuff will never go near my child’
You’re more brave than I am, though, I don’t blog about it because my mom reads my blog. LOL! I do think they have their place, like maybe in biological warfare, but as of right now we’re opting out as well 
Cara
August 30th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
It always worries me when people choose to not vaccinate. The two biggest concerns:
A) What if your child never does get the chickenpox as a kid, then gets it as an adult? It can be very, very dangerous for an adult.
B) What if you kid does get one of these diseases and has relatively few problems with it, but passes it along to another child who due to medical reasons cannot be vaccinated and falls seriously ill (or dies)?
These two chances, to me, along with the evidence of how much different our world is due to vaccines, are the reason I would never refuse to give any offered vaccine to my kid.
August 30th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
I actually have a friend who was 35 get the chicken pox. Aside from 3 weeks of socially debilitating pox on the face he was fine. Personal experience debunks the myth of the deadly chicken pox. I suppose if he was 65 or older the consequences could have been more severe. But then, at the age of 65 even the common cold can make a body kick the bucket.
Life is competition and exploitation. If my child survives a disease that winds up killing other people we have a validation of natural selection processes. It’s the chance we all take when we done got ourselves borned.
August 31st, 2007 at 3:43 am
Vaccines are a touchy issue, but there are a few cases where they are crucial:
1 - influenza - every year many elderly and babies die from the flu when there is a vaccine available. Of course, you could try to fight it off, but then you might take drugs that make more resistant viruses.
2 - polio - nearly but not quite eradicated from the world. we could soon send this the way of smallpox.
3 - hepatitis A and B - these are things to worry about as an adult, since they are transmitted by blood and there are more and more cases of resistance every day.
That said, the method of preparation of vaccines is always possibly dangerous, since they have to be made in a lab, and can cause unpredictable reactions. I think it’s important to recognize which vaccines are necessary for you and for the world at large, and which are taken just for a possibly false sense of peace of mind.
August 31st, 2007 at 11:16 am
This always strikes such a chord for me. Don’t you wonder about the ethics of the decision to basically sponge off the vaccinations of the vast majority of the populace to “choose” not to vaccinate your own child? It’s only an “option” for you because most other people are protected from and thus not carriers of the various horrible diseases that we no longer have to encounter in the West. Your son had a negative reaction to a shot, like a very small number of people do. Do you believe that there are never any adverse reactions to alternative treatments? Similarly, why is it not OK to “request unnecessary genital surgery to be performed on newborns who cannot consent” but it is OK to withhold lifesaving medical treatment from those same non-consenting newborns/infants? There always seem to be so many more sides to this coin than non-vaccinators acknowledge.
August 31st, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Anna -
Our decision to refuse vaccines is not made of an effort to “basically sponge off the vaccinations of the majority.” No, it is made with great concern for our son’s long-term health. Indeed, I wish fewer people were vaccinated so that I would have an easier time exposing him to relatively harmless diseases like measles or chickenpox so that he could acquire immunity naturally.
I agree with you that withholding lifesaving medical treatments from newborns and infants is unacceptable, but a vaccine is not a lifesaving treatment which I believe was the message you are attempting to express. Indeed, the only vaccine currently offered to newborns is the HepB vaccine, and very, very few newborns are at risk for HepB. No, a vaccine is not a lifesaving treatment; it is an attempt at preventing illness, and vaccines have their own side effects including death and are often ineffective. A potentially preventative measure and a lifesaving treatment are not the same thing.
August 31st, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Jenny - Well said. Thank you for your courage to post such a personal experience. I understand that this is a subject that can cause emotions to run high, but I find it disturbing that a parent shares this type of experience and the first thing people want to do is attack them for not protecting the rest of the population. A parent’s primary ethical responsibility is to the safety and well-being of their child. Rather than attacking a parent’s intuitive response to protect their child from another such experience, why are we not questioning the safety of vaccine ingredients? It is not the preparation of vaccines that is dangerous but the contents of the vaccines themselves - many contain heavy metals, as well as human and animal by-products, the inclusion of which I find to be ethically questionable. http://www.informedchoice.info/cocktail.html
August 31st, 2007 at 6:38 pm
That’s another reason why I choose not to address this on my own blog
With regards to acquiring Chickenpox as an adult, the chickenpox vaccine isn’t good for longer than 7 years at the most. I got all my childhood vaccinations, but I’m willing to bet that now (at age 24) if you ran my titers I would no longer be immune to 80% of them. The same would go for chickenpox, if your child is vaccinated against chickenpox at age 5, he will need to be vaccinated every 5-10 years (or so) to keep his immunity. If your child got chicken pox at age 5, he would have life long immunity. If an adult who had the chicken pox vaccine and has never gotten chicken pox, but hasn’t had his vaccines updated, he is just as at-risk for getting chicken pox as a child who was never vaccinated and never contracted chicken pox.
September 12th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
As a father of two ASD boys, I really appreciate your blog and the information you post!