Look at it another way. There's a whole group of "natural parenting" issues - circumcision, unmedicated birth without being required to push in the lithotomy position (I am deliberately not discussing home vs hospital birth here), breastfeeding, and vaccination - on which the medical establishment is not necessarily on the right side. Vaccination in general happens to be one issue where it's easy to paint a picture of crazed Waldorf hippies with boners for Steiner who don't care if their kids die cause that means they weren't incarnating right vs pure clean Science. But vaccination isn't the whole story.
People are making the best decisions they can, partially influenced and deluded by status considerations, and they don't have the training or necessarily the native intelligence to assess the evidence for each issue. Part of the problem, it occurs to me writing this out, is that Jenny McCarthy has more status than your pediatrician. This is a general cultural issue, it's not the fault of individual parents.
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Date: 2010-06-24 05:27 pm (UTC)People are making the best decisions they can, partially influenced and deluded by status considerations, and they don't have the training or necessarily the native intelligence to assess the evidence for each issue. Part of the problem, it occurs to me writing this out, is that Jenny McCarthy has more status than your pediatrician. This is a general cultural issue, it's not the fault of individual parents.