(This will probably be tangential, but I promise it will all tie together at the end. I just ranted at my husband about it for a good ten minutes and thought I’d try to write it down.)
There is currently a cure for autism that has been approved for trials by the FDA in the US. Cord blood will be administered to 30 autistic toddlers. There are a bunch of reasons why this probably won’t work, and you can read about that over here. (Link courtesy of sherlocksflataffect.)
Current autism research is looking at cure and cause. It should be looking at support - ways to help autistic people live the lives they want to live, the way they want to live them. You know, like how a lot of non-autistic people do.
Here’s the thing: researching cure and cause is going to result in eugenics.
Researching cure and cause is going to result in eugenics.
Researching cure and cause is going to result in eugenics.
We’ve seen it happen before; it is happening now.
From Wikipedia:
A 2002 literature review of elective abortion rates found that 91–93% of pregnancies in the United Kingdom and Europe with a diagnosis of Down syndrome were terminated.[73] Data from theNational Down Syndrome Cytogenetic Register in the United Kingdom indicates that from 1989 to 2006 the proportion of women choosing to terminate a pregnancy following prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome has remained constant at around 92%.[74][75]
In the United States a number of studies have examined the abortion rate of fetuses with Down syndrome. Three studies estimated the termination rates at 95%, 98%, and 87% respectively.[73]
This is eugenics, people.
Eugenics is the attempt to make the human race better by eliminating undesirable elements of the population. Apparently people who have Down syndrome are undesirable. We already know that autistic people are undesirable; why on earth would you think that this is not the direction we are heading?
In the 1920’s in Canada, eugenics was applied to people who had disabilities. They were sterilized against their will. The thought process was that people who had mental illness or developmental disabilities would give birth to more people who had mental illnesses or developmental disabilities, so they should be stopped from reproducing. This was done until the 1970’s.
To be clear: as recently as 40 years ago, Canadians sterilized people who had disabilities against their will, in order to keep them from producing more people who had disabilities.
This is recent history. This didn’t happen hundreds of years ago.
But humanity has a really selective memory.
I was shocked and appalled to learn, last year, that Canada had operating residential schools (you know, the ones that First Nations children were sent to against their parents’ wishes, so they could be forced to fit into white people’s society) as recently as the 1980’s.
Thanks to how poorly our history is taught, I had thought that residential schools were all done away with something like 100 years ago. But no, when I was in public elementary school, there were children being abused and denied their cultural heritage, taken away from their families by force. In my country. EDIT: The last one was closed in 1996. So I was halfway through university.
This is selective memory, people. This is trying to pretend that this sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore, that it was all really long ago.
It happens now. It is real.
And that is why you should care about this research for cures and cause. This is why you should reject it. This is why you should advocate for a focus on appropriate and wanted supports.
I’m turning 36 in a little over a week, and sometime in the next little while my husband and I are going to start trying to get pregnant. If my amniocentesis comes back positive for trisomy 21, I will be pressured (in not so many words) to have an abortion. I won’t do it, of course. But the fact that this happens is a sign that eugenics is just a part of our lives. Eugenics is ableism (and racism, and probably a whole bunch of other -isms) in its purest form.
Please, don’t support eugenics. Don’t support the eradication of diversity from the human race.
(Told you it would all tie in together. I should go to bed now, but I’ll stay up for a little while longer.)
