When I first watched Lena Dunham’s Girls, three or four years after seemingly everyone I knew had done so simultaneously, I loathed it so thoroughly that I was retroactively angry at everyone who had ever told me the protagonists were similar to me and my friends. Exactly the opposite happened as I read Eula Biss’s On Immunity, a book-length essay on vaccination that several friends recommended to me before I finally picked up a copy a few weeks ago. From the first pages, I liked it so much that I felt flattered by the recommendations, bathed in the warm glow of my friends’ recognition and understanding. On Immunity is rigorous and incisive, yet sympathetic and situated in lived experience. I want all the books I read to be like it; I want to write a book like it.
Biss explores the history and science of vaccinations from the eighteenth century to the present, looking not only at how they were developed, tested, and administered but at the cultural responses and mythmaking that have surrounded them. She draws on Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, explores vampires from Dracula to Edward Cullen, analyzes Greek myths, and writes richly and compellingly about her own experience of mothering a young child. Her son was born during the H1N1 outbreaks of 2009, and the fears of the world seemed to parallel Biss’s experience with “the landscape of new motherhood, where ordinary objects like pillows and blankets have the power to kill a newborn. Colleges were daily sterilizing every ‘high-touch’ surface, while I was nightly boiling every object my child put in his mouth. It was as if the nation had joined me in the paranoia of infant care.”
Biss efficiently debunks claims about links between vaccines and autism, as well as pointing out that some of the “suspect” ingredients in immunizations are present in higher concentrations in foods including breast milk, but these arguments function as starting points rather than aiming to end conversations. Writing as a mother, she takes mothers’ concerns seriously. In a world where corporations do wield undue influence on policymaking, where environmental contaminants are widespread, and where the CIA really did administer fake Hepatitis B vaccines in Pakistan to gather intelligence on Osama Bin Laden’s whereabouts, suspicions about vaccines are understandable—and portraying mothers as hysterical and illogical is not a helpful response. The power of On Immunity rests in Biss’s willingness to dwell in complexity, where the boundaries between public and private or between self and other are porous, and we cope with profound challenges as best we can.
Though the author is sympathetic to the fears of parents, she mercilessly takes down those who profit from exploiting these fears—such as the pediatrician Robert Sears, whose The Vaccine Book proposes an “alternative schedule” of immunizations and advises parents not to vaccinate their own children against measles, mumps, and rubella but also not to discourage their neighbors from vaccinating theirs, so herd immunity will be preserved. Appealing to Kant as well as to common decency, Biss points out the deplorable hypocrisy of this stance, in which other children must be “contaminated” so one’s own may remain “pure.”
The imperative to care for each other, therefore, offers a way out of the individual anxieties and insecurities each parent faces—though without diminishing the reality of these fears. When everyone in the house is sick at once, the mother must care for her children despite her own discomfort. In the same way, we are obligated to rise above our own uncertainties about immunization for each other’s sake, for “We are continuous with everything on earth. Including, and especially, each other.”
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I found a similar take on the anxieties of new motherhood, and a similar vision of their resolution, in Karen Russell’s “Orange World,” where a mother makes a pact to breastfeed the devil nightly in exchange for her unborn baby’s safety. The story vividly captures the fairy-tale qualities of pregnancy and birth. Especially during my first pregnancy, it was almost impossible to believe I was somehow creating an entire human, complete with elbows and lymph nodes and hair follicles, as I went about my life. Months of nausea and torpor, followed by a physical trial unlike any other, somehow yield a new person. What is this but a miracle? And yet what could be more prosaic?
Pregnancy and new motherhood feel so profoundly strange that I can scarcely believe how universal they are. It beggars belief to realize that every person I see, no matter how humdrum or unlovely, has been created and cared for so intensely. Rebecca Solnit writes in The Faraway Nearby of “the heroic labor it takes to keep [babies] alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing but demands everything.”
In Russell’s story, the protagonist creeps out of her house every night to feed the devil. She crouches in the gutter as it clutches and gnaws at her: “the creature sinks its fangs under her skin. Blood sheets down her breast.” The scenario is bizarre and off-putting, so at odds with our image of motherhood, that she cannot bring herself to confess to her own mother what she is doing. Yet when Rae finally confesses to her mothers’ group, she learns that many of them have fed devils of their own, devils who promised to
Stop the car from running the red light.
Shrink the tumor.
Jail the kidnapper.
Drain the water from her brain.
Return the bullets to the gun.
Swat away the infected mosquito.
Save the job that pays our rent.
Prevent the warhead from reaching western Oregon.
Keep our son safe from the police.
Reverse the spread of leukemia.
Bring them home to me safely, my babies, oh, please.
Not all the mothers she meets are feeding devils, but all of them understand anxiety. And so they work together. The experienced mothers in the group promise Rae that her devil has no power over her baby’s fate—it is a devil, they say, not the devil. It cannot keep her safe. They tell her to stop feeding it, cold turkey. And she does try. But when, overcome by fear, she finds she cannot stick to her convictions, the group steps in. They surround her during a nighttime rendezvous, capture the devil, and drive it away from Portland to “an arbitrary spot just shy of the sandy border where, if you look down at the glove box and up again, Oregon will have transformed from dark forest into high desert.” There, in community, they banish it from their city. All the mothers stand together, refusing to continue feeding the devil.
“At first it has a pale, vulpine face. But, as it runs, it seems to shimmer in and out of view, its edges melting and revising themselves. Very quietly, almost undetectably, it begins to break apart. Huge-eyed and snuffling, it looks back at the women. A final trick: tugging at the heartstrings. It mewls pitifully, faking a limp. ‘Nobody move,’ Yvette cautions. But even her eyes are filling. It is hard to watch anything die. As the sun sparkles on the sides of Mt. Hood, the creature continues to shape-shift: a wolf cub, a bunny, a kit fox, a spotted fawn. Every animal protagonist of their infants’ board books.”
Finally, in the face of unified refusal, the creature dies. “There is no corpse to bury and nothing left to nurse back to life.” The women drive together back home, and the devil does not reappear.
In Russell’s story, as in Biss’s book, the mothers’ fears—and their power—are taken seriously. The devils are real. The mother's fears are merited. But there is a way out: to stand together, in community. And to be bathed, however temporarily, in the light of each other’s love.