In my previous post I talked about how I learned to parent with the help of the internet, and how, when my oldest son was diagnosed with autism, I came to believe that vaccination causes autism.
My Flawed Logic
In addition to completely overhauling our diets to all things organic and natural and finding all the therapies we could qualify for, I spent the next five years becoming more immersed in anti-vaccine culture. It wasn’t hard. At the time if you googled anything to do with vaccines, the entire first page would be nothing but anti-vaccine pages (Thankfully, this is no longer true and you can find a much better balance of information). This further “proved” to me that my side was “right” about vaccines. Later I learned that my belief that my side must be right on vaccines because I could find more internet searches related to anti-vaccine information is what is called the “jumping on the bandwagon” and is flawed logic.
Does vaccination cause autism?
In 2007 Jenny McCarthy shared that her son had been diagnosed with autism and she thought vaccines were to blame. Since I already had the preconceived notion that vaccines were the cause of my son’s autism, that just further solidified it. My child was just like hers! She was fixing her child, so I could fix mine, too!
She talked a lot about a study that proved that the MMR vaccine caused autism. This study, which only included 12 participants, was later found to be fraudulent. I started hearing of more parents coming out and saying their children had been damaged by vaccines. Because I heard these stories often, I assumed that the idea that vaccines often caused damage, must be true. Again, this is not logical, especially since when I was the one who created my own echo chamber of voices that supported the view of vaccines that I already had.
Every time I friended someone who thought like me, or followed an anti-vaccine page, I was creating a virtual world for myself that kept reinforcing my belief that vaccination causes autism. Every time I checked out another anti-vaccine book from the library or watched an anti-vaccination You Tube video, I was become more radical in my ideas about vaccines, though I did not know it.
As Facebook came on the scene, I looked for anti-vaccine groups and mommy groups that supported natural living. It became easy for me to believe that all intelligent, thinking mothers who “did their research” were coming to the same conclusions that vaccines were harmful because *I* only knew people who thought that way. But the truth is that in today’s virtual world we create our own reality. If I was really into cats I could go on facebook and find groups with other cat lovers, follow a bunch of cat related pages, and eventually as I scrolled through Facebook, I would myself thinking that cats were the main thing that all people think is important.
My second son was born in 2005 and was perfectly healthy. Due to my belief that vaccination causes autism, we decided to completely forego vaccines. By 2008 we knew he had no signs of autism. He was growing, thriving, talking, and completely unvaccinated. Again, this proved to me that my decision to vaccinate my oldest son was the cause of his autism. I didn’t vaccinate my second son and he didn’t have autism, which was further “proof” that my oldest son’s vaccines caused his autism. Again, I later understood that my logic here was extremely flawed.
The truth is that we also sometimes do things because they are easier. It was easier to be anti-vaccines. Living as an anti-vaxxer really wasn’t that hard. If I’m honest, it was easy. I didn’t really like having my kids get shots. It’s not fun, they cry, and it’s natural to feel bad about that. This way, I didn’t have to deal with all that. Getting exemptions for school was easy. Fill out a form, check some boxes, get it notarized, give it to the school. I didn’t have to remember to bring shot records to a new doctor because we didn’t have shot records. Easy-peasy.
I start to move from anti to pro-vaccines
As the years went by, more and more scientific evidence began to mount that showed that vaccines do not cause autism. In 2019 a study looked at over 660,000 children over an 11 year time span and found no link between vaccines and autism.
It’s funny how sometimes when you try to think back to how you became the way you are, and it can be hard to pinpoint the exact moment that your mind started to change on something. I spent about 9 years believing that vaccination causes autism and feeling completely justified in our decision not to vaccinate. I had another baby in 2012. But then the school where my husband was teaching had an outbreak of whooping cough. My husband hadn’t had any kind of booster shots for pertussis and I started wonder how I would feel if my baby came down with it. Could I live with that? The books said whooping cough was a “normal” part of childhood and natural immunity was better. But could I live with myself if my baby daughter got whooping cough? I didn’t know.
This would begin a slow evolution over the next two years to my decision to fully vaccinate my children.
