At first glance, the answer would appear to be no.
But I’m a pusher, Cady. And now I’m gonna push you. I mean, it really does seem that some sort of peak something has been achieved here:
My wife is nine months pregnant and we are planning a home birth. Our team of two midwives came to our house to do a home visit last week, and shamed us for about 30 minutes when we let them know we would be vaccinating our baby.
Let’s take a moment to acknowledge that it is an affront to human dignity as well as to the natural-born right of autonomous perception, to imply (or worse yet, believe) that you can actually be “shamed” by an idiot. Definitions of such will vary, of course, but in my mind, anti-vaxxers are right at the top of the list of people in possession of a moral calculus so dimwitted and selfish that they could not effectively shame anyone for 30 whole minutes about a normal behavioral imperative aimed at both individual and public good, i.e. vaccination.
However, identifying personal affront by any means necessary has long been the provenance of Yacubian man, and the idea of being shamed by a double team of anti-vaxxing midwives is prominent among the reasons why this Dear Prudence question appears, at first blush, so damn peachy.
But, being an optimist, I think it could get whiter. Here are some possibilities, which I’m definitely not going to write this weekend and send sailing into Emily Yoffe’s Gmail account like so many handmade origami birds.
• “Help! I Mixed Up My Placenta Pills With My Dog’s Fish Oil Tablets”
• “Help! No One on This Commune Will Cater My Vegan Gender Reveal”
• “Help! My Llama Is Getting Skinny-Shamed by a Rare Midwestern Bird”
• “Help! My Mother-in-Law’s Trust Fund Administrator Voted for Jesse Jackson”
• “Help! My Polygamous Doula RSVP’ed No to My Handfasting Renewal”
• “Help! My Three-Year-Old Named Our Chickens After the Gorbachevs”
• “Help! My Cat Has Depression and Won’t Come Out of Her Yurt”
• “Help! I’ve Whipped Up a Fortress of Imagined Problems and I Can No Longer See”
I mean, definitely get a new midwife. That’s my advice column: Ask a Person Who Suggests You Just Move On.
Further suggestions welcome in the comments.