Post #768169
2025-12-19 19:09 UTC
Replies (25)
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@stuartl@mastodon.longlandclan.id.au 2025-12-20 00:07
@greene At least for the freebirthers, stillborn babies are not contagious the way diseases are. Freebirth advocates risk their own lives and that of their soon-to-be-born. Anti-vaxxers risk the lives of everybody they come into contact with.
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@MisuseCase@twit.social 2025-12-20 00:36
@greene My grandpa had school mates who died of measles or polio. My dad had a friend who permanently lost his hearing due to a bout with the mumps in childhood.
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@peterbrown@mastodon.scot 2025-12-20 00:42
@greene yes, even the wealthy had large families as they didn’t know how many would survive into adulthood
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@samiamsam@mastodon.social 2025-12-20 00:59
@greene republicans want to murder as many of us as possible including children
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@gbargoud@masto.nyc 2025-12-20 01:01
@greene https://masto.nyc/@gbargoud/115499201687037717
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@TransitBiker@urbanists.social 2025-12-20 01:02
@greene I’ve seen some heartbreaking headstones in some colonial era cemeteries which still have open plots. Whole batches of kids in one family died very young. Then multiply that by a few dozen families. Then once the vaccines came, folks started dying in their 80’s on a regular basis instead of in childhood. The record is literally written in stone. There was a swath of March-April 2020 freshly prepared plots awaiting headstones too. 💔
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@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org 2025-12-20 01:20
@greene 🙏
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@deepmud@mas.to 2025-12-20 01:35
@greene every graveyard in Ohio has lots of little round balls of cement. Every one of these is a baby who died.
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@poleguy@mastodon.social 2025-12-20 01:47
@greene you aren't wrong about the saving power of modern medicine! But there is also a sad taboo we might discuss. I fear "still births" today occur at a rate much higher than most people are willing to discuss in public. They generally are categorized as miscarriages/abortions. But people don't put up headstones for them any longer. Most people don't know how many people they know have had miscarriages until they have one themselves. It isn't in movies, TV, or songs.
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@funkula@goblin.camp 2025-12-20 02:21
@greene used to listen to a history podcast and every single episode that began with early biographical information in the 19th century or earlier involved at least one sibling dead in infancy, to the point it became something of a meme between the hosts
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@stacey_campbell@aus.social 2025-12-20 02:24
@greene Three siblings of my great-grandmother, all gone within a week. https://aus.social/@stacey_campbell/115141762297644247
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@PamelaBarroway@mstdn.social 2025-12-20 02:29
@greene This makes me want to scream. My mom is 89, and when I take her to visit my grandmother's grave she can point out the headstones of child relatives who died of polio, whooping cough etc. in the 1930s , 40s, and 50s. Children dying from these diseases is not centuries ago -- it is within living memory. I was born in '64 and you can bet your bippie my parents got me every available vaccine.
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@huntingdon@mstdn.social 2025-12-20 02:54
@greene Their moms, too, had their names on a lot of tombstones. Especially before medical doctors and midwives knew to wash their hands and sterilize equipment.
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@jstevenyork@mastodon.social 2025-12-20 03:54
@greene And many of the ones that survived grow up orphaned because the lost parents. I knew someone who lost his father to polio, and spent the rest of his life hating the father because he thought he did this intentionally to get away from he and his mother. Great legacy, huh?
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@sabik@rants.au 2025-12-20 05:17
@greene Also, some classes of disease are diseases of the built environment; we built it, we can build it better Sanitation, clean air
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@huntingdon@mstdn.social 2025-12-20 05:56
@greene Billionaires and MAGAts are convinced that survival of the fittest always works out well for them. As you say, a visit to an old cemetery usually proves the contrary. They go through various phases. Those with sections from the mid- 20th century, for example, were filled with those who had heavily smoked.
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@gcvsa@mstdn.plus 2025-12-20 06:06
@greene There's an old graveyard between my house and downtown. I have to pass it every time I go downtown. People really misunderstand increasing life expectancy statistics. There are more gravestones in the old cemetary of people on their 80s that most people realize. The statistics are mainly driven by four factors: early childhood death due to infectious diseases, childbirth deaths of women, and war and accidental workplace deaths of working age men. Vaccines, antibiotics, and legislation.
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@painting_squirrel@muenchen.social 2025-12-20 06:57
@greene This gave me another chilling thought. There is a significant overlap between people spreading disinformation about vaccines/modern medicine and trying to exert pressure on women to have more children due to "below-replacement" birth rates. If we bring child mortality back up to 50% or whatever, even more children would have to be born to keep population levels up, meaning even more opportunity to scold people for not having enough of them.
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@mast0d0nphan@beige.party 2025-12-20 07:05
@greene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTqtrGBYpxQ
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@Jake_Shelton@universeodon.com 2025-12-20 07:06
@greene I was remember a cemetery in Boston near the Commons. The headstone that really stayed with me was for a 38 (somewhere in her 30's, anyway. I don't remember exactly) year old woman and her 8 children. All of whom died before the age of 10.
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@Dialectician@universeodon.com 2025-12-20 12:13
@greene Gaslighting and projecting science against nature and nature against science has only ever served Empires’ oligarchs and plutocrats! #ReasonsVsArguments #Nature #Science
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@jasonb@sigmoid.social 2025-12-20 12:17
@greene Now everyone is going nuts about birth rates you'd think the MAHA crowd would get off this antivaxxing BS. Especially since the leaders of MAHA have vaccinated their kids.
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@SteveClough@metalhead.club 2025-12-20 12:59
@greene You only have to watch history genealogical shows, Families form my grandparents generation and before would often have 7 or more children, but there would only be 2 who survived. That was common. Losing 2/3 of your children was pretty normal, and losing more was not uncommon. Mostly from things we can vaccinate against. And the ones who survived were mainly by chance. Nothing else. And some families were entirely wiped out. And the fact it was normal didn't mean it hurt less. Didn't mean the families were not deeply traumatised by this.
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@kimlockhartga@beige.party 2025-12-20 13:02
@greene Exactly. There are sections of every cemetery where there is a group of babies and children buried. They are all before the vaccine era. Often, half of the children born died. In my great grandfather's family, out of seven children, only four made it to adulthood.
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@beecycling@wandering.shop 2025-12-20 13:02
@greene I had to look up exactly what this freebirth is that I keep hearing about, and bloody hell, these people are absolute maniacs. It's one thing not to want birth over-medicalised (though personally I'd want an obstetrician like 2 minutes away if they're needed.) But there's a reason midwife is one of the oldest jobs in world. Giving birth is uniquely dangerous for humans compared to other animals. Why make it riskier? Absolute lunatics getting women and babies killed.