[A] chagrined Canadian mom announced that she is leaving the anti-vaxx movement after all of her seven children — four of them completely unvaccinated — have come down with whooping cough. Writing from quarantine, and surrounded by sick kids, Tara Hills wrote she is “emotionally, a bit raw. Mentally a bit taxed. Physically I’m fine,” before admitting that not only are her own kids sick, but they may have exposed her five-month-old niece who is too young to be fully vaccinated. What began with a cold brought into her home by her brother-in-law, turned into coughing by her kids leading to full-blown whooping cough in all seven children…. “My youngest three children were coughing so hard they would gag or vomit. I’d never seen anything like this before,” she wrote. ” Watching our youngest struggle with this choking cough, bringing up clear, stringy mucus - I had heard of this before somewhere. My mom said I had it when I was a kid. I snapped into ‘something is WRONG’ mode.”…. Jumping onto her computer, she discovered her children’s symptoms matched — almost perfectly — all the symptoms of whooping cough in a household that was woefully under-vaccinated.
Well, DUH…. Whodathunkit, eh? Turns out those nasty, awful scientists and all their high-minded science may just have been onto something. Before anyone feels the urge to pat Ms. Hills on the back for seeing the light, we should remember what it took for that to happen. Let’s not lose sight of the fact that it took her own children becoming gravely ill in order for her to understand that science actually works…and it doesn’t care what you believe. Her announcing that she’s leaving the anti-vaccine movement isn’t something she should be congratulated for; she should be investigated for child abuse. Saying that she didn’t know who to trust (Was the medical community just paid off puppets of a Big Pharma-Government-Media conspiracy?) seems merely self-serving code for “Jenna McCarthy said it. I believe it. That settles it.”
Tara Hills isn’t some sort of hero for deciding the anti-vaccine movement is wrong. She risked the health- perhaps even the lives- of her children out of ignorance, fear, and the refusal to believe that more than a century of empirical scientific research. “I snapped into ‘something is WRONG’ mode.” Yes, something was wrong, all right; she was too willfully ignorant to do the right thing by her children. The consequence of her choosing to believe anti-vaccine propaganda was that her children came down with whooping cough, an eminently preventable disease…all that was asked of her was that she do the responsible and caring thing and vaccinate her children.
The question for Ms. Hills seems obvious: Gee, didja ever stop to think that what might be wrong is YOU and your devotion to irresponsibility? Did you ever wonder if your dogmatic ignorance might have condemned your children to unnecessary exposure to and infection with whooping cough?
I appreciate that Ms. Hills has finally recognized the error of her ways, but what she fails to acknowledge is her complicity in her the unnecessary illness and needless suffering of her children. That her refusal to vaccinate her children not only exposed them to and infected them with whooping cough is bad enough, but what about her irresponsibility and culpability in similarly exposing every child her progeny came into contact with?
Hills explained that she had a hard time overcoming her biases and mistrust of “Big Pharma,” asking herself, “Could all the in-house, independent, peer-reviewed clinical trials, research papers and studies across the globe ALL be flawed, corrupt and untrustworthy?”
Now Hills says that years spent “frozen” out of fear of vaccinating her kids has the whole family frozen: confined to their home by a quarantine.
She said she hopes her mea culpa will make other families who have held back from getting their children vaccinated rethink what they are doing.
“Right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear. I understand that families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk. I want them to know that we tried our best to protect our kids when we were afraid of vaccination and we are doing our best now, for everyone’s sake, by getting them up to date. We can’t take it back … but we can learn from this and help others the same way we have been helped.”
I realize this undoubtedly will come across as rather strident, but how can a reasonable person profess sympathy for parents who refuse to take the responsible, common sense step of vaccinating their children against preventable childhood diseases? Their arrogant denial of scientific fact and rejection of sound medical advice (backed by more than a century of empirical research) not only place their own children’s health at risk, it imperils the community as a whole. There’s a very simple phrase that effectively describes such willful ignorance and craven irresponsiblity: child abuse. Who claims to love their children while exposing them to preventable childhood diseases? How can such a person be considered to be a fit mother when she’s engaged in long-running and willful child abuse?
I’m happy that Ms. Hills has finally owned up to her own ignorance, but that hardly excuses her from responsibility for facilitating the illness and suffering of her children. I’d argue that she’s a child abuser, and that her parental fitness can and should be seriously questioned. No one should be able to escape consequences for failing her children so egregiously just because she wakes up and says “OOPS! MY BAD!!” Ignorance is not an excuse, especially when that ignorance is willful and endangers the health and wellbeing of her children AND the community as a whole. Ms. Hills and her former fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine movement need to understand that decisions (especially when made willfully and in contravention of accepted common scientific wisdom) have consequences.
It long since past time that child abusers like Ms. Hills be held accountable for the abuse and neglect of their children.
