Parents who decline to vaccinate their children have been called selfish and stupid. They’ve even been accused of child abuse. But what if they’re actually acting logically?
That’s the conclusion of Jennifer Reich, a sociologist at the University of Colorado, who has spent the better part of two decades studying these families’ immunization decisions. Reich is not anti-vaccine; her children received vaccines according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention schedule. But she sees parents’ decisions to go a different way as a logical outgrowth of the push for them to be savvy consumers in an increasingly complex world, to make informed decisions about everything that could affect their children’s health.
