Generation Rescue...-_-

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Better to have them in care than not born at all.

Those who use this argument seem to miss one point: if someone does not feel they can handle raising a child with special needs, they should not have children at all. Why? Because even if they give birth to a "perfect" child, an accident can leave them with a brain injury and turn them into a special needs child at any moment.

This is not just a theoretical point. I know a guy who is 32, and his mother is still taking care of him, because at age 16, he was in a car accident and suffered a head injury. Things like this happen. Pretending that "birth defects" are the only problem is altering the circumstances to suit a particular argument. If a person feels that they cannot handle having a child who is not "perfect", and thus believes there would be a need for genetic testing - then they should simply forgo having children altogether. Because those tests are not perfect - my niece was told her baby would have Downs, the doctors tried to force her to have an abortion, but she managed to refuse, and her son is now 17 and perfectly fine - and even if they were, they cannot guarantee what will happen later in life.

And also, these 'autism' genes could be in a very large part of the population. They'd be eliminating a whole bunch of 'suspect' infants, who might not ever display autism symptoms at all.


The only way I could see this 'abortion' thing being kept to a mimimum, would be is if they developed a way for the child to have therapy early and cheaply, and educated people that having autism doesn't mean the child will necesarily be an invalid.

First of all, i believe in a woman's right to choose right or wrong its her body that is deliviering it.

That being said the genetic screening of a fetus if that information is going to be used to abort that child is unethical. There is such a thing as knowledge people aren't ready for. If most people if they heard their child is a "high risk" for autism they would imagine the most severely autistic child they could, looking at that fetus as nothing as an object and burden instead of a potential unique human life with every right to exist (don't get me wrong, I;m just stating this in the point of view of a typical couple). Not to mention we still aren't very good at genetic mapping, Look at Xq28, that took until 1999 to dispel if they had been using that as a genetic screening for abortion countless potential lives would have been exterminated because the parents wouldn't want a gay child, costing the health care system a very large sum of money and not even delivering the desired effect (and that's looking at it from the point of view of a eugenicist douchebag). Abortion should be a last resort, and doctors cannot ethically provide genetic screening to people who would be unable to soundly process the information. Which begs the question, if they successfully wiped out all people on the spectrum, who is next?

They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Okay, comparing prenatal testing to the Holocaust pisses me off. First of all, comparing stuff to Hitler is not only played out, but really f*****g insulting to people who died in the Holocaust. Abortion is not the same as taking 11 million+ fully aware human beings, rounding them up, and torturing and killing them in unspeakable ways. It just isn't.

If prenatal testing is used, it will not mean that autistic people will be wiped out. They are not rounding up autistic people and killing/sterilizing them.

In part, I agree with you. The Holocaust was a unique horror. However, the very people in America who were praising the Nazis for what they intended to do, and encouraging them (including individuals associated with the Carnegie Institute), realised when the war was over and the public expressed shock and horror at the tactics used, that they would have to change tactics. So they shifted their emphasis to reducing the "unfit" through abortion. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, said "Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated." She was a prominent eugenicist, who wanted "to create a race of thoroughbreds". She was even a featured speaker for the Ku Klux Klan.

She outlined some of her plans for the "Negro Project" in a letter to Dr. Clarence J. Gamble (who funded North Carolina's Eugenic Board): "We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. The minister’s work is also important and also he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation [of Eugenicists] as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."

More recently, in 1958, the Director of the American Eugenics Society was invited to speak at a Planned Parenthood luncheon. Alan Guttmacher, who went from being Vice President of the American Eugenics Society to serve as the president of Planned Parenthood from 1962-1974, spoke to a Planned Parenthood gathering, saying, "The mentally ret*d and the mentally defective . . . insidiously are replacing the people of normal mentality." Today, the International Planned Parenthood Federation approves of the forced abortion practiced in China.

So, however effective their propaganda has been and how much they've managed to obscure it for most people today, there is a direct link between the Nazis and abortion. World War Two and the Holocaust have been special interests of mine since I was young. I've been a professional genealogist, who was horrified to discover the link between genealogy and the Nazis (they used genealogical records to hunt down Jews) and also the modern link between genealogy and eugenics. I take the whole topic very seriously, and I wouldn't mention such a link unless there was extensive, if well obscured, evidence of its existence. They couldn't get what they wanted by rounding us up and destroying us in camps, so they turned to other solutions. They spent a fortune on public relations, on propaganda, and on confusing the issue for many people. And today, they have been so successful, one of the people they wanted to "cleanse" the world of can sincerely defend their efforts.

