How MAHA Is Changing New Motherhood
What nobody told Rebecca Villasana-Espinoza about becoming a mother was how it could turn the banalities of day-to-day life into boogeymen, creating all these new possible threats that lurked in the aisles of the grocery store, or in a misstep at the pediatrician's office. Having a newborn was like having a colony of new anxieties implanted in her mind. Was she feeding her child right, using the right chemical-free lotions, posing the right questions to her doctor?
Social media and text exchanges about vaccine skepticism combined to sharpen that angst. Ms. Villasana-Espinoza, 29, who lives in the Atlanta area and has a 1-year-old daughter, did not bargain for becoming a mother while, all around her, people were embracing medical skepticism with new ferocity.
Ms. Villasana-Espinoza was recently at a church dinner, a weekly event in which families pay $5 and bring their children for boisterous meals with big portions of pasta or taco salad. One mother sat down at the dinner table and brought out her own glass bottle of raw milk. Ms. Villasana-Espinoza, who had grown up in a rural area and had gotten sick several times from drinking raw milk, was taken aback. Her church leans conservative, but its members have fairly conventional views on health. The raw milk seemed to her like a dog whistle for 'Make America Healthy Again' — the slogan and ethos that is now also a presidential commission led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In the car ride home, Ms. Villasana-Espinoza and her husband discussed the raw milk moment, and whether that family was likely to be vaccinated.
'The Venn diagram of people who drink raw milk and people who think vaccines are bad for you is basically a circle,' Ms. Villasana-Espinoza recalled saying.
Becoming a mother now means confronting a grab bag of voices — on phone screens and on Reddit, but also at school pickup and church — that are critical of the medical establishment, including people skeptical about vaccines and fanatic about drinking raw milk. Doctors say that during the Covid-19 pandemic, large pockets of people, especially parents, lost trust in experts and started doing research into unconventional and discredited ways of caring for themselves.
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