Sadly, a big disseminator of this nation’s recent anti-vaccine hysteria has come from parenting blogs on the Internet – widely referred to as “mommy blogs.”
Whether that label hints at a veiled sexism is for another article, but for every person with a domain name doling out pseudoscience to their tens of thousands of followers, there are websites out there run by people who are actually interested in facilitating an honest dialogue, who don’t rely on unfounded claims to whip up panic to generate ad revenue.
Scary Mommy is one of those blogs. Jill Smokler, the site’s creator, doesn’t hesitate to ask and discuss the questions about parenthood some may be too uncomfortable to bring up. Smokler’s website “consists of an on-site confessional where moms can anonymously share whatever is on their minds in a judgment free environment, a pregnancy, baby, and travel guide, active and passionate message boards and the original blog, written by Jill and a talented team of writers.”
But when it comes to the subject of vaccines, the site’s content isn’t exactly “judgement free.”
In a recent post entitled, “7 Sarcastic Reasons Not To Vaccinate Your Children,” staff writer Lola Lolita brilliantly exposes what may be the real reasons some parents allow themselves to become anti-vaxxers:
1. You plan for them to live in isolation for the rest of their lives. If you’re going to start a commune filled with unvaccinated people who make their own food and weave their own clothing and have zero contact with the outside world ever, you probably don’t need to vaccinate your kids.
2. You plan to wrap your kids up in a giant bubble for eternity. If a life of solitude isn’t your jam, you could always fashion an impenetrable globule around your children to protect them from rubella. Sure, they might not have any friends, but at least you saved them from that .000001 percent chance they’d die from getting the MMR.
3. You plan to douse your children in bleach. If you believe proper hygiene and diet is the best way to prevent communicable disease, dedication is the key to success. This means no fewer than seven bleach baths per day and, oh, don’t forget to feed them lye sandwiches as well. It’s best to tackle these things both inside and out.
4. You believe “those things” only happen to other people. If you’ve got a knack for stopping bad shit in its tracks by adopting a that-stuff-only-happens-in-third-world-countries attitude, I’d say you can forego vaccinating your kids. Seems legit to me.
5. You somehow know more about disease prevention than people who dedicate their lives to its research. Don’t have a medical degree or nearly a lifetime of investigating deadly disease prevention under your belt? No worries! If you think you know better than the people with advanced education and thousands of hours of experience in this field, you’re good.
6. You can magically protect your family with positive thinking. If you’ve had success stymieing misfortune by sharing memes with gratifying platitudes on social media and meditating in fields of sunflowers, I say forget about vaccination — light some patchouli and bring on the healing up in this mofo!
7. Total world domination is your goal. Perhaps your intent is to wipe out as many people as possible by potentially passing on preventable diseases in an effort to make herd immunity your bitch. If so, you definitely shouldn’t vaccinate. Nothing says you mean business quite like biological warfare.
Check out Scary Mommy’s Facebook page here. Featured image courtesy of io9.
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