Who deserves to live?

CW: I cover some tough topics here, including prejudice against autistic people and death. Please read with care.

I want to say a couple of other things. There are many, many other studies that affirm this, and instead of listening to this canard of epidemic denial, all you have to do is start reading a little science, because the answer is very clear, and this is catastrophic for our country.

There’s a recent study by Blacksell et al. and a team of other researchers that said that the cost of treating autism in this country by 2035, so within 10 years, will be a trillion dollars a year. This is added to already astronomical healthcare costs, and then there is an individual injury.

These are kids that, this is a preventable disease. We know it’s an environmental exposure. It has to be. Genes do not cause epidemics. It can provide a vulnerability. You need an environmental toxin, and Irva Hertz-Picciotto pointed out that because of this mythology, that the amount of money and resources put into studying genetic causes, which is a dead end, has been historically 10 to 20 times the amount spent by NIH and other agencies to study environmental factors, to study exposures, to study external factors, and that’s where we’re going to find the answer.

This is an individual tragedy as well. Autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which are our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this. These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they were two years old, and these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted, and we have to recognize we are doing this to our children, and we need to put an end to it….

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is currently Secretary of Health and Human Services, said the above during a press conference on April 16. Plenty of people had something to say in response to these words. As the parent of an autistic young person, I certainly had some thoughts, but I will let autistic people speak for themselves.

I don’t want to diminish the fact that Kennedy’s words were about autistic people, and I hope I’m not doing that by suggesting that there’s a message for all of us in there—a message about what this person who is in charge of health care for the entire country values and does not value.