Vaccination exemption in CA, personal down, medical up

[Rev. Rye]

So to clarify, you guys really think choosing not to vaccinate your child should be a criminal offense?

Do you really think allowing your kid to die of a lethal, easily preventable disease is in any meaningful way different than allowing them to starve?

I suppose for her, the difference was that in the former case, the mother seriously believes she has the best interests of the child in mind.

In practice, I don't think that really matters much. Remember the case of Candace Newmaker? She was a 10-year-old girl who died under rather disturbing circumstances. She was taken from a neglectful home, and adopted by a pediatric nurse who wanted a child of her own. But, being born into a bad family, she was very standoffish (her mother would also claim she had been acting out, but the people who knew her in life dispute this). Therapy failed to bring her out of her shell, so, in order to bring out the affectionate side of her adopted daughter, they went on an "attachment therapy" retreat in Colorado which was meant to help her bond with her birth mother.

WARNING: THE CONTENTS OF THE NEXT PARAGRAPH ARE REALLY FUCKING DISTURBING. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

There was one major exercise in the session: a "rebirthing" exercise where she was wrapped up in a blanket (to simulate a womb) and told to find her way out, which was made all the more difficult because there were four adults in the session (including her adopted mother) using whatever force they could to block her attempts at getting out (not having a womb, I highly doubt birth works that way.) At times, they pushed on Candace with a combined force that was almost ten times her weight. Candace spent a good portion of the session confused, screaming, eventually puking and shitting in the blanket. About Forty minutes into the seventy-minute session, she passed out. At the end of the seventy minutes, they found her, not breathing. Paramedics were able to restore her pulse for a few hours, but she was pronounced brain-dead the next day.

I've done quite a bit of reading on the case, especially after discovering it after its connection with phantom video game "Petscop," (Game Theorists have a video about the game with a retelling of the basic events) and the point I'm trying to make is that, all the people who did that to Candace (including her own mother, though her unreliability about her daughter's past makes me wonder) really thought they were going to make her grow as a person, and not kill her. While the transcript of the murder video (yes, it exists, but the video itself is not online) shows some abusive language directed towards her as she's slowly dying, it seems consistent with a "tough love" approach, and I highly doubt they planned to kill her. Does this mean they're not culpable? That it somehow doesn't count as abuse? In my book, no.

And it's the same thing with antivaxxer parents, the way I see it. It's really different only in the way a Black Ops mission during a war is different from biological warfare.