Deciding on Whether to Have Children

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I have three cousins (2 on mom's, 1 on dad's) who also have autism. What if they can't have children because of their disorder?

I didn't make that choice not to have children. Circumstance, sadly, made it for me. Not that anyone would have married the person I was in my younger years. Even today, I might never catch up enough to do all I need to do in order to get married.

If they are high-functioning, and can do what it takes to handle marriage and children, then there is nothing that says they shouldn't have them.

I doubt that I could ever become that functional, even with all the improvements I've made. The big improvements have leveled off and I would have to improve my current level by about one hundred times to be even adequate. It stresses me out to think about it.

What does that mean?

People can have kids if they are autistic. The chances of autism will rise, but who says that's bad?
Up to them

(shrugs) my wife and I are autistic and we have a kid.

I would not bring a child into a world that is headed for chaos. If the Climate starts to recover, or there were few people left, I'd consider it.

I love this quote, but not for the intended reason.

I would not bring a child into a world that is headed for chaos.

You're talking about the world being headed for chaos. I think SOMETIMES the potential of being born with Asperger's/Autism or being born to a parent with Asperger's/Autism means that the unborn child's life will be "headed for chaos" from the get-go.

Forget the planet, for the kid's own sake and the life the kid might have, I don't think I want to have him/her if the child's life will be "headed for chaos."

Is your kid...you know?

His kid is to young to know, but both of the parents are autistic so they are somewhat expecting it.

The world is always headed for chaos. For thousands of years, chaos is always right around the corner. Do not automatically assume that the child will grow up to be an Aspie. You might be pleasantly surprised. One of my daughter grew up and became a biomedical engineer and the other became a medical doctor.

Are they Aspies? Who knows and who cares! Because I am an Aspie, I knew how mean and cruel the world was. And I did my best to instill in them greatness.

I didn't have children when I was younger because frankly my social skills were so bad I didn't attract any potential partners!

Now I'm 36 and I know that pretty soon any chance I have to have children will be gone. My husband wants kids... For some reason... And I love him to death, but well my medication would have to change because I take two medications in pregnancy Category X which is horrible. One is Lipitor which is just a high cholesterol med I started not long ago but the other med is depakote and changing a med so tied to my moods... My psychatrist said she would change my meds if I wanted to though.

Second issue is that I was a special needs kid and there is always the issue of if I would give birth to a special needs kid and what that would due to my nerves.

And third... Husbands been having his own ED issues... Umm yeah.

A kid is probably not in my future either.

Through former times, children were unavoidably in peril from disease and other dangers, but their numbers and abilities were almost no danger to the future, except for making deserts and the work of rare warlords. Now, humans and domestic animals outweigh all the wild animals combined about 10:1 and there are daily extinctions from loss of habitat to rising human populations. Our machines make it far easier to invade wilderness, and our demands for more stuff make it "necessary." Our coming chaos is not just political, but climactic. We have had natural disasters before, but now we can't move to a safe area - the whole world is changing rapidly.
I may have some good genes for the coming age, but with over seven billion other humans, I assume that there's enough diversity, and try to produce something society needs more than another mouth to feed.
To me, it seems pretty basic that parents want a better life for their children, so to prepare, I decided I'd have to be able to support them without cutting into their natural inheritance. That is very difficult to do in this economy, and success would probably make the child a social outcast anyway.

Get a cat.

My mom had a kid just over a year ago, at 46

Buc,

Yes, my cats were my kids. LOL! I've had quite a lot of them over the years, too.

We were discussing that too .. we used to own cats and had to give them away when we moved but now we live in a place where we could have one again