Why One Anti-Vaccine Mom Changed Her Mind

Tara Hills’ turn-around to embrace vaccination came a week too late for her children. All seven contracted whooping cough just before the youngest four were slated to start a vaccine catch-up schedule. The mom tells Yahoo Parenting what it will take to bring other anti-vaccine folks around faster so they don’t suffer as her family has. (Photo: The Scientific Parent)

For years, Tara Hills opted out of vaccinating the youngest four of her seven kids, for fear of “unwittingly doing greater harm than help,” as she writes in The Scientific Parent blog. But the Ottawa, Canada mother has been making big news for reversing her decision and boldly writing about how her brood is now “living the consequences of misinformation and fear”— after every one of her seven children contracted whooping cough.

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“I set out to prove that we were right,” she tells the Washington Post of pondering a “Pharma-Government-Media conspiracy” and distrusting the medical community. “And in the process found out how wrong we were.“

When her youngest three unvaccinated children began coughing hard enough to gag and vomit back in March, the homeschool teacher says she knew something was seriously wrong. But it wasn’t until she took her 10-month-old son to the hospital and she got the results of his tests on April 7 that they knew for sure — all seven of her kids had the deadly respiratory disease pertussis.

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“The waves of chaos hit us with a fury that we can’t possibly describe,” she writes of the diagnosis in an update post on the Scientific Parent. “Everything that day was a blur.” The family immediately went under quarantine and started on antibiotics.

A little less than a week after the diagnosis, health officials gave everyone a green light to resume normal life, though she says, “My 3 youngest were hit the worst and will take longer to recover. Their coughs still turn heads when anyone hears them through the window or from our backyard.”

Hills says today that she can relate to the “many real emotions of fear, anger, distrust and hurt that many have voiced against us.” She and her husband have personally apologized to those close to the family and to their elder children.

They just hope that by sharing their story, others will reconsider forgoing vaccinations. The parents ironically had done exactly that — and scheduled a vaccination catch-up schedule for their kids in the wake of the 2014 measles outbreak — when they discovered that they’d come close to contracting the disease themselves last year. With “a very real sense of personal and social responsibility,” Hills says she worked with the family doctor on a plan to get the kids back on track.

It was slated to kickoff the week after her 10-month-old son ended up in the hospital.

“For six years we were frozen in fear from vaccines, and now we are frozen because of the disease,” Hills writes from quarantine. “I understand that families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk,” she adds. “I want them to know that we tried our best to protect our kids when we were afraid of vaccination and we are doing our best now, for everyone’s sake, by getting them up to date. We can’t take it back…but we can learn from this and help others the same way we have been helped.”

The about-face the she experienced shows that even the most ardent anti-vaccinator “can be reached if people use the right approach,” Hills tells the Washington Post.

What, then, is the “right approach?” The mother tells Yahoo Parenting it’s about toning down attack talk. “In my experience and observation, many people that are pro-vaccine can vent their anger and fear by taking a mocking, angry, sometimes bullying stance with parents that have questions about vaccines,” she says. “That feels like they’re talking down to us or questioning our fitness as parents and it only made me more defensive and less inclined to even consider re-examining my position.”

The person who made a real impact on her re-examination of the issue “talked to me like a person and didn’t make me feel stupid or a negligent parent for asking questions,” she tells Yahoo Parenting. “That person didn’t force me to vaccinate while I still had doubts. They talked to me like I was an intellectual equal and acknowledged that I just wanted to do what’s best for my kids. If more people talked to parents with questions about vaccines like that, instead of making them feel stupid or ashamed, I think more minds would be changed.”

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