5 Months Pregnant, I Face Losing My Job And Health Care For Choosing Not To Get A COVID-19 Injection By Lori Fisher for The Federalist
The state of Oregon is forcing me to contradict what I think is best for myself and my baby or face losing my job and health coverage when I need it most.
I am an Oregon state employee, but from the looks of things, I won’t be for too long. Kate Brown, the governor of Oregon, has announced a mandate for all state executive agency employees to have full COVID-19 vaccination by October 18 or six weeks after full approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), whichever is later.
I am currently five months pregnant. Under this mandate, I stand to lose my job and health care if I don’t allow a needle in my arm, even though the long-term effects of the COVID-19 vaccine are unknown.
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Yes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are now recommending the vaccine for pregnant women. The CDC says the risks of COVID-19 for unborn children and their mothers are greater than the unknown risks of the vaccine. But how can they know, if the long-term risks of the vaccine are unknown? These COVID treatments are, after all, only several months old themselves.
According to the CDC, the percent of preterm births among women with COVID-19 was 12.17, compared to 9.91 percent among women without COVID-19. That’s only a difference of 2.26 percent. Further, these numbers are not broken down by age and underlying health factors. In fact, these numbers are quite small when compared to the relevance of other factors like stress.
Finding another financially comparable job at this point in my pregnancy will be virtually impossible. It is a terrible decision to make between financial security — a roof over my family’s heads, food on the table, being able to pay for doctor bills — and putting something in my body that could ultimately affect me and my unborn child in ways I do not know.
What I do know is that the CDC has reported no COVID-19 deaths for women my age (age 30-39) in the state of Oregon in either 2020 or 2021. What’s more, few have been hospitalized. At the highest point, the rate of weekly hospitalizations for women in their thirties even being hospitalized was just over seven out of 100,000. That is not even discerning between underlying health factors.
