Creationism and Christian fundamentalism feeds into the medical skepticism we are seeing in the U.S. and, once again, the main victims of phenomenon like vaccine hesitancy will be children who are helplessly dependent on their adult caregivers.
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 āWhy? Why are babies born needing vitamin k? Humans survived for thousands of years before it was invented. This must be a conspiracy.ā
Infants, the human life stage notorious for randomly dying with no easily discernible cause. I donāt 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 donāt 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.
If you believe God created us, you must know he created us to be imperfect, he created us to be imperfect so we could have the pleasure of discovery and progress and improvement and repentance and growth and learning, he did not create human infants capable of synthesizing their own vitamin k but he created humans intelligent and driven and loving enough to want to ensure that the majority of children make it to adulthood.
The Creationist insistence that babies and especially childbirth have been optimized somehow is maddening. It's the number one sign that someone does not know the first goddamn thing about the history of medicine.
"Well if childbirth is so dangerous, how did humans survive so long?"
Because 1 in 100 is not an extinction-level rate of maternal mortality, next question.
"What do you think people did before Vitamin K shots if babies are so vulnerable?"
Infant mortality was 16.5% in 1900 and even higher before that, next question.
"Women have been giving birth for thousands of years, don't you think they know how to do it by now?"
Women have been dying in childbirth for thousands of years, next question.
They just have no goddamn clue how bad things used to be. It's such a spoiled, ignorant perspective. And when they do acknowledge the difference, they claim it's because of hygiene, not 'modern medicine.' Don't even get me started on childhood vaccines.
