A mother worries: Should I give my girl the MMR jab?

In today’s Daily Telegraph, journalist Victoria Lambert explains how, after years of reporting on a possible connection between the MMR vaccine and autism, the professional became personal: Should she have her young daughter, Rowena, vaccinated or not?

Perhaps I shouldn’t vaccinate at all? My husband, Nick, has allergies – what if Rowena had inherited his conditions? Moreover, she had been born nearly seven weeks’ premature. Was her immune system working at full strength? Would it ever? And I asked myself the bottom-line question that every parent poses: how would we ever live with ourselves if that bright, shining child were to be stricken with autism because of a decision to have the vaccination?

Lambert decided to have Rowena vaccinated and I appreciate the honesty of her account of how she came to this decision. We recently went through a similar process in deciding whether to have Charlie—who did not receive his vaccines when he was five years old—vaccinated at the age of nine.I would say, though, that we do not think of Charlie as “stricken with autism,” whenever he became autistic, in utero, in his genetic make-up—he is one great healthy, thriving boy.