I do agree with you that abortion is not the same as what was done in the camps. But scientific evidence does show, unquestionably, that an aborted fetus does suffer, often horribly. Some live for several hours after the abortion has been performed. So it is not as clean and painless as modern society would like to think, and even if it were, it is also certainly significant that the campaign which led to its being so widely accepted was deliberately planned and carried out specifically to finish what was started in those camps. For that matter, the numbers tattooed on the arms of Holocaust victims were essentially IBM punch card numbers (although the name of IBM's subsidiary in Nazi Germany was Hollerith) - and IBM is still involved in projects to catalogue and classify the human genome so that "undesirable" traits may be eliminated. Of course, they also obscure these truths. But the links between the Nazis and what is done today are complex, deep, and strong.

theWanderer, that is very interesting and very scary.

Autism Speaks are modern day Nazis, then?

The reason why I am defending prenatal testing is because I believe in a woman's right to choose. If a woman does not want to carry a child, it is HER CHOICE. Not everybody is emotionally or financially able to care for a child, especially ones with special needs.

If she didn't want a child she shouldn't have got herself pregnant, but that's a separate issue from getting rid of a baby just because it could have autism.

The first time I ever heard of Autism Speaks, a blogger posted a video of theirs - and when I watched it, my first thought was "Goebbels would have been proud of that video."

Whenever I think of how much of what they intended survives today, and just how respectable it has managed to become, I scare myself half to death. But it is vital to know your enemy. And every eugenicist and anyone who does their bidding is the enemy of every single person on the spectrum - and a whole lot of other groups besides.

I agree that it is a woman's choice not to carry a child. No quibbles about that - if anyone suggested forcing women to bear children, I'd be opposing that as vehemently as I oppose eugenics. In fact, that is also a Nazi idea - they proposed, and in some cases went through with, plans to "breed" women, willing or not, to create their "master race." They would do whatever they decided was necessary, in order to accomplish their own ends.

But other than that, your argument is illogical. If she is not emotionally or financially able to care for a child, then she doesn't need prenatal testing to tell her that. And, if she is not emotionally or financially able to care for a child with special needs, since there is always a chance of an accident which will leave her caring for just such a child, then the only possible answer is not to have children, so she still won't need prenatal testing. Such testing is uncertain at best, and is not at all a guarantee of avoiding giving birth to, or subsequently becoming the parent of, a special needs child.

Prenatal testing was proposed and developed by those members of the medical profession who sought to eliminate certain "undesirable" genes from the human race, it serves their purposes - and the "medical advice" they offer women who get such testing is coloured by their beliefs. (Yes, there is a chance a woman might be advised by a doctor who doesn't agree with such beliefs, since not every doctor does. But the official policies of various medical bodies on what advice is appropriate were drafted by eugenicists.) The very argument you're using is one first formulated by eugenicists as an acceptable sounding justification for achieving the ends they sought, so they could convince the public to accept those ends, one way or the other.

1. What about prenatal testing for things like Tay-Sachs or anencephaly? Is that wrong, despite that the child will not survive long (anencephalic babies usually die soon after birth, and Tay-Sachs children usually die around age four at the old) and will live a short and agonizing life? But oh, I guess the woman shouldn't have gotten herself knocked up then, even though she can't predict whether or not her embryo will have birth defects unless she does prenatal testing.
2. If prenatal testing is uncertain, that would mean that autism wouldn't completely be eradicated.
3. Prenatal testing is also done to check for genetic disorders like Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia, for defects like spina bifida and cleft palates so that they can be fixed, or to see if a pregnancy will be high-risk and where to go from there. Is that also wrong?

Why?! That is not right at all...prejudice is a pestilence.

Oh, and I noticed your profile picture was of Chiyo-chan from Azumanga Daioh! Cool!

(I need a pic of Sakaki or Osaka.)

The removing of we autistic people from the world would create global collapse.

And...

The removing of NT people from the world would create global collapse.

It takes both we autistics and the NT population together to make the world function properly.

Both are necessary, but even together both are not sufficient. We're not the only kind of neurodiverse.

What else neurodiversity are you talking about?