In October 2009, Barbara Loe Fisher awarded me the Courage in Journalism Award of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). The award certificate reads: “. . . for her vision and journalistic integrity in defending a mother’s right to raise her children in the holistic health tradition.” When Barbara presented me with the award, she added, “for her dedication to improving the health and well-being of mothers and children; for her honest, accurate, and insightful coverage of the vaccine-safety and informed-consent debate; for her leadership in empowering young mothers to make educated, independent health decisions for their children.”
The following is an edited, abridged version of the opening talk I gave at the NVIC conference in Washington, DC, where the award was presented. For the original speech in its entirety, go to my blog, http://mothering.com/peggyomara/ 2009/10, where I also talk about other speeches from the conference.
As new parents, we believe that society will take care of us, has our best interests at heart, and will protect us. I want new parents to believe this, but health-care policy in the US is focused on eradicating rather than preventing disease. It is fear-based, interventionist, and compromised by economic considerations. At this time in history, assuming that society will protect you can be a dangerous belief.
It was new parents who, in 1976, founded Mothering in the mountains of southern Colorado. We were natural-living pioneers who had gone “back to the land.” Many of us tried to grow our own food, can fruits and vegetables, keep chickens and goats, and heat with wood. This was a time when one could find children’s cotton pajamas only at a secondhand store—newer pajamas for children were required, by law, to be made with flame retardants that were later found to be toxic. There were no natural personal-care products, and no packaged herbal teas or organic produce in grocery stores. Natural-living pioneers preferred to use peppermint oil or willow bark instead of aspirin for a headache, and were particularly cautious about the use of antibiotics. We often chose not to circumcise our male infants, and usually breastfed. When vaccinations were suggested for our babies, we had questions.
Mothering magazine was born out of these and other questions that natural parents had in the mid-1970s. Then as well as now, one of the most popular topics in the letters to the editor section was that of vaccination. In 1980, we published our first full-length article on the subject: Roxanne Bank’s “A Mother Researches Immunization.”
When we began covering the issue of vaccination in Mothering, we were asking legitimate questions raised by the community of natural-living pioneers. I never thought the issue would become of such wide concern, though I did anticipate its political significance when I subtitled our first anthology of reprinted articles on this subject The Issue of Our Times.
But that was before Congressman Dan Burton’s (R-IN) hearings of the late 1990s and early 2000s. That was before 1997, when the EPA set a reference dose for mercury in biologics. That was before July 1999, when the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the US Public Health Service called for the elimination of mercury from childhood vaccines.
It is concern for children that is at the root of the new health journalism. The new health journalists are participant observers reporting on their own lives. Some have medical backgrounds that help them in their search to find out what’s wrong with their children; others become scientists along the way.
When we publish articles about vaccines and autism, grateful mothers call me, in tears, and tell me that they now have something they can show to their relatives, to all the people who doubt them or who think they’re crazy. I know that these mothers are not crazy. I know they are telling the truth, because by the time a mother has reached the conclusion that her child has autism because of vaccines, she has considered and thrown out every other possible explanation. She did not want to come to this conclusion—she has dragged herself to it, kicking and screaming. If a mother has decided that vaccines caused her child’s symptoms of autism, then there is no question but that she is right—because she so badly wants to be wrong.
The mother always knows.
It is these heartbroken mothers and fathers who have gotten on the Web and told each other what is going on, compared symptoms, and put the pieces together. It is their experience that challenges the status quo.
Since 1980, Mothering has published hundreds of articles and letters about vaccines. In the early days of the magazine, this content was about reconciling vaccines with a natural-living philosophy. By the mid-1990s, it had become evident to me that parents were feeling oppressed on all sides. A mom sat in my office, weeping as she told me that she had no idea what her point of view was regarding vaccines. She felt pressured by her family to vaccinate, and pressured by her health practitioner not to.
When, in 1999, the AAP called for the elimination of mercury from vaccines, everyone took notice. It was also in the late 1990s that we began to hear in earnest from the community of families whose children’s autism was caused by vaccines, and to publish their stories. We were the first magazine to publish articles on hopeful treatments for children with vaccine-induced autism.
With 140,000 members, our discussion community on Mothering.com is the largest one for parents on the World Wide Web. Our vaccine forum has 24,000 threads and 263,000 posts. Before the Internet, there was no way for so many like-minded people to so easily exchange information about an issue. Unlike industrial media, which require special skills, special equipment, and considerable financial resources, digital media require no special knowledge or equipment, are immediate, and can be quickly updated.
In the leading textbook about the Internet, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, 2006), author Yochai Benkler writes, “It seems passé today to speak of ‘the Internet revolution.’ . . . But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. . . . It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.” According to Benkler, we are shifting from a mass- mediated public sphere to a networked public sphere. “I suggest,” he says, “that the networked public sphere enables many more individuals to communicate their observations and their viewpoints to many others, and to do so in a way that cannot be controlled by media owners and is not as easily corruptible by money as were the mass media.”
No better example of this exists than the proliferation of vaccine information on the Internet. It takes me hours now to do the research that, before the Internet, used to take weeks. Because of the networked nature of the Web, when an important observation is made within the online vaccine community, it is quickly picked up by other sites, and then by bigger sites. Before you know it, it’s on The Huffington Post, and then there’s an interview on Larry King Live. According to Christopher Harper, co-director of Temple University’s Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab, “Until recently, only a small number of people owned a news organization. Today, digital tools have empowered many people to own a news organization.”
Barbara Loe Fisher asked me if I have suffered for challenging the status quo. My job as a mother is to challenge the status quo. If I am lucky enough to have a child who is perfect and one of a kind, it is not my job to make my child be like everyone else. It is not my job to follow the current fashions, but to forge my own way, to develop my own personal ethic of parenting. As a journalist, my job is the same: to challenge the status quo. It’s not the media giants that need protection. It is the common man. As the journalist Finley Peter Dunne said a century ago, “the job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”
Because I own Mothering and am both its editor and publisher, I don’t have to answer to anyone, and seldom have to negotiate my point of view among my staff. But Mothering has suffered financially for our advocacy and our standards. Independent magazines are not the norm in the US. Most, if not all, of our competitors are owned by companies that publish multiple titles and therefore enjoy greater economies of scale. They are often driven by advertising, and seldom have a strong point of view.
We don’t take advantage of the ad dollars spent in other parenting magazines by formula companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers because we don’t accept ads for those products. In the magazine industry today, such a policy is almost unheard of. Our mission at Mothering magazine and Mothering.com is not to sell products to parents, though we hope that the products we do advertise are useful. Our mission is to help parents make informed choices.
The current trend toward patients’ rights, informed consent, and the new health journalism is about “we, the people.” We—all of you—have brought the issue of vaccine safety to center stage in the US, and it is only a matter of time before the new health journalism becomes the status quo. Don’t be deceived by the backlash—the last gasp of tyranny is always the loudest.
