Why so many anti-vaxxing mums

[FirstTimeMum881]

I have a 5 month old baby and I'm going back to work at 7.5 months and planning on pumping milk at work. I was looking for tips so I joined some Facebook groups on breastfeeding and pumping and also made an account on babycenter as it had a lot of threads on the subject. OH MY GOD. They may as well rename these groups "Batshit mums against vaccines" because the content is insane. My favourite is a mum of a preemie refusing donor milk from vaccinated mothers. Lots of others paranoid their babies have autism because they had their 8 week jabs and they noticed their babies love staring at the ceiling.

I'm aware most of these women are in the US but what the hell is going on??? It's like i stepped into a parallel universe.

I can remember a friend of mine saying during her medical training that she would definitely have an elective CS. She later went on to have 3 normal births but said that they mostly got to see the complicated births while they were training so their view of childbirth was massively skewed as being terribly dangerous and traumatic.

I read a really interesting article once that linked it to birth trauma and that causing an increasing distrust of medical professionals. Women in childbirth are very routinely ignored and violated by doctors and midwives, told their feelings and pain are wrong, and left feeling out of control- certainly happens here but worse in America I suspect. Doctors become scary people who do things without your consent, and naturally you don’t trust them anymore. That’s why you see all these ridiculous “free birthing” groups, but also anti vax.

I also think America in general has a much looser relationship with “trust” and “experts” than we do. When your president is spouting absolute shite 24/7, there’s endless programs with right wing nutters shouting anything that occurs to them like it’s fact, then I can see it being harder to identify good information from bad. I don’t think our media is quite so bad