Today’s theme challenges issues related to individual freedom. I will seek to demonstrate that the freedom of each person cannot harm anyone, naturally including children. Logical.
Now, as everyone will recognize, the mother and father have unquestionable duties on the health protection of their children. In other words, they have an obligation to do everything to avoid children’s diseases, as to protect them in relation to cold, heat or malnutrition.
In fact, the State, since 1976, has consecrated the right to freedom in the Constitution, but its interpretation has boundaries: the chapter dedicated to “personal rights, freedoms and guarantees” stipulates that “parents have the right and duty of education and maintenance of children” (number 5 of article 36). Sublinho: Rights and Duties.
Accordingly, parents are not free to refuse school attendance, just as they should not deny their children’s vaccination. Duties.
Although in Portugal, the subject does not represent a social problem, there are countries where worrying signs arose to groups that insist on the spread of wrong ideas about risks of vaccination, which generate hesitations, behaviors and negative lifestyles. These opinions, propagated without any scientific foundation, endanger not only their parents’ health, but also their children and the community. I refer, for example, to the United States of America, where the irrationality of argument is even defended by members of current governance.
I consider that an adult has the right to refuse to be vaccinated, but this right is only acceptable to himself. It cannot impose this denial on anyone, including their children. The right to freedom is only for themselves, since it has a duty to protect children in relation to diseases that are proven to be avoidable by immunization. It has no right to deny disease prevention to children.
Necessary.
As a norm, after childbirth, still in maternity, the newborn is administered the first dose of the hepatitis B infection vaccine, which is part of the National Vaccination Program. It is therefore universal and free. In adulthood, this child will be, after completing the vaccination scheme, protected from liver cancer. Now, we admit, as a hypothetical scenario, that the mother or father had not authorized immunization and that the same child will get sick with liver cancer, which would have been avoided by fulfilling the vaccination calendar.
Duty to protect children or the right to denial?
(Continues)
Former Director-General of Health
franciscogeorge@icloud.com