Journal of Educational Controversy

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Sunday, July 18, 2021

Are the “Right to … Anti-Vaccinators” Aligning Themselves with the Right to Choose Abortions Movement and the Right to Die with Dignity Movement

Categories are strange things.  They tell us what is included and what is excluded.  They allow certain kinds of questions and render other kinds invisible. They organize our thought and blind it at the same time.  Here is a thought experiment.  Those who refuse to be vaccinated against the Covid-19 virus in the United States have many different motives and maybe even different reasons if they explored their motives.  One group seems to be politically motivated and likes to adopt the language of rights---one has a right to make a decision about getting a vaccination or not for oneself.  We see such “rights” language used in other contexts.  It sounds familiarly like those who argue for the right to choose whether or not to have an abortion.  Perhaps, politically motivated anti-vaccinators are aligning themselves with that movement.  Or it also sounds like those who argue for the right to die with dignity, a movement for the right of the terminally ill to decide when the end of life should come.  Could they be seeing their life and death decision in comparable terms. I suspect that the anti-vaccinators do not necessarily align with either of these two movements.  And they might even start to offer reasons why they do not both fall in the same category.   Maybe, they would even think about what they are actually arguing for.   I only bring this up to raise the question about the ways our minds get locked into the categories we impose and ways to shake our minds to begin to look beneath and around our automatic responses.   What might be the implications for the teaching of our youth?