Vaccine hesitancy—which is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines”—has been named one of the top 10 global health threats by the WHO. While vaccines currently prevent 2 to 3 million deaths a year globally, a subset of the U.S. population still refuses to vaccinate their children.

It’s called the anti-vaxx movement, and I used to be a part of it. I’m a “crunchy” mother of six. For my first four children, I actually did follow the standard immunization schedule set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But I stopped vaccinating my children altogether after the birth of my fifth child, around the same time I started hanging out with other parents who didn’t vaccinate their children.

Things started to change for me during the delivery of my fourth child. When I had my fourth I realized that the only people I truly trusted with my comfort and safety were myself and my husband. This was the beginning of my journey toward out-of-hospital birth.

I had a home birth with my fifth child, Parker James (we call him P.J.), and it was amazing, transcendental, and everything I ever wanted. It was a lot more empowering. I felt like I had had a baby for the first time, even though it was my fifth. I took him to the pediatrician when he was two days old and I think we started vaccines with him.

But when he was six months old, I started looking for a new pediatrician. We had some job transitions and for a time our family was uninsured. I was also talking to all these people who didn’t vaccinate their kids at the time. (It seems to me that when you go off the beaten path by having a home birth, you start to meet people who also prefer to approach health care differently. And within those circles, some people don’t vaccinate their kids.)

All of this led to my decision to stop vaccinating my children. I began to believe the notion from the fellow crunchy parents I was talking to that vaccines were driven by money more than by necessity and evidence. The thinking here—which I subscribed to—is that the medical industry and big pharma both profit from vaccines because they build in a need for multiple doctor’s visits, and that the vaccines mean more money for the pharmaceutical industry. From what I’ve seen, because many anti-vaxx parents believe that vaccines cause illnesses like autoimmune disorders and autism (which the CDC and several studies have refuted), they think that the medical industry and big pharma further benefit from vaccines by creating a need to treat these illnesses.

Plus I really didn’t want to have any dependence on the mainstream medical establishment. My exposure to moms who had the same parenting style as I had reinforced my hesitancy about doctors and vaccines. These confident, engaged mothers weren’t vaccinating, and they could articulate why. I started to agree with anti-vaxx sentiments that many modern ailments may be due to over-vaccination.

I started to postulate that many issues that I was seeing in my family could be related to vaccines—specifically obesity and autoimmune disorders, like arthritis and chronic pain. I really bought into the fallacy that we were generally better off living as naturally as possible and that this lifestyle would be protection enough against most diseases. The more I learned about birth and early childhood medical care, the more I thought I was seeing connections to the pharmaceutical or other industries whose main motives, I guessed, were profit.