I am so fucking tired of people treating autism like it’s some horrible disease worse than death.

It’s just a different way of viewing and reacting to the world.

Are some autistic people severely intellectually disabled? Sure. Plenty of non-autistic people are too.

These antivaxxers act like if you kid is going to be autistic, you might as well have never had a kid.

And then on top of that, you have big antivaxxer proponent Jenny McCarthy saying she cured her son’s autism, so why did she make such a big fucking deal about it?

Incidentally, it’s been scrubbed from the web, but there used to be a website where Jenny McCarthy wrote an essay about how her son was an “indigo child,” which meant he was going to grow up to be superhuman with all sorts of amazing powers. It contained the unforgettable line, “after my son was born, I quit smoking.”

Edit: Ha! I found it on the Wayback Machine! And I was wrong about what she said. What she said was worse.

As all of you know, being a mother changes you in ways that you never thought you could imagine. I went from chain smoking and eating cheeseburgers to Hepa air filters and eating vegetarian after my son was born

web.archive.org/web/20110708144318/…/free.php?pag…

Are some autistic people severely intellectually disabled? Sure. Plenty of non-autistic people are too.

The incidence of intellectual disability among autistic people is notably higher than among non-autistic, and similarly for the incidence of many other comorbidities.

That said, I’m not sure what you’re trying to argue for, here. If you’re trying to say that we should be more accepting of neuroatypical people, like those with autism, I agree; it has improved quite a lot in the last decade but it’s still not great. If you’re trying to say autism shouldn’t be considered a disease and there shouldn’t be efforts to find a cure for it, I don’t agree.

I’m not sure why antivaxxers focus so much on specifically autism as a supposed vaccine sideffect. I think it might be historical reasons dating all the way back to Fudenberg and maybe even older, plus the fact that it’s a mental problem rather than physical and hence trivial to motivatedly “self-diagnose” (it’s much easier to claim that after you vaccinated your child you immediately noticed “clear autism symptoms”, than to claim their leg abruptly fell off).

Where is your evidence that autism is a disease? Because that’s the sort of shit Autism Speaks says.

Why do you even thing autistic people want to be “cured?”

A “disease” is a condition that affects one adversely. Some people with the autism diagnosis are not obviously affected adversely and do not consider themselves to be (and I am not suggesting that they are wrong), but most are. The worse-off autism cases look more like “constantly keeps trying to self-harm to deal with distress caused by crippling sensory issues; needs to be institutionalized”. I think not very controversial to say that those people are affected adversely and would want to not have those problems.

I think when you see me talking about autism, you think only of the first group of people - and I agree that if that’s what all autism was like, it’d be strange to consider it a disease (and I also agree with what you said earlier, that in the context of anti-vaxxing, a lot of weird parents seem to unjustifiedly think the mild autism of their children is as bad as death). But it’s not, and hence it causes quite a lot of suffering and it’d be morally right to find a way to prevent children from getting it.

A “disease” is a condition that affects one adversely.

Your definition of disease is patently false.

an) illness of people, animals, plants, etc., caused by infection or a failure of health rather than by an accident.

If vaccines were the cause, which they are not, then it still couldn’t be called a disease. It is not infectious, nor communicable, nor spreadable by any means other than genetic mutations presenting during fetal formulation.

**Autism is not a disease. **