My sister gave birth to her first baby in her neighbour’s bathtub, in a little house off the edge of a dirt road near Wakefield.
There was a story about it in the local paper, the Low Down. The headline read: “Baby born in bathtub.”
The story explained that my sister was puttering around in her vegetable garden when she felt the first contractions. Her own bathroom was being renovated, so she sauntered down the road, knocked on her neighbour’s door and asked to borrow her bathtub. Her midwife arrived just in time to catch the baby.
I was proud of her. That’s my sister, I thought: strong, independent, a free thinker. Someone unshackled by western, medicalized ideas about things like childbirth, things that should be natural.
But my sister also thinks diseases are natural. She didn’t vaccinate her daughter. Not because of the discredited link between vaccines and autism or because of actress Jenny McCarthy’s ridiculous tirades. My sister believes immunity is something that needs to be built up by exposure, but that vaccines weaken the body’s natural defence system.
I haven’t been able to change her mind about this, no matter how hard I try. My sister says she doesn’t trust people who tell her to vaccinate because she isn’t sure they really know what the truth is.
She’s pieced her own ideas together by talking to people like herself, who live in the country, off the grid, and spend their time trying to make the world a better, healthier place than the one they grew up in. Her friends practise mindfulness and make tea from herbs in their gardens to cure their colds. They eat organic food and raise chickens so their kids can eat fresh eggs.
My sister has her own ideas about health, education and how to live a socially responsible life. She is a passionate environmentalist and lives according to ideals that many people espouse, but few follow through with.
She rarely drives her car. She buys all her clothes second hand, and uses natural products to clean her home. My 8-year-old niece knows how to grow her own food and chop wood for the fireplace, and sew and knit. She has never played a video game.
My niece was homeschooled until this year and entered Grade 3 seamlessly, with a warning I’m sure few other school-age children have received: “Just remember,” my sister said, “it’s not OK to go pee in the schoolyard.”
I’m worried about my niece now that she’s at school, especially since I know a lot of parents in my sister’s community don’t vaccinate their children.
We’ve been told who the anti-vaxxers are: religious zealots and ignorant conspiracy theorists. I think that’s not true, or at least not the whole truth.
I think a lot of them, like my sister, are Gen Xers who have rejected a world that they feel failed them. They played with plastic toys when they were kids and were fed packaged food, only to learn that they might get cancer because of it. They went to university, but the promised jobs never materialized. They were the first generation that were poorer than their parents.
When you are trying to reimagine the world, inevitably you take a few wrong turns.
Anti-vaxxers like my sister don’t deserve our scorn or our anger. My sister is an amazing, hard-working parent who has raised a strong, intelligent and independent child.
People like my sister need their faith in the system restored, so they can understand that there are some ideas in this upside-down world of ours we can trust to be true. Because no amount of preaching is going to change the minds of people who are trying to create a better world than the one many of us don’t bother to question.
Julie Anne Pattee is a Montreal writer.
