Call me a conformist but...

I have noticed that the pro/con vaccination discussion seems to be a popular topic again.  Slate had this article recently.  One of my favorite authors, Quinn Cummings had this post on her blog in response to yet another article that was all about Jenny McCarthy and her wacky anti-vaccine stance.

As for my household...Jeff has no spleen...he lost it in a car accident 17 years ago.  That puts him at a serious risk if he's ever exposed to certain things.  So we are VERY pro-vaccinations.

And I must say that in my personal experience, the anti-vaccination crowd always seemed to consist of that very odd mix of conspiracy-theory/hippie/new-age-y folks that want so desperately to be non-conformists that they all sound alike.

We had an anti-vaccinator here at my place of employement. She CONTRIVED to be weird.  Besides harping on about the evils of vaccines, some of her other hobby-horses (I swear to God I am not making these up):

- Foreskin re-growth.  For men who wanted to un-do the "mutilation" that their parents had forced on them without their consent. (She was a big proponent of a product called "Tug-A-Hoy.")

(It works just like you would assume it does.  You know, I'm a GIRL and I? Can't. Even. Imagine.)

- Elimination communication. This is where you never put a diaper of any kind on your baby...from BIRTH...and you learn from his/her "elimination cues" when to hold them over a toilet.  After she had her first child, she met us all for lunch while she was out on maternity leave so we could all meet the little whipper snapper.  I'm pretty sure I made her mad when I didn't offer to hold him...but I'll tell you here and now that the only 3 week old baby I'll hold will be one strapped in tight to some sort of diaper (cloth or disposable...I'm not that picky) so that it doesn't leak all over me.

- She rescued pet rabbits, which was all fine and noble...but she'd rescued about eleventy-five of them and let them free-roam in her house....with her diaper-free baby and her vegetarian dogs.

- And her vegetarian dogs.  She was a vegetarian herself, which, hey, is a choice many make...but then she went and deemed everything in the house a vegetarian too.  To this day I'd bet real money that more than one of the rescue rabbits went mysteriously "missing"  at the same time one of the dogs seemed a little friskier than usual. (You know, oddly enough?  She did vaccinate the dogs. WTH?)

- She was very anti-doctor (I guess that fits in with the anti-vaccine thing).  FYI, my opinion? Ob/Gyns are not the devil. If you had an epidural during childbirth, it doesn't mean that you didn't want to "connect" with your child during the birthing experience. Going to a hospital to deliver doesn't make you a victim of "Big Medicine." That's another whole topic that gets me spun up...she would act all smugy smug because SHE wasn't even going to use a midwife!  She and her husband alone were going to have their baby in a clear mountain stream or some crap.

I had MY baby (18 years ago) in a nice, climate controlled hospital. Which was a good thing, since her linebacker-like shoulders caused her to be obstructed. The hospital had the staff and the protocol to quickly react...she ended up with a broken collar bone...I ended up with a 4th degree  episiotomy(wince)...but we were both fine.

I would try to tell my story to little Miss but-I'm-so-much-more-progressive-than-you to try to convince her that MAYBE since she weighed approximately 85 pounds (16 of that looked to be baby) and since MAYBE this was her first child that she should at least consult a medical professional.  She would just smile and say (smugly) "I'll be fine.  You see, I trust God's design." (Meaning a woman's body.)  I wanted to scream, "No, Ms. Patchouli!  Your dogs eat weird meat-free kibble!  You DON'T trust God's design!  Because He?  Designed dogs to be carnivores!  You will not find any free-roaming wild packs of vegetarian dogs! I guarantee it!"

(Patchouli is something that the tree-hugging hippie ilk use instead of antiperspirant.  Because "Big Cosmetics" is trying to give you armpit cancer or some shit with real antiperspirant.  They think patchouli works just as well.  They are wrong).

There certainly wasn't any reasoning with her husband...I assume he had all of his attention directed at the quasi-semi-homemade "medical" device attached to the end of his manhood.  I suppose after she convinced him regarding THAT, giving up meat and having their first-born in a hospital were small potatoes.  Everyone knew who wore the pants in THAT family...and it wasn't him (or the baby).