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.
Many have been emboldened by Mr. Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic. With vaccination rates among American kindergartners on the decline, Mr. Kennedy advised new parents to “do your own research” before vaccinating infants. He announced that his pick for surgeon general nominee was Dr. Casey Means, who trained as a doctor before becoming an influencer and critic of medical institutions. Her ascent, to many, legitimized the kind of skepticism that was making life so complicated for mothers like Ms. Villasana-Espinoza.
What is especially confounding for some new mothers to navigate is that many of the voices questioning medical conventions are close to home, in “local mom” groups on Facebook and even in text messages from close friends. Getting distance from dubious health theories is not a question of unsubscribing from podcasts or YouTube channels. It’s a matter of disagreeing with mothers at the playground. It means the experience of new parenthood is shot through with new reasons for self-doubt and isolation.
In an already politically polarized moment, many are finding that the MAHA movement makes the ground more slippery. Like partisan divisions, clashing views over health have become their own source of social tension. A woman discovers all of a sudden that her neighbor’s views on health seem unmoored from reality; someone scrolling through social media abruptly sees that a close friend is promoting a theory that they view as not only objectionable but also dangerous to the whole day care classroom’s health.
“A lot of the messaging is designed to target moms,” Ms. Villasana-Espinoza said. “You can’t walk down the aisle at the grocery store without thinking ‘Oh this is non-G.M.O., you should use silicone, you should actually use glass.’ You’re already so stressed about everything you’re doing. Here is someone saying, ‘Well you’re actually pumping all these harmful chemicals into your kid’s body.’”
Already, mothers are significantly more likely than fathers to be the medical decision makers in their families. And 84 percent of mothers look for parenting advice on social media, according to polling from the University of Michigan. Pediatric researchers there surveyed more than 600 parents of children under 4 to explore why this group turned to social media for medical advice. The researchers found that new parents were often open to believing information that ran counter to conventional wisdom and preconceived ideas. Some specifically want to do things differently from what their parents did. Meanwhile, social media pages tend to amplify unorthodox voices and downplay those sharing medical expertise.
“Imagine a young mom kind of anxious about doing the right thing,” said Sarah Clark, the co-director of the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health at the University of Michigan. “She might be seeing more information in favor of not vaccinating than she sees in favor of vaccinating.”
Dr. Ari Brown, a pediatrician in Austin and a spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics, has found herself counseling dozens of new moms who are swimming in a pool of post-pandemic medical mistrust, one that they are surprised to find includes close friends and relatives. “You are not familiar with the diseases vaccines prevent and that’s because vaccines do their jobs and quietly remove these diseases from our world,” Dr. Brown tells them. “Unless your grandma is a pediatrician, I’m not sure that I would take her word as gospel.”
When Dr. Brown asks her patients which influencers on social media are exposing them to misinformation, the answers are rarely precise: “People are not looking for this content,” she said. “It’s showing up in their feed.”
‘Keeping Up With the Jones’ Vaccine Schedule’
When Carly Day, 34, a mother of two, moved to Fort Worth, she found that mom groups on social media were a lifeline. In Facebook groups, she could ask “Who is a good local pediatrician?” “Where do people send their daughters for dance class?” But in recent years, and especially in recent months, she has seen posts drifting through these groups that raise all kinds of dubious ideas about medicine. There are mothers asking about which pediatricians would delay vaccine schedules or forgo vaccines altogether. There are mothers asking where they can buy raw milk.
Tensions in Ms. Day’s online mom groups first started heightening during Covid lockdowns. In one Facebook group, in the fall of 2020, Ms. Day observed a local mother become more and more angry about mask requirements at school. The mother posted photos of a school board member out and about, at a Dallas Cowboys football game, and was removed from the group for provoking confrontations.
What has irritated Ms. Day is the sanctimonious sentiment underlying some of the medical misinformation she encounters. Scrolling through posts from other moms about the medical practices they view as most “holistic” can leave Ms. Day wondering whether she’s doing all she can to protect her own children.
“There’s so much comparison and trying to keep up with the Joneses,” Ms. Day said, adding that now it can seem like a matter of trying to keep up with the Joneses’ delayed vaccine schedules. “Our parents were freaked out about ‘stranger danger.’ There’s always some kind of moral panic in any generation of moms. This is the moral panic of our generation.”
At the playground or during meetings of her mom workout group, Ms. Day has tried to subtly discern people’s views on medical issues like vaccines. She does this by listening to the way they talk about related topics, like how they tell their birth stories. She observes the snacks that mothers pull out of their bags. These are signals, she explained, of how they might broadly view the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and some of the issues it focuses on, like microplastics and ultra-processed foods.
