Yes, our children are our primary and ultimate responsibility. Still, we live in a society with other people, to whom we also have a responsibility. We know how much we love our own children, so we can imagine how terrible we'd feel if our short-sighted choice cost another parent their child.

Before vaccines, children routinely lost limbs, senses, and even their lives to diseases that some contemporary folks barely understand, because we didn't grow up watching people be maimed or killed by them. While having a bout of whooping cough may seem like a nuisance to an adult (though there are some adults with whooping cough who might take issue with that characterization), these types of illnesses can be horribly painful and deadly, especially to newborns and others with compromised immune systems. That's nothing to mess with.

The most common side effect of a vaccine is temporary soreness at the injection site and possibly a mild fever, if that. For an otherwise healthy child, trading soreness and a slightly higher temperature for protection from potentially deadly diseases, and the chance to protect more vulnerable people from those diseases, is a really good deal.

No profession is perfect, made up entirely of infallible people with perfect knowledge. Researchers and scientists are not beyond question or reproach. The beauty of science, though, is that we don't have to just take any individual researcher’s word for it, and blindly assume their work is accurate just because they claim it is. Their peers review their work, and set out to see if their results can be repeated. There are built-in checks and balances that help mitigate against false claims. So, when we see something like vaccines, where the overwhelming weight of the scientific evidence, amassed over decades, shows that they are safe and work to prevent massive harm, we believe it.

It is rare for people to experience serious adverse reactions after getting a vaccine. With the exception of certain medically fragile people (the ones the rest of us are looking out for when we get our shots) it's far more likely that our kids will just be a bit sore, and maybe a little sleepy and cuddly, after their shots.

Diseases that had been all but eliminated have started making a comeback in certain communities because a critical mass of parents have decided not to vaccinate their children. Bringing back deadly diseases is not something to play around with. There are enough scary diseases already, we really don't need to open the floodgates to more.

When babies are brand new, it can be so hard to see them get their shots. They don't know what's going on, and then someone's jabbing them with a needle, and they're so upset about it. It's just a few of seconds in both of your lives, but those seconds really suck.

The first few times my son received his shots, before he decided they were no big deal, I would always remind him (and myself) that this would be quick, and way less painful than experiencing or even dying of a completely preventable disease. There are so many things beyond our control as parents, and so many times we won't be able to keep our children from suffering. Passing up that opportunity when it comes to a preventable illness is unfathomable.

The most widely influential evidence against vaccines is a fraudulent paper authored by a disgraced former researcher, that claimed the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism. This claim has been reinvestigated multiple times, and no evidence for it has been found.

But even if there was still some teeny chance that vaccinating our children might cause autism, we don't believe it makes sense to prioritize a child being neurotypical over a child being alive. We won’t let ableist assumptions about people on the autism spectrum scare us away from making an important and healthy choice for our children and our communities.