The Way That Seemed Right
Thursday, May 7, 2026
Evidence Based Birth · https://evidencebasedbirth.com/evidence-for-the-vitamin-k-shot-in-newborns/
A 7-week-old in Maryland began seizing. A baby in Kentucky vomited and went lethargic. The shot their parents declined had been routine for seventy years.
What's happening
A ProPublica investigation published Wednesday traces a rising number of newborn deaths from vitamin K deficiency bleeding, a condition prevented by a single injection given at birth for the past seventy years. A national study in JAMA found the 2024 refusal rate climbed above 5%, up 77% from 2017. Babies who do not receive the shot are 81 times more likely to develop late VKDB. One in five who develop it die. The reporting follows several infants whose autopsies traced cause of death to spontaneous brain bleeding. At the morgue, the babies arrived in their diapers and blankets, hospital ID bracelets still wrapped around their ankles.
What the Text says
Proverbs is wisdom literature shaped by repetition. A line is sharpened until it is unbearable, and then it is set down without commentary.
Proverbs 14:12There is a way which seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.
The Hebrew is plain. Yashar is the word for what is straight, level, upright. The path looks correct. It feels correct to the one walking it. The text does not say the traveler is wicked, or careless, or unloving. It says the appearance of rightness is itself something the human eye cannot always see past. The verse is set in a chapter on the difficulty of knowing, on hearts that the stranger cannot enter and laughter that hides grief. It refuses the comfort of the easy moral. The way that seems right and the way that ends in death can be the same way, walked by the same person, for reasons they could explain to you.
The reflection
Every parent who declines the injection loves the child fiercely. They are trying to protect a body so new it cannot yet hold its own head up. The love is not in question.
The pediatrician at Vanderbilt said she thought they had turned the corner. The CDC investigators found, in family after family, that awareness of the bleeding risk was incomplete or absent. There is a kind of tenderness that walks a straight road, and the road ends where it ends.
Knowledge is not the opposite of love. Sometimes it is the instrument love needs and does not have.