I was talking to my son yesterday who is in grad school getting a doctorate in Chemistry and he told me that he finally had found the time to read Tara Westovers book Educated. We had a lovely chat and I told him about Lyz Lenz’s new book Belabored and then his wife mentioned that Laree Westover has written a book titled Educating, as a response to Taras book.

So I woke up this morning determined to write something meaningful as I review Belabored and reshare the review I wrote for Educated I wrote in 2019. I will review Larees book when I read it.

It has not heen lost on me that two of the best writers of the new millennium are these amazing homeschooled women who were raised thinking out of the corporate box of American Ed.

Because of the nature of my online activism, I have had to walk this tightrope of using my own experience as a mother to illustrate various principles and examples of what I am writing about without betraying or over sharing my husband and childrens private lives.

It is a nearly impossible task as a mother to divorce my lived experience from the Family Sovereignty that I am constantly agitating for.

I too am estranged from my own mother who has rejected my stories as false memory syndrome and so the words Lyz crafted for her chapter describing a visit to interview Taras parents in Idaho titled Miracles just cracked my heart wide open.

I share now 21 quotes from that chapter and would encourage all of my birthy friends to go buy Lyz’s book today and read the whole thing. It is a TREASURE!

Jenny Marie Hatch

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Here is the review I wrote of Tara’s book the first time I read it. (I have since read it a second time and watched and listened to all of the podcasts and interviews she did that are preserved online.)

Last year when Tara Westovers book Educated came out my daughter Allison read it and told me about it.  I put it on my list of books to read.  Then at Christmas, my son and his wife told me I should give it a read as I had much in common with Taras parents.  They were into homeschooling and used essential oils for healing and had raised Tara and her siblings in a small town in Idaho where Mom served as the local midwife and Dad was a prepper who ran a junk yard from his property.

I put the book on hold at the library and was shocked that although they had sixteen e-book copies on hand, the wait to read it would be months away!  I finally received notification a few weeks ago that it was my turn to read this runaway best seller and I plunged in and read it quickly.  Then I went online and watched many of the interviews Tara did with the media and people like Bill Gates to promote her book.

A couple things I would like to point out, especially listening to Taras call for a bridge between rural America and the coasts, and seemingly uneducated America and the institutions of higher education.

First, the irony of someone like Bill Gates being responsible for Taras Cambridge doctorate because he financed the scholarship that allowed her to study there and receive her doctorate in history is the HEIGHT of irony.

Tara, if you are reading this, Bill Gates father was the first president of Planned Parenthood.  He and Bills mother were elitist Eugenists who believed that certain populations needed to be wiped off the earth with abortion and so-called family planning. He has also completely ruined education for huge swaths of American schoolchildren with his meddling in the public schools and financing of the common core behemoth that has rendered many children unable to read and do basic arithmetic.

Bill and Melinda have made depopulating vaccines a cornerstone of their outreach on planet earth for the past few years and have been identified as the source for these noxious toxins ruining the health and vitality of many people.  He also has made certain that sterilants were included in the vaccines to cause infertility in both men and women.

He admitted the depopulation side to the vaccines in a Ted Talk.

Now Tara, something you may not understand because you are not a parent yet is that those of us who homebirth, homeschool, and use energy medicine to heal are some of the most hated people in society.  A huge neverending media budget has been spent attempting to teach the naive and gullible to hate and fear those of us who refuse to vaccinate our children or treat them medically with antibiotics and psychiatric meds.  Those of us who have made these choices know that we do so at the risk of being called “medically neglectful” of our children and are at great risk from busybodies who may attempt to force entry into our homes and at the point of a gun force us to go to the hospital to give birth, vaccinate a child, have a useless surgery, or forced meds.

We are not the ones who have the laws, police, social workers, CPS, the hospitals, jails, courts, and guns in our hands to force families to live the way we choose to live.  We would never dream of trying to compel anyone to live this lifestyle.  The lonely difficult choices we have made for our own children have isolated many of us away from extended family, potential friends, and increasingly a nanny state infrastructure that would love for nothing more than to force us to go to the doctors for prenatal care, childbirth, help when our babies are sick, and to public school to reinforce the idea that all of those who make a livelihood from the pelvic goldmine are entitled to the fruits of our labors to enable them to pay back their student loans.

I appreciate your desire to be the bridge between the two worlds, and I hope that as you continue to learn and grow you will open up your heart to the idea that those of us who have rejected many of the bells and whistles of modernity are not stupid, we simply recognize the risks involved with certain lifestyle choices around health care and education.

I must admit that when I read in the book of your desire to be congruent in your personal life with what you had learned and how you behave that I laughed out loud as the chapter finished up with your call to the clinic and decision to get fully vaccinated.

You want to know why your book has been a runaway bestseller and touted in every possible media outlet and Bill Gates himself giving you a tongue bath of an interview?

That decision to be naively congruent was indeed your ticket to wealth and fame.  I only hope that the potential auto-immune diseases you have subjected yourself to and the possibility of never being a mother are factored into this decision to kiss the hand that has so generously fed you.

As a faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I am completely supportive of your parents choice to teach you how to live free. As you well know, The Book of Mormon is all about teaching individuals, families, nations, and the world how to be free.

The fact that you were raised by loving parents who taught you how to negotiate this life using faith and living close to the earth is a legacy that few American Children enjoy.  And as you observe huge swaths of neglected and medically abused little ones dissociate into attachment disorders, autism, complete brain dysfunction because of too many chemicals, and are left drugged, dead, or useless at the side of the road while those whose parents made the difficult choice to birth without the chemicals, not vaccinate, and nourish them with breastmilk and essential oils instead of antibiotics and formula, just remember that you are one of these lucky ones who made it into adulthood with your brain intact. So intact that you were able to reach the heights of educational glory.

As a lover of musical theatre, I also have to give a shout out to your parents for recognizing how important it was for you to participate in musicals, which I personally believe are the best way to learn how to read and relate to people socially.  There is nothing like a show to deepen friendships, connect a community, and elevate children to seek for the higher things in life.  Your Dads willingness for you to play Annie at the local playhouse was perhaps the best example of where his heart was as a Father.

I share these thoughts with you and anyone else who chances by in the hopes that those who would love for nothing more than to see me locked up for life because of my choices around health care and education, and yes, those people do exist, (I have been debating all of these issues on the internet with them for the past 22 years), can all take a deep breath and realize that we all want what is best for our children.

It would be refreshing if instead of hating and fearing each other, we could recognize parental rights around bodily and mind integrity and look at the oodles of cash the drug companies make from our willingness to bow down to the medical gods and the universities that give them their intellectual backing.

Jenny Hatch

If you have thoughts on these books, please share in the comment section!