Aspies For Freedom

yes im making another power point thats ASDAN for you! anyways the powerpoint i am making is about genocide and ethnic cleansing i have made one slide about discrimination i was wondering about maybe saying about the possibility of autism being erased would this be a good idea or not?

not to be too pushy or anything but i really need some advice on it thanks

Why powerpoint and where will you be showing it?

well powerpoints are easier to make and I will be showing it to my teacher (when it is finished) but if you would like to see it fine!

Not so easy to give advice when you've crossed the line into ethical musings. It really depends on which perspective one adopts regarding the "cause" of autism.  A person who sees autistic traits as aberrations will naturally assume that they are something to be eradicated.  A person who sees autistic traits as part of natural genetic variation is more likely to point out that thinning the gene pool reduces the overall viability of the species. I suppose that until and unless we know with absolute certainty what is going on, caution is advisable. History is full of overconfident scientists and gullible policy makers doing truly horrible things to our world. One example that pops to mind is DDT.

I for one have seen enough historic evidence to believe that autism is natural genetic variability.  I think that autistics were perhaps less likely to survive or reproduce in the past. I found Lipton's work fairly fascinating since it indicates that the expression of genetic traits is not necessarily a function of biology alone. But now I am just musing and babbling. Good luck with your project.

I recall giving a presentation myself using powerpoint back when AFF was first starting in a special needs school to a bunch of aspies who had been spoonfed doom and gloom.

I started off with this:


And then asked "what is wrong with this blood?"

A few people responded "aspergers?"

I clicked onto the next slide and gave information about sickle cell, pointing out how it mainly affects black people.

I then asked "should we cure sickle cell or black skin?" and compared this to the negative traits of autism being like sickle cell - but that you would not need to cure autism itself in order to remove these negative traits.

Further, I then expanded on how special interests can be a positive asset.

Try a similar approach at first, and then if you wish show some of the horrors that curebies have caused - such as the numerous child murders and ABA, restrictions of our rights etc.

good idea!

so do you think instead of adding this to the powerpoint mentioned i should consider making a seperate one altogether?

That's up to you

In that case, may I ask which method to works best to remove the negative traits?

I'm not trying to be sarcastic or rude or anything... it's just for some reason my mind is failing to see the comparison at the moment, mental functions have been declining of late, and I keep getting confused by everything.

Correction.

I don't know if I really should bring this up, but would there be any Black people in your class. They might be rather offended by the idea of curing black skin..even though it does make your point. I'm just saying, perhaps use a group of people who might not be so uh..sensitive.

The point is that it's an idea which is obviously offensive - meant to show how racism is equal to anti-autistic bigotry.

Apparently, people who are heterozygous for sickle cell (i.e. only one copy of the hemoglobin gene has the variant that causes sickle cell) might have an advantage of being more resistant to malaria.  Someone who is homozygous for sickle cell is likelier to suffer the detriments.  

Anyways, I think this is a bad analogy to AS--likely to get the speaker into trouble.

A potentially better analogy, imo, is vision impairment.  It comes in varying types and degrees.  It undoubtably caused serious difficulties back in the stone age or any age when there wasn't the technology or the effort made to provide visual assists.  Whereas now, the idea of eliminating the blind or myopic folks would seem like anathema.

One might envision the development of various strategies that enable autistics who are functionally impaired in various ways to, in fact, function quite well.  The internet is one of those tools.  There are and will be others.  Disability is highly contextual.

I kind of like the sickle-cell analogy better--because it points out that a difference or mutation can have both positive and negative aspects.