“People wear an unmedicated birth like a badge of honor,” she said, recalling when other mothers made pitying comments about people who had hospital births including C-sections (Ms. Day has had two) — “Oh I’m sorry you didn’t get to have a natural birth” they comment — or rolled their eyes at processed snacks with remarks like, “My kid doesn’t even know what Veggie Straws are.”
Sarah Cann, 40, a mother of two in the Southwest, does not like to get into arguments on social media, but she feels unsettled when she sees unsubstantiated posts from people who she considers her real-life friends. When a friend from college posted a video advising women to forgo pelvic exams, warning them with no evidence that it could lead to radiation exposure, Ms. Cann did not hold back: “Did your page get hacked?” she wrote. “Where is this coming from?” When two other women jumped in with critiques, the friend deleted her post.
The spread of measles in the Southwest has made encountering vaccine skepticism in these types of social media groups more angst inducing. “Measles is a thing right now!” Ms. Cann said. “You’re bringing those children into a public space.”
The ‘Give and Take’ of Friendship
Even some of those self-identified crunchy mothers — the ones who use cloth diapers and make their own granola and pooh-pooh seed oils and tell anyone who will listen about their unmedicated birth — find the new terrain of “MAHA moms” hard to parse.
Terésa Woods, 37, has worked as a massage therapist and lives about an hour from Portland, Ore. Ms. Woods proudly calls herself an “earth mama.” She lives in the woods and has tried ecstatic dance. She is part of a sub-reddit called “Moderately Granola.” She studied herbal medicine, which she was drawn to because she found “holistic healing” more helpful than mainstream medical approaches to her own autoimmune disease and anxiety. But Ms. Woods, whose baby is almost a year old, drew the line at firmly wanting to vaccinate her child.
“I’m in some pretty crunchy circles, which has a lot of value, but there’s a tendency for conspiracy theories to sneak in,” Ms. Woods said. “Once I had my son a year ago, I realized there was no way in hell I wasn’t getting him vaxxed. If he were to come down with anything I could have prevented, I would have never forgiven myself.”
Having a child gave Ms. Woods a new understanding of how interconnected her own medical choices were with everybody’s around her, how her baby might be at risk if others around her did not get vaccinated and then got sick. She worries about what she will do when her child is old enough to be enrolled in school. She wishes that mothers like her, who do have some mistrust of medical authorities, could share advice and support with one another while still affirming basic principles, like the value of vaccines.
“If you go to graveyards, there’s a lot of dead kids and they’re there because of measles and rubella,” Ms. Woods said (referring, she added, to infants who died long ago). “There’s a lot of damage to be done with the anti-vax perspective in not remembering that piece.”
At the same time, she added, “I don’t want to be railroaded by a doctor criticizing me for being skeptical because I just don’t know.”
Parenthood has always been a force that reshapes values and rearranges friendships. But now it’s not just a life stage that is amplifying that change, but also medically skeptical voices who are on the political and cultural ascent.
Ms. Woods has a close friend, a quasi-sister figure, Katy Budd, who lives across the country, in New Jersey. The two keep in touch by leaving each other video voice mail messages through the app Marco Polo. Ms. Budd prepared for her pregnancy by reading “The Vaccine Book,” which supports parents in doing their own research and, for some, in potentially delaying or forgoing vaccines. Ms. Budd decided not to vaccinate her 2-year-old son.
Ms. Budd feels that Ms. Woods is one of the few people she knows who understands her discomfort with elements of modern medicine; both of them wanted to have natural births so they could have control over the process, but both ended up having C-sections because of complications. They agree on a lot. But when the subject of vaccinating their children comes up, they politely and firmly disagree, neither persuading the other.
“Our conversations are give and take — we’re adults who feel strongly and are respectful of having different opinions,” Ms. Budd said. “We’re both baffled by the American medical system when it comes to birth.”
Back in Atlanta, Ms. Villasana-Espinoza has also stumbled into disagreements with people she loves. One close friend had a child about a year ago and has since seemed more attracted to medically dubious theories. She told Ms. Villasana-Espinoza that she worried there was insufficient information about vaccines and that she chose to delay certain vaccinations for her son. She still wanted to get together when her son was sick. Her feelings seemed to be hurt when Ms. Villasana-Espinoza canceled plans.
Instead of getting together weekly, the two now see each other either monthly or every other month, a new layer of awkwardness added to their relationship.
“I have these long established friendships I want to maintain,” Ms. Villasana-Espinoza said. “But they’ve become such wildly different people. That has been hard.”
Emma Goldberg is a business reporter covering workplace culture and the ways work is evolving in a time of social and technological change.
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