Aspies For Freedom

Who the hell decided this anyway?

I disagree with your characterization of these "certain conditions", but I don't wish to start an argument here.  I will just say that no one has any right whatsoever to decide that someone else's life is not worth living, no matter what reason is given, unless it is a matter of "lesser of two evils" life-and-death decisions (You know, like shooting an intruder or having an abortion to save your life), which is obviously not going on here.

It already IS discrimination.  Not sure if you caught it, but they would be SELECTIVELY killing embryos PURELY on the basis of supposed disability.  Doesn't actually matter if they are or aren't- either way, it's dead wrong.

Featherways, where did you find out about this?  Is there a news article I can see or something?

Right - the way to combat this is simple.

Alert the House of Lords.

The government doesn't control them, and when the sheer stupidity of this Act is shown to them, they'll vote it down - and send a message back to Gordon Brown and his cronies saying categorically that "this is discrimination on the basis of disability and we will never pass such a provision - even when limited to IVF".

And just to back it up, alert Buckingham Palace to this as well.

If it does pass, then please go out aspie men and donate sperm to sperm banks en masse without disclosing your diagnosis.
Aspie couples, please go out and get IVF, and tell the clinic you will sue them in the european court of human rights if they comply with the bill. ECHR overrides member state law.

Yeah, but it's an awful precedent. Horrible things like eugenics tend to happen gradually. Of course, this in itself IS a form of eugenics.

As to prenatal screening questions, I think the easiest solution is to not allow them to be performed. That way it can't devolve into a debate about abortion, as prenatal screening debates tend to.

Also, as to quality of life, many people who look from the outside look at being autistic to be a poor quality of life, because they base this judgment on assumptions rather than experience and our opinions. This is also not autism-specific; it applies to many people, including people who are deaf or who have Down Syndrome. There are advocacy movements much like our own led by people with these disabilities among others, and who have also voiced their anger over this policy.

It is simply outrageous. Nobody gets to decide whether another person or kind of person should or would like to live. It is wholly unethical.

This is further proof that our fears of the elimination of a mass amount of the autistic population are realistic.

I also fear not getting a choice in this. That is the problem with arguing that people who don't want a cure can simply refuse it as a matter of personal choice - any "cure" would be forced (and children whose parents refuse certainly taken away), though we probably won't even get to that point, because we'll be forced to get rid of our autistic progeny before birth, and even if it is not forced, we would be subject to the stares and whispers of people wondering, "Didn't they know there was a prenatal test for that?"

Ugh.

Do you have a strong pro-life movement over there? It would be a big ally to the disability rights people. They don't want embryos destroyed, either.

This is the scary thing.

From what I read, they're not allowed to positively select an embryo with a disability, i.e. deaf parents wanting a deaf child.

But if there are, say, six embryos, and a couple of them text positive for AS or ASDs, and the doctors are only allowed to implant two embryos, to implant the AS/ASDs would amount to positive selection, although not to select them would be okay... if that makes any sense.

If you can't select them, then they are de facto deselected, and there is the potential for AS/ASD people being wiped out in future.  Unless it's some kind of recessive gene that somehow skips a few generations and switches on... It's a very nuanced argument, but the upshot would probably be that AS/ASD embryos would be progressed to implantation.  Although they would say it's not deselection of such embryos, it's more the positive selection of NT 'normal' embryos.

Someone make a petition!

Maybe there are one already, the disability community is larger then the autism community - after all.

Problem is: it is a clique.

Guess that's the word.

Confirmed by the free online dictionary.

Eugenics.

We don't. "Godwin's Law" is invoked by people who wish to stifle debate.

It cannot be invoked when Nazism is, or is related to, the subject under discussion.

Anyone who wishes to invoke Godwin's Law on this thread should be ashamed of themselves. It is by forgetting the mistakes of the past that we are doomed to repeat them.

The largest recent concerted attempt to remove a whole group of people from the population that everyone knows about is the Holocaust.

The next was the wholesale screening for and destruction of people with Down Syndrome. It really isn't hysterical hyperbole to invoke Nazism as an illustration when we have every reason to worry that autists might be next.

My concern was that we wouldn't be taken seriously.