“I Have to Write a Statement of Moral Conviction. Can Anyone Help?”: Parents’ Strategies for Managing Compulsory Vaccination Laws

Laws requiring evidence of vaccination before children can enter schools or child care have been key to public health. However, as parents increasingly reject vaccines for their children, they rely on legal exemptions that allow children to access these settings without vaccination. Using qualitative data from interviews, ethnographic observations, and analyses of online forums, this article traces parents’ understandings of legal regulation and their strategies for navigating vaccine laws. Specifically, it shows how parents resent the lack of information about vaccine exemptions available, how they laboriously manage information about their children’s care to protect access to exemptions, and how they strategize how to use exemptions in ways they see as in their children’s best interests, but not necessarily as the laws were intended. It then shows how these efforts represent a way to challenge state power, which parents see as limiting individual freedoms. It concludes by considering the meanings for communities.