Accidentally Green

Making Healthy Decisions That Honor God and Happen to Help the Environment

How to Avoid Becoming a Cesarean Statistic

One exciting and nerve-racking aspect of pregnancy is the looming due date. Will the baby be born early or late? How will labor start? What will the delivery be like?Most mothers who are pregnant with their first child don’t think about Cesarean sections much. Even though two-thirds of births in America are vaginal deliveries, medicated or unmedicated, one-third of all births are Cesarean sections. 1 That’s an alarming statistic, when the World Health Organization recommends just ten to fifteen ... Read more

Thinking About Birth Days

For most of my life, I thought childbirth – unless in an emergency situation like giving birth in a car on the way to a hospital – involved drugs like epidurals. Kind of like I thought most babies drank formula from bottles. But once I reached a childbearing age and watched how my friends dealt with births and their newborns, I began to understand that there were a lot of different options available to parents. A lot of natural options. It certainly made a lot of sense to me that if God ... Read more

In the News: Alternative Vaccine Schedules

As I’ve admitted, my husband and I use alternative vaccine schedules with our two children. So a recent study published in Pediatrics, the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, definitely caught my eye.“Alternative Vaccination Schedule Preferences Among Parents of Young Children” includes survey results, details “national patterns of alternative vaccination schedule use, and the potential ‘malleability’ of parents’ current vaccination schedule choices.”To briefly summarize, Dr. ... Read more

A Vaccine Truth That’s Stranger Than Fiction

Something even stranger than monkeys or mad cow disease is present in many vaccines.Many vaccines are cultured in human cell lines, called human diploid cells – and, I kid you not, these human diploid cells originated in fetal tissue taken from legal abortions in the 1960s. Two fetal cell lines are commonly used in vaccines: WI-38 is the cell line taken from the lung cells of a healthy three-month-old female aborted fetus in 1962. Some brands of varicella, measles, mumps, rubella, ... Read more

How Are Avian Flu and Mad Cow Disease Related to Vaccines?

On Monday, I shared some of the animal components used in vaccine production. As a review, ingredients like sugars, salts, and meat extracts are necessary for a vaccine’s toxic bacteria to grow. A viral vaccine needs living cells, also known as cell lines, to grow – and for the most part, those living cells are taken from animals.However, using some animals comes with consequences including avian flu and mad cow disease. Chicken run Currently, flu vaccines are produced in chicken eggs. The ... Read more

Do You Know Where Vaccines Come From?

Vaccines are such a hot button issue. And, regardless of whether you love them or hate them, one thing is sure: vaccines are made with some really weird – and sometimes super creepy – components. As I’ve spent quite a lot of time researching vaccines, one point that always disturbs me is the production process. I understand it’s a necessary process, but it’s really quite creepy. Where do vaccines come from? In order for a vaccine’s toxic bacteria to grow, ingredients like sugars, salts, and ... Read more

How I Unknowingly Gave Oxycodone to My Newborn

Would any mother knowingly give Oxycodone to her newborn baby?Hopefully the answer is a resounding no. I surely never thought such a thing could be possible.Yet one night, I realized in horror that my very own newborn was on Oxycodone. Sound highly unlikely? Little Sister’s birth story The end of my pregnancy with Little Sister was a strange one. I experienced postdronal labor (contractions that never led to active labor) on and off for an entire month. In my attempt to experience ... Read more

Are Epidurals As Safe As You May Think?

Many mothers love epidurals in childbirth – more than one friend has told me they’d like to not feel a thing when it comes time for labor pains and delivering babies.However, with epidurals, there are real dangers to both mothers and babies. Most significantly, NONE of the drugs used in epidurals or given for maternal pain relief have been proven safe for unborn children – or even newborns. 1 The unsafe drugs cross the placenta and enter a child’s bloodstream within seconds of being administered ... Read more

Do You Know What’s In Your Medication?

In 2010, McNeil Consumer Healthcare surprised consumers when they announced a recall on all forty-six types of their infants’ and children’s products. Trusted medicines like Tylenol, Motrin, Benadryl, Dimetapp, Robitussin, and Triaminic were pulled off store shelves. McNeil informed parents that the products were recalled because they might “contain a higher concentration of an active ingredient than is specified,” they might include “inactive ingredients that may not meet internal testing ... Read more

What’s In Your Drinking Water?

Anyone trying to live a healthy life knows that drinking water is vital. Our bodies were created to need water – in fact, around 60 percent of our bodies are made of water.Unfortunately for Americans, it’s difficult to discern what type of water is safe to drink. Both tap water and bottled water certainly have their share of problems. It’s important for consumers to judge for themselves what’s acceptable. Tap water troubles Over the past few years, Americans have learned more about what ... Read more

How to Avoid Frankenstein Foods

Recently, I found an illustration on Facebook with the ironically funny caption, “Try organic food … or as your grandparents called it, ‘Food.’ ”If only this statement wasn't so true! The non-organic food that fills store shelves and restaurants is pretty frightening. Consumers should avoid unhealthy ingredients like trans fats, high fructose corn syrup or artificial colors. But they also should steer clear of non-organic food because it's produced with synthetic growth hormones and ... Read more

When Does Dressing Up Turn Dangerous?

Have you ever noticed how October tends to have such a spooky focus each year? So much of the beauty of autumn is overshadowed by ghosts and goblins, costumes and candy. Like it or not,  I’m jumping on a creepy bandwagon, too, for the next few weeks. It just seems like the perfect time to write about all sorts of scary things that seem to be stranger than fiction. (Last week I kicked off the month with three posts about lice you can read here, here and here.)   Since autumn ... Read more

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