Tristan is 2 months old today. To celebrate, we shot him up with diseases. Maybe you're already choking on your kombucha as you search for a pen to write me some hate mail on the back of a Whole Foods receipt. Chill. I have vaxed and not vaxed and delay vaxed, and I've done the research and such. I am honestly pretty neutral either way, so do whatever you want.
Where it got tricky for me was a few months ago, when my friend Susan started blogging about the connection between certain vaccines and aborted fetal stem cells. As a pro-life parent, this is horrifying. Basically, there are a few stem cell lines that have been used to develop these vaccines for over 40 years. The good news is, some of the vaccines affected have an alternate vaccine. You can look at a pretty good chart here, although the graphics are a little early 90's.
I found out Tristan was scheduled to receive Pentacel today, which is one of those lines. Here's the deal... I have a lot of respect for medicine. My micro-preemies ALL had their lives saved multiple times by medical technologies and interventions. I don't buy everything a doctor says, necessarily, but I respect their knowledge and I hear what they have to say. So I was a little paranoid about going in there wild-eyed waving papers I printed off the internet.
I did print the charts, though. I tried to use 2 different websites, to have a little more credibility, and I explained up front that I had ethical concerns about Pentacel, a cocktail of 3 vaxes in one injection. Interestingly, she had heard of the stem cell controversy, and she said she had a chart in her office mapping which vaxes were connected, but she hadn't heard the Pentacel was one.
There were a couple of alternatives given on the sheet I printed: Pediarix, which was another cocktail, but no fetal cells, and the other option was individual injections of the 3. We had to go with the separate shots, since they didn't have Pediarix. (we probably could have requested it and come back, but I was okay with the solo shots). In the end, he got 5 shots instead of 3. It gets a little trickier when he gets older, as some of the 1+ yr vaxes don't have easy alternatives. It was good, though,that this pedi really respected my making this decision on moral grounds. I think when we get to that age, she might not have an objection to us not using those vaxes. Regardless, we won't be getting them.
If you want more info on all this, there is a lot on Moral Outcry, just search "vaccines" on there, or Google something like "which vaccines have aborted fetal stem cells".
Oh, and Tristan? TEN pounds 12 ounces. Developmentally perfectly on track. After his shots he cried for about 30 seconds and then tried to eat my shoulder, so, good.
Oh my goodness. I had no idea about the vaccines! Not that I would have ever needed to at this point, since I don't have kids... It just makes me wonder how many people out there have no clue what is being injected into their children. Wow. Horrifying is correct.
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