Today we are going to be talking
about vaccines. With all of the controversy surrounding the safety and efficacy
of vaccines it can be difficult to decide whether or not to vaccinate your
child. Well the simple answer is… yes. You should certainly vaccinate your
child with every vaccine recommended under all circumstances short of a
specific condition which deems that vaccine unsafe for your particular child. I
am not even going to pretend like there is a valid counter argument here.
Vaccines prevent horrible diseases, have few side effects, have little to no evidence
of long term health risks, and are in almost every case free. If your uninsured
and cannot afford the vaccine the United States government will give it to your
child for free because they are that important. So, in summary, don’t be ignorant,
vaccinate your child, the end, right? Well, not quite. We’re only one paragraph
in and what I have written so far isn’t even relevant to the title.
So, where’s the controversy? Let’s
review my rule for legislation. Let them do what they want as long as it can’t
harm others. So, if you don’t want to go to the doctor when you are sick I won’t
make you. If you don’t want to take your medicine when you are sick, I won’t
make you. If you don’t want to get an adult vaccine that could prevent you from
contracting a horrible disease, I won’t make you. The key word in all of those
statements was you. Your children on the other hand, are not you, nor are they
your property. Say, that title is finally starting to make sense. Should
vaccines be mandatory for children? Yes. Should parents be able to opt their
children out of immunization because of personal or spiritual beliefs? No. Is this
infringing on their freedoms? No, because again, your children are not you.
While children are the
responsibility of their parents, they are still their own humans, and that
needs to be respected. Now that doesn’t mean that children should be
autonomous. I think anyone who has spent any time with a child can attest to
the fact that they are not mature enough to make decisions that are in their
own best interest. Left to their own devices, I’m sure most kids would live off
of a diet of ice cream and gummy bears. If you have ever tried to give a child
medicine, you also know that, were it up to them, they probably wouldn’t take it,
yet it is your responsibility as a parent, to act in the child’s best interest,
even if it means doing something that they would vote against.
What is in a child’s best interest, is of
course subjective. If a child wanted to learn piano and then decided it was too
hard after a few lessons and now wanted to quit, should the parent force them
to stick with it to teach them patience and hard work, or let the child pursue
other avenues to find their real passion. The key difference here is that, to
my knowledge, no child has ever contracted polio from their inability to perform
Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
Forcing parents to parent in a
certain manner is obviously a slippery slope, and parents certainly won’t
accept that anyone knows better how to raise their child than them, but immunizations
are not as controversial as you might think. While scary stories might still persist
about the redacted autism link, or even other unrelated risks that parents tell
each other around the campfire, vaccines are very well studied, and the
evidence and general consensus among medical experts all suggest that the
benefits of immunizing your children far outweigh any potential risks. And it
is in these such cases, where the evidence is
there, that parents should be forced to act in the best interest of their
child, regardless of their personal beliefs. To not do so would be, in my
opinion, child abuse, something most all of us can agree is bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment