LANCASTER, Pa.— Amish families peer into Roberta Devers’ Honda Passport as she drives among prenatal checkups along the rolling hills of Lancaster County. They ask her increasingly frequent questions about the vaccine: Do you have some measles in your car?
Devers, 63, works as a traditional midwife in communities at the epicenter of Pennsylvania’s largest measles outbreak in more than 30 years.
She belongs to a class of midwives who follow age-old practices and are unregulated by the state, unlike the state-licensed midwives one may find in a hospital. She received the full childhood vaccination schedule but, as an adult, chose not to vaccinate her son and is part of the rising number of people in Pennsylvania refusing to get vaccinated against preventable diseases due to unfounded concerns about their safety and necessity…