This weekend, I heard a noise in the hallway in the middle of the night and I just knew something was wrong. Before the terrible idea in my head had time to completely form – before even checking my daughter’s small bed beside my own – I ran into the hallway and snatched up Layla, who was sleepily stumbling near the top of the second floor staircase in my parents’ house. I was terrified, but grateful that I had listened to my gut. Like every mother, I can list a dozen other moments like this with my daughter – when a doctor missed something, or when I realized her safety was at risk and no one else did.

There are things we know about our children that no one else ever will, and there is no doctor or nurse who will be closer to our children than we are. So when I hear parents who don’t vaccinate their children claiming that they “just know” that it’s the right decision, or when some say it was a mother’s instinct that told them their child was “vaccine injured”, I almost want to sympathize. The intensity of parental love combined with the medical establishment’s poor history of listening to and trusting women’s voices can make it easy to believe that we are the ones who know best. But quite simply: we’re not.

We are experts in what our children like to wear to bed, and what toy they’re favoring. We know their smiles, their sleep sounds and the way they mess up putting on their sneakers. But despite the platitudes thrown at mothers – that we’re doing the hardest job in the world and that motherhood is also being a chef, chauffeur and doctor – the truth is that we do not know everything about our children and what is best for them. That’s why we have real doctors. And no matter how condescended one feels by the medical establishment – and I’ve had that feeling myself – it does not excuse putting other children’s lives at risk.

Risking other children’s lives, and other parents’ pain, is exactly what you’re doing when you don’t vaccinate your child: you’re not just making decisions about your children’s health, but the health and safety of the children around them. Children like mine.

Layla was born extremely premature, and because of her low birth weight and underdeveloped lungs, her immune system was not up to par for years. She got sick more easily and more drastically than other children. The first two years of her life were filled with too many emergency room visits, doctors, shots, antibiotics and other medical interventions.

She was at such risk, in fact, that our pediatrician recommend that we keep her out of daycare and away from groups of children for as long as possible, so we cared for her at home for two years – a luxury we could afford but many other families cannot. But every time she played with a child at the park or a doctor’s waiting room, I was terrified.

So when I read quotes from parents denying any social responsibility to vaccinate saying things like, “My child is pure ... It’s not my responsibility to be protecting their child,” it makes me livid. Where once we said “it takes a village”, these days some people don’t care if the village burns to the ground so long as their precious snowflake is left standing.

Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that shows vaccines are safe, the debunking of “science” that said otherwise, the widespread medical support for vaccinating your children and the irreparable harm not vaccinating can do, some radical parents continue to insist they will not vaccinate and some politicians, like Chris Christie, want to make sure they can do just that.

But it’s also a little too easy to say that parents who don’t vaccinate their children are being stupid and selfish. Raging at people who have already drank the Kool-Aid will do little to change their minds; if anything, hearing the facts makes them dig their heels in more – it’s just proof that they’re “anti-establishment”. So if we want to convince anti-vaccination parents to open their minds, we need to come from a place that empathizes with their need to feel like the utmost expert on their child. Their belief that vaccines are dangerous – however misguided – comes from a place of fierce love for their children.

Still: until we can convince people that caring about public health is more important than the health of one person (let alone that the science shows both are better off if children are vaccinated) I’m not entirely against forcing anti-vaccine parents to vaccinate their children or stay away from mine. Anti-vaccine parents’ fantasies shouldn’t trump any other child’s reality – or their future.