Jenny McCarthy: The day I heard my son had autism

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Agreed. It is already happening with children with down syndrome(they can find it in prenatal tests). Doctors promote this by telling expectant mothers all the horrible negative things about people who have down syndrome so the mothers can be informed about whether to "keep" their child (...). This is why you don't see many babies with down syndrome anymore. This is eugenics to eliminate certain people from the human race, like Hitler tried to do...

They are also aborting babies with spina befida.

I agree with that statement.
I'm not against treatment. However, I AM against treatment that claims to make ASD kids indistinguishable from their peers. It's possible to teach an autistic child to mimic NTs, but it's all an act. Inside, they're still autistic. From what I've read from blogs, and articles written by those that are more severely affected by autism they eventually break after living this way for so long. It's not natural to them to use NT coping strategies, and behaviors. They need to be taught how to cope, and how to communicate the way their brain works, not the way NTs think they should work. The last thing that I EVER would want my child to feel is that he is worth less in his natural state, and to become worthy in society's eyes he must supress everything that he is. The pressure has to be almost unbearable to these kids.
When these celebrities go into the public eye with all these claims of "cure", and "recovery" that is what the public knows. They don't go to the pc, and spend endless hours researching mercury, and DAN! docs. They only take that one piece of biased information, and tuck it away in their memory. They truly believe it. Every time that I tell the nurse, dentist, cashier, ect.... that my son has autism they always say that they read/watched something on TV the other day about it. It's never the positive, accepting stuff that I'd like them to know about my kids. No. It's about mercury, chelation, DAN! docs, and heavily used ABA. They expect me to do these therapies, because they work. Why else would it have been so publicized? I have to say I was pleased to no end when I saw Amanda Baggs do an interview on CNN several months ago. THAT is the kind of autism awareness that I love to see. I e-mailed everyone that I know to tell them to watch it. I referred people to the youtube video if they missed it. Ms. Baggs is not beautiful or rich like Jenny Mcarthy, but she IS autistic. That makes HER the real expert in my mind.

i doubt her son had autism. she just wanted a cause to get on tv. again
shes cute though

I agree with Space. I also thought her "bucket" analogy was creepy. I wouldn't want anyone telling me to clean out my bucket! It was also misleading. It implies that ASD people have totally different physiology than NTs. Of course there are neurological differences, but (unless I'm misinformed) there aren't any other physical traits that go along with ASD. I understand ASD to be a set of neurological characteristics that can have different causes, including some that are as yet unknown. She hinted at that at one point, but she spent more time talking about how it was caused by a weak immune system. She also attempted to convey that she knows more than most doctors who specialize in ASD. This strikes me as an over-statement of her credentials.

If the aim is to make a child the same as his or her peers, that seems to set the bar appallingly low. I would want a child to distinguish himself for his ability rather than his inability. The aim is to help the child realize his or her potential. You can still find a sense of belonging and retain your uniqueness. For Roger Bannister, it was running. For me, it is my love of cats.

Very well put! Short sweet, and to the point.

I agree, very well put. And then such a thing as "the same as his/her peers" doesn't exist altogether. Whom of the peers the child should resemble - Johnny, Harry, Tony, Betty etc.? So in the end, it all boils down to trying to turn the child into something the parents want to see, perhaps into the ideal child they had dreamed about but never got in reality, and then claiming that this is exactly what "normal" is. This is pure egotism.

Another part of the whole thing is that ABA therapy is a fairly lucrative business. Just like the psychiatric medications that are being forced upon people even when they don't suit the particular patient and do more harm than good (I'm not saying medication doesn't work, it does, I'm basically pro-med when it comes to mental health issues, but medications are being abused to no end), simply because the pharmaceutical companies and the like need to make a profit. Same here. It pays off to claim that autism is curable and have parents lay out thousands and thousands, expecting that ABA will be that very cure for their child, while somebody else makes a profit from their being frightened and desperate to do something for their child but not knowing what exactly it should be.

Interestingly, the spina bifida test picks up spina bifida occulta, which usually goes undiagnosed and generally causes no disability. So people who practice selective abortion are not only picking off disabled babies, they're also killing ones that would have been "just fine".


Back to the original subject...

While I question Jenny McCarthy's use of the term "cure" and also take issue with the way the phrases other ideas, I must interject that my own son was greatly helped by many of the methods she champions. It's pretty clear that autism is something with many facets and probably multiple etiologies as well. Every individual is unique. If you or I are happy with the way we turned out, we still don't have any right to say that nobody is helped by special diets, etc. The autism experts who examined my son say that they frequently see children who experience a regression of skills, display severely autistic symptoms, and then lose the majority of those behaviors in a 6-12 month time period of intervention. While our pride might balk at the term, it is easy to see why someone would call such a phenomenon a "recovery" or "cure".

Looking at the article I'd say she is writing a soap, filled with cheap sentiments ans sensation.

When the door opened and a sweet older man walked in, I immediately felt good.
He looked at me with sorrowful eyes and said, "I'm sorry, your son has autism."

I find it disgusting.




No, I don't want people telling me or others to believe in miracles and quackery and go on some useless diet or chelation or whatever. I don't want other people to waste resources on the modern equivalents of snake oil when those resources can be put to better use.

It kind of offends me that she treats her son's autism like the plague instead of embracing him for who he is.

No one is going to buy your book or give you money if you're aren't complaining.

yeah this is stupid shes making money cause of her child having autism. funny cause her son most likely still has autism and when he grows up hes still gonna have aspergers anyway. so she hasnt cured nothing. as they told me i had autism and now as an adult i have aspergers. you cant cure it. man i wish people with listen to us and to people who actually have it and most likely have outgrown it to the best we can.

My wife and I know of another child on the exact diet promoted by Jenny McCarthy. I haven't seen the miracle cure in this other child. Besides having Asperger's my son has PDD-NOS/HFA and he is doing well using a "Floortime" method. He's not "cured," but he is probably the child with the most progress in the support group my wife and I belong to. We have not done any special diet method because he is such a picky eater as it is. Anyway, if he was totally cured, he would lose one of the aspects that makes him unique.

I hated her article in People magazine. She referred to Evan as a "sick kid"; I read it twice to make sure she wasn't talking about his past seizures and was indeed talking about his autism. And, sure enough, she believes he needs a cure. You don't even have to read between the lines to see that she's the needy one, wanting a child that will hug her and tell her all about his day at school and draw her cute little pictures to stick on the fridge. She believes his silence is torturing him, when in reality it's torturing her.