Infant Loss Awareness Quotes

In a section of The Vaccine Book titled “Is it your social responsibility to vaccinate your kids?” Dr. Bob asks, “Can we fault parents for putting their own child’s health ahead of that of the kids around him?” This is meant to be a rhetorical question, but Dr. Bob’s implied answer is not mine. In another section of the book, Dr. Bob writes of his advice to parents who fear the MMR vaccine, “I also warn them not to share their fears with their neighbors, because if too many people avoid the MMR, we’ll likely see the disease increase significantly.” I do not need to consult an ethicist to determine that there is something wrong there, but my sister clarifies my discomfort. “The problem is in making a special exemption just for yourself,” she says. This reminds her of a way of thinking proposed by the philosopher John Rawls: Imagine that you do not know what position you are going to hold in society—rich, poor, educated, insured, no access to health care, infant, adult, HIV positive, healthy immune system, etc.—but that you are aware of the full range of possibilities. What you would want in that situation is a policy that is going to be equally just no matter what position you end up in. “Consider relationships of dependence,” my sister suggests. “You don’t own your body—that’s not what we are, our bodies aren’t independent. The health of our bodies always depends on choices other people are making.” She falters for a moment here, and is at a loss for words, which is rare for her. “I don’t even know how to talk about this,” she says. “The point is there’s an illusion of independence.

The second way our satiety is being undermined is that these manufactured foods often contain that uniquely powerful combination of sugar, fat, and carbs—and this seems to activate something primal in us. We go crazy for it, in a way we don’t for other kinds of food. Dr. Giles Yeo, an obesity researcher who I interviewed in his lab at the University of Cambridge, told me his hunch about why that is. There is, so far as he is aware, likely only one foodstuff available in abundance in nature “where you have carbs and fat naturally mixed together as a unit”—and it’s breast milk. This is the first food almost all of us consume. It soothes us. As a species, humans didn’t access this seemingly unique sugar-fat combo after we’ve been weaned—until now. So we lap at it like an infant at the breast, and gorge.