Interview 19

Brief Outline:

For all immunisations' She read information given to her by the midwife at her birth group, in addition to her own knowledge gained through her work. She considered the motives behind the pro and anti-immunisation arguments when making her decision.

Background:

At time of interview' cohabiting, two daughters, aged 11 years and 3 years. Parent's occupation' Mother- health professional, Father- Thatcher. Ethnic background' White-British.

Don't have your child immunised until you are happy with your decision.

I think the only advice I used to say to parents whose children I had to vaccinate because that was part of my job was that the guidelines for the ages at the eight weeks, twelve weeks, sixteen weeks and then again later on for the MMR, they are only guidelines and people often feel railroaded into the day their baby is eight weeks old they have to go and have them vaccinated. And I would say to parents if you're not sure then, then don't do it until you've read some information or you've acquired some information that makes you more sure.
 

Information given to her by a midwife at a birth group influenced her decisions for her children...

Well it was when my eldest daughter was born which was twelve years ago now and I contacted a birth group for support with a home delivery. And after she was born the lady, the midwife who ran the birth group asked me if I'd considered vaccinations and at that point I hadn't really thought about it. I was just going to go along with the flow really and have her vaccinated. And she gave me some information to read. And it really all followed from that. 

I read that which sort of sewed a seed of doubt in my mind. It was books written by various doctors and articles interviewing parents whose children had been damaged from being what they believed from, from the vaccines. And I just really started to seek out as much information as I could.
 

She personally believes that injecting several vaccines in to a young baby cannot be beneficial.

I suppose basically my gut instinct is that to me whatever evidence they come up with I think I will always find it impossible to accept that you can inject an eight-week old baby with a cocktail of diseases and vaccines against those diseases and not damage them. Because naturally the chances of anyone contracting all those diseases at the same time are, I would say, nil and the response that a body has towards a vaccine is different to the response it has towards the disease if it's contracted naturally.