how strange it is to be anything at all

Infants are given a vitamin k shot at birth because they cannot synthesize vitamin k or get it from their diets, it is vital in preventing vitamin deficient bleeding which can cause death or permanent brain damage. Administering the injection is a bog standard preventative measure done on newborns immediately after birth, usually automatically. More and more parents are denying it and more and more babies are having totally preventable complications in their first 6 months of life just because the vitamin k shot has a black box warning. Doctors are repeatedly trying to explain to parents that babies need vitamin k and parents just keep asking “Why? Why are babies born needing vitamin k? Humans survived for thousands of years before it was invented. This must be a conspiracy.”

Infants, the human life stage notorious for randomly dying with no easily discernible cause. I don’t say that to be flippant, human babies are so incredibly fragile that before the modern era, about half of them died before adulthood. That is a natural 50/50 of making it. Humans did not evolve to be perfectly designed and efficient, we are just functional enough for some of us to survive to adulthood and reproduce. We don’t have to live like that! Looking at the human body through the lens of infallible intelligent design and allowing that to inform your medical decisions is so fucking dangerous.

The "problem" is that in the last hundred years or so our medical advancement has been meteoric. So people (in rich countries) forget, how easy it is for a child to die. We have built incredible scientific infrastructure to make sure that kids don't die of diseases like polio. But over time those advancements fade into the background. They become routine.

We are just far enough removed from diseases like polio, that people don't remember how devastating they were. You're not afraid of your kid dying of polio because you don't know any kids who have died of polio.

friend whos always available: i can do whenever

friend whos constantly busy: im sorry i have work and then school and then the labyrinth and then more work :( i can do tuesday at 3:00 am for five minutes tho

friend with the randomly generated sleep schedule: (no response)

friend who went missing in the woods behind their house 12 years ago and hasn't been heard from since: (no response)

drawing whatever i feel like in order to get back into drawing regularly

Bc so many ppl focus on the idea of telling A Trusted Adult, but even a well-meaning individual can fuck up and let abuse fall through the cracks or not know what to do

Whereas if a child tells LOADS of adults AND other kids, there's far less opportunity for an abuser to do damage control

Consistently telling their story and spreading it around disempowers the abuser to control and coerce the flow of information, or to utilise gaps and weaknesses in systems of reporting or welfare to isolate the child

Been sitting in my drafts for too long