Vaccines & Faith/Religion

I am pasting this post from Stewardship Diaries because I feel she makes some good points and addresses some important issues.

-Sunny


Our Reasons for Not Vaccinating
Posted July 12, 2010 by Erika in Vaccines.

Madeline will be five years old this summer and will officially be starting school this fall. In order to register her we had to present either her proof of vaccination or our religious exemption. Thinking that the religious exemption needed to be written, I began work on a mini-paper explaining why we chose not to vaccinate. However, a few days into my work, another non-vaccinating mom told me I only had to sign a pre-written form. Nothing fancy.

Well, instead of letting my hard work go to waste, I thought I’d finish and share it for those of you considering whether or not to vaccinate. For those of you who do vaccinate and may consider non-vaccination to be foolish or negligent, I would love to have you stick around and consider the other side. You may not change your position on vaccinations, but I hope it will keep you from viewing non-vaccinators as nut-job, faithless, fringe-lunatics.

Not a Matter of Salvation

Before we dive in, I wanted to review that vaccinations are not a matter of salvation. To quote from a post I did on this topic a while ago:
Those of us who believe that vaccines are more dangerous to our health than the diseases from which they protect us, are no more righteous than those those who believe otherwise. Parents who vaccinate are doing what they understand to be best for their families.

Those of us who believe vaccines are more beneficial for our health than they are dangerous, are no more righteous than those who believe otherwise. Parents who don’t vaccinate are doing what they understand to be best for their families.

So, why discuss it?

We believe that we should be seekers of the truth. Scripture tells us in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 to “test everything; hold fast to what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.” (Though some might think applying the “evil” part to vaccines is a bit much, consider that many vaccines make use of aborted fetal tissue and animal cells. More on that to come. . .)

In 1 Corinthians 10:23, Paul says, “‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things are helpful. ‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things build up.” Though there is certainly no direct command in scripture to avoid vaccines, we feel they are not helpful for building up our children to serve the Lord and others with all of their strength and might.

Our Investigative Journey
This is part of a long process of investigation that Erich and I have been doing for the last 6 years or so. It started before Madeline was born.
We read The Virus and the Vaccine: The True Story of a Cancer-Causing Monkey Virus, Contaminated Polio Vaccine, and the Millions of Americans Exposed. Though Erich noticed a strong political bias in the book, it still raised valid arguments about the integrity of the vaccine producers and government who both had a lot at stake to make the vaccines a success.

We watched a DVD of a 3 hour lecture from Dr. Sherry Tenpenny, a board certified medical doctor who has been in practice since 1985. The lecture was called: Vaccines: the Risks, the Benefits, the Choices.

We spoke to other parents, both those who vaccinated and those who did not.

We spoke to pediatricians to get their thoughts as we interviewed them to determine who we liked best.

Though we understood that there are risks to not vaccinating we ultimately determined that there are more risks to vaccinating and decided to avoid them at least for the time being. (As a side note, even if you are 100% convinced that you do want to vaccinate your child, delaying them is a GREAT option, widely recommended by many medical experts like Dr. Donald Miller and Dr. Bob Sears. If you’re not 100% about vaccines, please consider delaying until you are.)

As Erich and I continue to study the topic, we’ve remained firm in our decision.
Posts to Come

I’ve boiled down our reasons for not vaccinating into 7 main points which I hope you’ll consider with me in the coming days:

Decline in Disease Not Due to Vaccines
Ingredients (including aborted fetal tissue and animal cells)
Long-Term Effects Unknown
Autism, Asthma, Autoimmune Diseases
Lack of Integrity in Industry
Vaccine Failure and Injury
Better Health Without

Lots of these topics actually blend into each other. Vaccine ingredients are related to unknown long-term effects, which is related to autism, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. . . You get the picture.

Here’s a great video summarizing the issues I’ll be addressing in more depth. There are a couple of sections that deal specifically with the H1N1 vaccine which was big last year when the video was made, but the sections surrounding it are more general and very informative:




My hopes
To quote again from my previous cross-centered discussion of vaccines post:
I hope that my communication on this topic will inform you.
If you’re a wife, I hope you bring everything to your husband and ultimately rest in his leadership.

I hope that those of you who disagree with me never feel condemned or judged by me. Likewise, I hope those who disagree with me will not condemn or judge me for my position.

I hope that you will engage with me in this topic. If you disagree, I’d love to hear why. I am SO grateful for those willing to engage in debate, not just on this issue but on any! There are certainly things I haven’t thought of, studies that I am not aware of, and sources I don’t know about that would be beneficial for consideration. I am not seeking to be right. I am seeking the truth.