Ask the Experts

It may be difficult to find a doctor who will treat your child if you question vaccination; want to give your child fewer vaccines; or use a different schedule than the one recommended by government health officials. The best way to find an open minded doctor, who wants to be a partner with you in making health care decisions for your children and is sensitive to your concerns, is to contact health professionals in the prepared childbirth, breast feeding, nutrition and wholistic or alternative and complimentary health care fields.

I am not certain what you mean by getting your daughter "passively immunized." The term "passive immunization" usually refers to the process by which a person comes into contact with the body fluids of another person who has recently received a live virus vaccine (such as live oral polio vaccine) and the live virus transmission confers or "boosts" the immunity of that person. Another type of passive immunization is the use of intravenous immune globulin after a person has been exposed to a disease such as tetanus. Immune globulin contains antibodies from the blood of persons who are immune to a particular disease.

The idea of separating combination vaccines (such as live MMR vaccine for measles, mumps, rubella) into their single components has been in the news during the past decade because of the debate about whether exposing a child simultaneously to three live viruses in the MMR vaccine can cause autism. Although government health authorities deny the MMR vaccine can cause autism, parents continue to report an association between receipt of MMR vaccine and their child's regression into autism. Therefore, some parents prefer to give their children the three separate vaccines singly spaced apart as a precaution. Because few doctors in the U.S. stock the separate vaccines, American parents have reported they must buy a multi-dose vial of each of the three vaccines from a pharmacy and take them to their physican for administration.

If you make the decision to vaccinate your child with one or more vaccines, make sure you read the product manufacturer insert and consult other sources of information so you know what kinds of vaccine reaction symptoms to look for after your child is vaccinated. Remember that vaccine reactions can occur from minutes to hours, days and weeks after vaccination depending upon the vaccine(s) given.

And if you choose to vaccinate, go to the website of the National Vaccine Information Center at www.nvic.org <http://www.nvic.org> where we have a list of eight questions to ask yourself BEFORE your child gets vaccinated. Becoming educated about diseases and vaccines will help you make the best vaccination decision you can for your child.

How long should you wait to become pregnant again? Just follow your hearts and your intuition.

I lost a baby to miscarriage from a Dalkon shield that prevented proper attachment of the placenta to the uterine wall at 5 and a half months. My belly was swollen and beautiful, the baby was moving, and I was very much in love with that child. The miscarriage was devastating and so was the grief afterwards, which hung on strong for months. My husband and I had thought to wait to get pregnant for a very long time, but one warm and humid night about two and a half months after the miscarriage, we had dinner at a very romantic Italian restaurant with some very excellent red wine, came home, and spontaneously started making love right after we walked in the door. I murmured to him that we should stop for a minute for me to get up and put on my diaphragm, and he murmured "yes we should," and we kept right on making love and I became pregnant again that night with my daughter Peyton. Later we realized that we simply were ready to have a baby and that thinking about it too much or trying to plan the right time to try again was not what we needed to do-we just needed to be in our bodies and hearts and respond to instinct.