Comment and Opinion

Beyond Conformity

More books! (12/11/2011)
A few years ago New Zealand's favourite anti-vaccination liar, Hilary Butler, called me an "emotive lunatic" in a letter to the British Medical Journal's web site. She was defending someone who had beaten a ten-week-old baby to death at the time and my emotive lunacy was to suggest that murderers should not be treated with too much respect. The murderer in question had had a letter published without bothering to mention that his current residential address was a prison so I had pointed out some facts to the BMJ's readers.

Ms Butler has written, with her husband, two books about the evils of vaccination and they are available for free from her web site. I can't resist a bargain so I wrote off for my copies and you can imagine my excitement when over a thousand pages of "information" turned up. The two books are Just A Little Prick and From One Prick To Another. I am not sure if Ms Butler is aware of the colloquial use of the word "prick" and is trying to make some sort of heavy-handed and juvenile joke or if she, like many of her ilk, is unaware of the zeitgeist and popular culture and just thought the tiles were catchy.

I tossed a coin and decided to read Just A Little Prick first. The book starts off with the life stories of the authors. (Peter Butler said that he married Hilary in June, 1980. That means he must have been courting her while the enquiry was proceeding into the air crash that killed his first wife, as the enquiry findings were not announced until June 1980 and the results of the subsequent Royal Commission until April 1981. He probably went through an appropriate period of grieving, though, as he had only been married to the first wife for 22 years. He didn't say what her name was. Perhaps he has forgotten.)

Once the personal details are out of the way Hilary starts describing what went on when she had her first baby. At 32 weeks into her pregnancy she started leaking, but an unnamed obstetrician from Holland told her that this was "no big deal" and advised her "not to stick anything up there". She took this latter piece of advice to heart when at 37 weeks her GP wanted to do an internal examination. When she refused and explained the Dutch quack's idiocy to him he insisted that she go to a hospital. When she finally got into somewhere where she might get good care she brought in a midwife (who was so committed that she went home before the baby was born). She then describes, in hysterical terms, a difficult birth experience not unlike one that occurred to a member of my family, except that my family member realises that the drama resulted in saving the lives of both baby and mother. Ms Butler, on the other hand, creates a fictional account of some sort of mad attempt to do everything wrong that it is possible to do wrong. Did I say "fictional"? Why, yes I did, because what she says went on is only imaginable in the mind of someone who hates doctors and medicine. Based on what little truth can be extracted from the story, however, it is obvious that had Ms Butler opted for a home birth with a midwife there would have been no book to read. Dead women can't write books. When she announced that she would be calling for lawyers if "so much as a teaspoon of formula" got into her baby I decided that I didn't need to read the remaining 450 pages of this emotive lunacy. If Ms Butler applied the same standard of truth and reason to her discussion of vaccinations as she did to her birth experience then I could only imagine that the remainder of the book would have had even David Icke's publisher scratching her head and saying "WTF?"

Remember how I said that the books are available for free from Ms Butler's web site? You can also get them from Amazon. As her books are directed at people who will believe anything I was not surprised to see that there were people taking advantage of this. In fact I had to laugh. Out loud.