Celebrity tattoo artist Kat Von D recently announced her pregnancy with her husband Leaf Seyer of the band Prayers. In an Instagram post this Thursday, Von D lamented the “unsolicited advice” she’s been receiving as a parent.
“I knew the minute we announced our pregnancy that we would be bombarded with unsolicited advice,” Von D wrote. “Some good and some questionable.”
She then revealed some questionable plans regarding the birth and raising of her son.
“If you don’t know what it’s like have people around you think you are ridiculous, try being openly vegan,” she wrote.
“And, if you don’t know what it’s like to have the entire world openly criticize, judge, throw uninformed opinions, and curse you – try being an openly pregnant vegan on Instagram, having a natural, drug-free home birth in water with a midwife and doula, who has the intention of raising a vegan child, without vaccinations.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bjvkm1gHPPb/?utm_source=ig_embed
She went on to write that she already knows “what it’s like to make life choices that are not the same as the majority.”
“So your negative comments are not going influence my choices – actual research and educating myself will – which i am diligently doing. This is my body. This is our child. And this is our pregnancy journey.”
Fair enough. It is her body. It is her child. But her child also has a right to grow up healthy. Sadly, the research that she is “diligently doing” is hugely flawed. As Jezebel points out, the couple’s research partly consists of watching long-debunked anti-vaxxer documentaries such as Vaxxed and Trace Amounts.
From Jezebel:
Vaxxed was briefly included in the Tribeca Film Festival lineup a couple years ago, at co-founder Robert De Niro’s insistence, then pulled after an enormous public outcry. Both it and Trace Amounts are heavily touted by anti-vaccine sites like Age of Autism and the ironically-named Thinking Moms Revolution. (A secret campaign in 2015 seems to have successfully persuaded a whole lot of celebrities to watch it.)
The peer-reviewed studies deeming vaccines to be safe are overwhelming. But that does nothing to convince the anti-vax movement, which has become one of the most entrenched pseudoscience/conspiracy belief systems in the world. The negative effects of anti-vaccine ideology aren’t just speculation — it has proved itself to be hugely effective in resurrecting once-eradicated diseases in small communities across the U.S. and Europe.
Many of these disease comebacks take place in wealthy and elite communities where alternative medicine and pseudoscience quackery has become a booming industry. The vaccination rates in some wealthy California areas such as Malibu, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills are reportedly similar to the vaccination rates of South Sudan.
“It’s a sense of entitlement and it comes out of a customer mentality since they are often choosing their doctor and paying cash,” says UCLA’s Dr. Nina Shapiro, who is a vocal critic of the anti-vaccine movement.
But the entitlement also comes from living in a first-country that has been bolstered by the immense success of vaccination. Now, people who don’t know what it’s like to live with diseases like polio and small pox and measles takes this luxury for granted. Whatever ideological bubble Von D is living in has tricked her into thinking there’s something nefarious going on when governmental and science agencies push vaccines on the public. She also thinks “research” consists of browsing the internet and reading junk links from fraudulent websites.
All we can do is hope her child grows up healthy.
Featured image via YouTube
