Blue Collar Scientist

Orac over at Respectful Insolence has an excellent posting today about a woman who killed her child, who had autism, in large part because she felt guilty for having had the child vaccinated.

The basic issue here is that the mercury militia have created a fringe culture in which responsible acts of parenting, such as having your child vaccinated, is held to be reckless behaviour that is responsible for the disorder. (Of course, in real life, neither vaccines nor their ingredients cause autism.) This culture of blame is resulting in guilt which has apparently interacted with at least one parent’s pre-existing mental disorder, which led to the killing of a child.

Notable in the comments is a very compelling - chillingly plausible, in fact - explanation of the evolutionary origin of infanticide.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 6:18 pm and is filed under dimwits, medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.