Vaccines, feminism, autism, motherhood

In discussions across the Web, a theme that emerges repeatedly is, "Should a mother have her child vaccinated?" Yes, "balanced" media outlets say "parent," but the reality is that this discussion occurs primarily among mothers. A peek, for example, at the comments on this post over at BlogHer gives you an idea of how the discussions percolate, with the mother having the final decision (and leaves me wondering, "How does one keep 'x-rays to a minimum,' exactly?). Interestingly, in my excursions through commentary on the Internets, I encounter quite a bit of "Dad says yes vs. Mom says no" stories.

And vaccination, it would seem, is a very maternal concern. We are often (usually? almost always?) the ones who take the little ones to the doctor, oversee the jab(s), nod our heads, initial the papers, expose them to the risks. Yes, there are risks. But as I've noted repeatedly on this blog, the benefits of vaccinations--personally and for society--far far outweigh the risks. By values of many orders of magnitude.

Thus, the womanly associations are intertwined with choosing or not choosing to vaccinate a child, and a maternal scrum invariably results from any news story about it, especially in the unsupportable climate of fear over the innocuous (pardon the pun) H1N1 vaccine. I've noted in my travels through the world of vaccine commentary that it's just fine for a woman and a mother to state that she's not having her child vaccinated, but if a woman clearly states that she is or argues on the side of rationality, well...that's tantamount to child abuse. And brings on accusations of exactly that.

Nowhere do the shrieking misogynist hordes come out torches flaring more than they do on anti-vax autism sites. While it's perfectly acceptable on those sites to claim maternal protectiveness of your child and deride vaccines as poison, doing otherwise means it's torch-and-pitchfork time. Even as antivax mothers claim the right to parent as they choose (and it's certainly their right), women who choose otherwise from them are child abusers who don't take care of their children, don't know the first thing about keeping children safe, don't have a clue what it means to be a "good mother." I've personally been told that because I vaccinate my children, I must also be a mother who never sends her children outside and never breastfed and who stuffs her children with all manner of processed, non-organic foods, all dyed red. I'm a woman who just doesn't get what it means to really really care about my children. That, of course, reduces me from 100% true womanhood to some lesser being, not quite woman enough to be a good mother.

In the interests of honesty, I've never gone to a site and masqueraded as a father who is for vaccination. But my guess is that such an experiment in sex attitudes would yield a very different response from the howling hooligans of the antivax crowd. I envision a "there, there, you're a dad, let me explain this to you carefully because you don't really know how to parent and you don't understand the nuances of child safety the way mothers do." And I've noted without this experiment that when a poster with a male persona expresses information based in science about vaccines, that poster is less likely (this is a qualitation, not a quantification) to be vilified as a terrible parent who crosses the border into child abuse with every jab. Naturally, that parent is also less likely to be accused of never having breastfed his child.

In a special group are the mothers who, based on gut instinct or rational decisionmaking or both, decided to vaccinate their children and who have children who are autistic. We are a unique bunch, once upon a time blamed for our children's autism because we were refrigerators, reduced to cooling appliances capable of performing a service but lacking in the necessary emotions to accompany it. Our inability to emote and exhibit warmth, according to adherents of this idea, led to our designation as Refrigerator Mothers. Where were the fathers in all of this?

I guess they just didn't matter. There, there.

And now we have an expansion of the anti-woman toxic talk. It's not enough to abuse women who choose to vaccinate their children. It's not enough to denigrate or ignore completely the role of fathers in this discussion, or to dismiss them because as men, naturally they lack the necessary emotion to really understand keeping their child safe. It's not enough to target autism mothers as responsible for their child's autism, once as Refrigerator Mom, now as Mom Who Chose Vaccination. Nope. We get to shoot the female messengers, too.

I posted here a few months ago a story by Jonathan Rabinovitz published in Stanford Medicine. It's a great piece that clearly lays out aspects of the autism-vaccine tale. There was not a place for comments, but Rabinovitz posts frequently on a related blog. A review of the comments on his posts on this blog yields nothing much in the way of sexist commentary. Instead, you can find fairly restrained questions and answers, in an atmosphere of relative calm. Unless you check out the blog post about Amy Wallace's story in Wired. Note the comment. This post was written by Stephanie Pappas, who is, presumably, female. In the comment, a certain well-known autism parent blogger notes, "Good one sided (sic) cheerleading!"

That female-related comment is just the beginning. While the notoriously misogynist Age of Autism--and they're proof to anyone who's wondering that yes, women can be misogynists, too--doesn't appear to have a single post about Rabinovitz's piece, it lost no time in attacking Amy Wallace, the woman who wrote the Wired piece. AoA mouthpiece and misogynist extraordinaire J.B. Handley went so far as to use rape imagery (Paul Offit as perp, Wallace as victim) in his excoriation of a woman who dared to write a pro-vaccine piece before he hastily retracted that symbolism and replaced it with a lesser example of his rampant hatred of all things female. And Wallace has received many comments laden with anti-woman terms, calling her a whore and a prostitute, among other treasured epithets. (Wallace posts much of what she receives--good and bad--on her Twitter feed, which you can read here).

Thus, it seems that women have much to bear, especially if we choose to vaccinate our children or choose to use rational argument and science to defend vaccination, or both. We're child abusers, prostitutes, whores, large cooling appliances, cheerleaders, rape victims. As I watch this misogyny manifest itself in ways large and small, subtle and overt, I find myself reminded repeatedly of the great line attributed to Elizabeth I: "Had I, my lords, been born crested not cloven, you had not treated me thus." Of course, she uttered those words more than 400 years ago. It would seem that as far as we women have come, we still have a long way to go, baby.