Anti-Vaxxer's Change of Heart Reveals Selfish Side of Parenting

A Chicago-area special education teacher revised her anti-vaccination views after her three children contracted rotavirus last year, something innoculations could've prevented, she wrote last week in an op-ed piece in the New York Post.

"All three of my kids had rotavirus, the potentially deadly form of diarrhea that could so easily have been prevented if I’d gotten them vaccinated," Kristen O'Meara wrote in the article that was published Sept. 20. "The guilt was overwhelming. But I thanked my lucky stars that they were neither newborn babies nor medically fragile, the type of children rotavirus can snatch from this world in a heartbeat."

O'Meara, 40, said she was "raised in a 'crunchy' family that questioned authority and the status quo," which helped cultivate and develop her beliefs against vaccinations after the birth of her first daughter in 2010. That led to her becoming immersed in the anti-vax culture, and O'Meara admitted that her stance against inoculations made her feel superior to other parents.

"Parents who vaccinated didn’t have my special investigative skills," she wrote. "As far as I was concerned, they didn’t stop to question and were just sheep following the herd."

That irony of feeling like an individual by bucking the conventional wisdom crowd only to follow a counter group demonstrates an unsettling undercurrent in the anti-vaccination culture O'Meara describes, an undercurrent that seems to be about earning parenting bragging rights and maintaining Top Mom or Top Dad status in social media circles.

Parenting is an imperfect and inexact science, and telling a mothers and fathers how they should raise their children from the outside looking in is the height of eogtism. As misguided as anti-vaccination beliefs are, it's hard to think that the parents don't have their children's best interest at heart.

But to hear O'Meara talk about losing her best friend over changing her views about vaccines, one has to wonder if people can't be pressured to live up to the expectations of their peers in their personal parenting communities. Or to be seduced by the self-satisfication that comes when those same individuals approve of your child-rearing choices.

"When I shared with [her then-best friend] that I’d changed my mind, there was an instant feeling of tension," O'Meara wrote. "Our relationship didn’t immediately end, but it went downhill from there. Perhaps she thought I was judging her."

We sometimes forget that parentng isn't like Olympic gymnastics. It's not about judges scoring your performance in the Daddy Shows Daughter the Importance of Sharing event. As parents, the best you can do is to do the best you can do to raise a healthy, productive member of society. You'll make mistakes, but you learn from them.

That's what O'Meara did. Her children are fully vaccinated now, and she has joined a pro-vaccination group.

"[I]n the end I am thankful, for the sake of [her children,] Natasha, Áine and Lena, that I was able to reassess my position and accept information that is based on well-established, sound scientific evidence," O'Meara wrote.

She might've been late to the vaccination game, but ultimately, she did what's best for her children, and that's what good parenting is about.

More via New York Post

photo via Shutterstock

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