“These people shouldn’t even have children,” my co-worker railed. Another piped in: “The parents should be arrested for neglect!” We were in an editorial meeting in a Midtown Manhattan magazine office, batting around the news of the day, and the issue of non-vaccinators had come up. This was 1999, and the anti-vax movement was just beginning to stir in the U.S., but in those days it was associated with people on the furthest-left edge of society: hippies, homesteaders, and other holdouts from the counterculture of the ’60s. Normal people didn’t question the advice of the medical establishment, and neither did my older and far more conservative co-workers at this classic women’s magazine.
Listening to them eviscerate the parents who would deny vaccines to their kids, I shrank in my seat—which was hard to do, because I was seven months’ pregnant with my first child. The truth was, I was likely to become exactly the type of parent they were lambasting. I was considering not vaccinating my baby, and that was only the beginning. Other things I planned to keep away from my child included plastic toys and cups (endocrine disrupters); snack foods that are wickedly marketed to children (high-fructose corn syrup, seed oils, artificial colors); fast food (gross); and disposable diapers (landfill cloggers). I also planned to serve my kid home-baked bread and foods with a minimum of processed ingredients, white flour, and sugar.
Does this all sound familiar? Minus the political views, I was a MAHA mom before my time—highly skeptical of the status quo and willing to forge my own path to health.
Read more
