TV star and attachment parenting celebrity Mayim Bialik doesn’t vaccinate her children.
She wrote a whole essay on why she doesn’t want to talk about it:
Children today get about four times as many vaccines as the average 35-year-old did when we were kids. Besides visiting the CDC website … here are the books we used to research each vaccine and discuss each with several doctors before deciding what was right for our family.
She then recommends anti-vax books by Mothering Magazine contributor Dr. Lauren Feder (primary care medicine, pediatrics and homeopathy) and super-quack Dr. Bob Sears.
She did offer a bit more while promoting her book in an interview with NPR:
So my feeling is you can really do whatever you want, just like I get to do whatever I want, but I don’t inherently think that no one should get the flu, for example. And that’s my personal opinion.
… My feeling is everyone gets to decide and do research based on their family and their needs as to what they want to do. But it’s completely separate from attachment parenting or from my book.
She couldn’t make it any clearer, right? Everyone gets to make their own choice based on their family and their needs, right?
Wrong!
Yesterday Bialik wrote about the Similac commercial, which as I pointed out last week last week is opposed by lactivists.
Surely, if there’s any decision that is personal, for which each woman should make her own choice based on her family and her needs, it’s how she uses her own breasts.
Wrong!
Yesterday Bialik pleaded: Don’t Fall For That Similac Commercial
Bialik is shocked, shocked that Similac presents breastfeeding as a personal choice:
The ad shows breastfeeding as “just another choice,” ignoring that it is the medically recommended way to feed human babies. It’s not the same as cloth versus disposable diaper choices or deciding which baby shampoo to use. This commercial undermines medical and scientific fact under the guise of “It’s all the same, don’t judge. And if you do, you are the bad mom.”
In other words: Tolerance for me, but not for thee.
At first I thought that Bialik was being inconsistent. Vaccination is a personal choice, but breastfeeding isn’t?
Maybe it’s because one decision has the potential to harm innocent bystanders, but the other doesn’t.
That can’t be it, because vaccination affects more than Bialik’s children and she thinks that is just a “choice,” while breastfeeding affects no one else but the mother-child pair in question.
Then I thought it’s because one decision is much more serious than the other.
But that can’t be it, either, since even in first world countries vaccine preventable diseases could kill thousands of children each year, whereas formula feeding doesn’t harm anyone.
Then I realized that Bialik isn’t being inconsistent at all.
She believes that whether or not she vaccinates her children should be HER choice and …
Whether or not you breastfeed your child should be HER choice, too!
Because we should never forget that breastfeeding is a medically recommended way to feed babies.
Kind of like vaccination is the medically recommended way to protect babies against deadly diseases.
Oops!
We have a word for people like Bialik. The word is hypocrite.
