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In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times after the pregnancy pact story had been roundly debunked, Mike Males proposed that politicians, reporters, and social scientists abandon the term “teenage pregnancy” altogether. Contrary to the misimpression that phrase conveys, in the majority of cases the mother is not “a child herself,” she’s in her late teens, and the father isn’t a teen at all. He is in his twenties.28

Too, panics over “teen pregnancy” invariably disparage low-income girls of color—even when the story is ostensibly about well-to-do white girls. As Veronica Cassidy of Fairness and Accuracy in Media noted, “a racial subtext ran through most coverage” of the pregnancy pact story. “The Time article pointed out that Gloucester is a ‘mostly white’ town, and subsequent coverage consistently mentioned that these girls were white—a point that seemed to imply that teen pregnancy is only expected of young women of color,” Cassidy wrote.29

Still Iffy After All These Years

Another of the youth-related scares I discussed got updated as well. The panic I reported in chapter 7 over chilling reports that the DPT (diptheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccine caused serious impairment in children resulted in substantial numbers of parents refusing to immunize their children. The upshot, as subsequent studies documented, has been significant increases in the number of cases of whooping cough. (The risk of pertussis is about six times higher for unvaccinated children.)30

Indeed, health officials have become concerned in recent years that the number of parents who buy into panics over vaccines and refuse to vaccinate their babies may be endangering the population broadly. Their concerns have been raised by incidents of diseases that had largely disappeared in the United States, such as whooping cough, measles, and Haemophilus influenzae type b (known as Hib), as well as a more sweeping danger. When vaccination rates fall sufficiently, a population loses what’s known as “herd immunity,” where the number of immunized people is so large, even those who have not been vaccinated are safe because they never come in contact with an infected person.31

Yet, apparently having learned nothing from the adverse effects on children of their crusade against DPT shots, the same array of forces—advocacy groups and ratings- and vote-hungry media and politicians—coalesced more recently to fill parents with fear about a preservative in the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine that supposedly causes autism. Well after it was definitively debunked by the medical community, the MMR vaccine—autism link continued to pop up in the media—even making its way into primetime programming. In the 2008 premiere episode of Eli Stone, an ABC courtroom drama, attorney Stone represents the parents of an autistic child in their lawsuit against a vaccine manufacturer. In his closing argument, Stone declares, “Is there proof mercuritol causes autism? Yes. Is that proof direct or incontrovertible proof? No. But ask yourself if you’ve ever believed in anything, in anyone, without absolute proof.”32

Or, in this case, any proof. Back in the real world, the preservative that allegedly caused problems in the MMR vaccine was no longer in use by 2007, and Andrew Wakefield, the physician who had first raised the issue in a 1998 study published in The Lancet, had been brought up on medical misconduct charges in Great Britain and retracted that study.33

Yet the victim-cum-expert I cited as a driving force behind the DPT vaccine scare of the 1990s, Barbara Loe Fisher, was still actively advocating for “vaccine safety and informed consent” via the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), an organization she founded in 1982. A quote from Fisher on NVIC’s home page makes their position clear: “If the State can tag, track down and force citizens against their will [to] be injected with biologicals of unknown toxicity today, there will be no limit on what individual freedoms the State can take away in the name of the greater good