Aspies For Freedom

I'm SO glad you're such an expert on the percentage of kids that parents would willingly kill.  I wasn't aware that being psychic could be a side effect of the autism spectrum.  Guess I learn something new every day!  

As far as helping autistic infants, therapy HAS been proven to have a significan impact, and the earlier it's started the more change that can be accomplished.  THIS is something science has already discovered.  That's the reason the US has mandated, publicly funded Early Childhood Intervention programs, and why the school districts are required to start searching for children in need of extra assistance at age 3, two years earlier than "normal" children are allowed to enter Kindergarten.  We all know how tight the government is on alot of funding, so they wouldn't be wasting their time financing this if it wasn't proven to have results.  There isn't any way that you can "cure" autism, but there are ways to help modify behavior patterns early enough that it starts to feel more natural to the child.  They do this for MANY dissorders now, even anxiety dissorders.  A friend of mine has a child who is still in elementary school and has been on anti-anxiety drugs for years.  They're being able to slowly wane her off because by taking the drugs they were able to TEACH her young body how to NOT respond with panic.  As an adult who suffers from an anxiety dissorder (as well as being ASPIE) I am so SO happy for her.  I only wish they had known about things like that when I was a kid!  This can be easily related to most ASD's as well.  If you can train and stimulate the right parts of the brain at an early enough age, you can help engrain patterns that will keep them from pain and frustration later on.  No it won't be perfect, and yes there will be trial and error, but eventually it could make significant difference.  

As for worrying about the idea that children would be "aborted", I think that it's a silly reason to avoid something that could do good for others.  First of all, it's not YOUR child.  No one is going to put a gun to any mother's head and say "Kill your baby because he's autistic".  Many parents keep children with Downs or Spina Bifida, and Autism offers much more hope than either of those, I see no reason to believe a large number of children would really be in danger.  Besides that, by saying to not make the test to avoid abortions is like saying you're willing to let some kids live more disabled than they would have to be, just to let other kids be born who's parents might not even want them the way they are.  As for trying to terrify me with the idea of being aborted myself, it's laughable.  I spent most of my adolecents in such misery because of my social misfitism that I WISHED I could some how have erased my existance.  Adolecent foolishness aside, my parents decided to ADOPT two mentally handicapped boys, they wouldn't have dreamt of terminating their own child, no matter what.  My parents aren't saints, they won't win any "worlds best parents" awards, that's for sure, but they still were willing to do that.  They're just regular people, and that makes me believe that it would be a very HARD decision for anyone to terminate their pregnancy because of a "defect" of any sort, much less one that's so completely abstract as an ASD.  

Why live in slavery forever just because the Exodus will be painful?

You are all WAY too paranoid!  Believe it or not, Big Brother isn't always watching, trust me, because if they were there wouldn't be so many damned interviews needed for people to get security clearances, and alot more dead beat dad's could be tracked down in the snap of a finger.  

As to NCLB...  it isn't a bad idea, it's just impracticle, there's a difference, not to mention the fact that the government is NOT funding most of that, but rather focing it off to the states, where as Special Education and ECI are primarily fedreally funded.  

I'm sorry that you feel it's unfair for families to be able to sterilize daughters decared incompetent.  I know it's truly painful when it happens to the small percentage of women who COULD have cared for their child on their own.  However, I am completely in favor of it in most cases.  I wish that it was EASIER to do.  In the U.S. it's not all that easy at all.  My parents have wanted to have one of my brother's sterilized for ages, but they CANNOT do it without his consent.  My brother lives in a group home, has serious scitzophrenic dillusions, and is hardly capable of remembering to take his own medication, much less care for a child.  If it's this hard to get someone him serilized, I have a hard time taking your fear of mass sterilization seriously.  

And I would like to know exactly WHERE you are getting your stats on Downs Syndrome babies.  Maybe I live in an incredibly skewed area, but NO ONE I've ever known who's baby was tested for downs, and had it, EVER aborted their child.  I have known at least three who have had the child.  Given that the test for downs doesn't occur until after the first trimester, when most women feel safe enough to announce their pregnancies, I also find it hard to believe that 90% of these babies are aborted.  That would make the statistical anomoly of the women I know absolutely ubsurd.  

And as to "training".  Of COURSE you train your children.  Unless you raise them with no discipline at all you're training them.  Even religous faith is something that is TRAINED at the beginning.  Human children are not born with nearly as many instincts (compared to potential) as most animals, so we have to be trained far more.  All of culture is based ona similar system of training.  It is important that children be as integrated as we can comfortably make them in society (whether they would have CHOSEN that or not...  remember Hindu's half wish THEY were cows (exageration)).  The things that effect us are NOT harmless.  I have a son who is fatherless because his father never learned how to deal with society well enough, so I don't give a D*MN how uncomfortable it would have been for him to be trained as an infant, I'm sure the rest of his life would have been better for it.  I cannot believe there's anyone who, after death, would seriously choose to look back at their life and say that they would rather have had inhibitted functioning in society to the point where they lost their child, just to be able to be a little more talented in analytical areas.  If I'm wrong about that, then I'm truly at a loss for understanding the universe.

This will be my last post here because you're obviously all already certain that the worst will happen in EVERY case.  

As far as the down syndrome tests go, none of the tests done in the first trimester are very accurate.  I have serious doubts of doctors recomending abortion at that time.  That being said, you say that people will claim "miscarriage" if they really had an abortion.  One must then also realize that second trimester miscarriages are also rare, and always traumatic.  I've only known of three in my entire life, and I find it hard to believe that any of them were secret abortions.  One of them was my cousin who's next child was shown on Sonogram up until the time of birth to be missing an asophogus.  They DID discuss abortion at that time, but she couldn't bring herself to do it.  I'm sure she's quite glad too as it turned out his asophogus was merely colapsed, and the "trauma" of delivery managed to open it.  The other two I didn't know all that well, but being that both of them were having fertility problems and were totally devestated by the loss of the baby, I can't imagine they actually terminated it.

Still, even if your statistic ARE correct, I see no reason why they would be anything near an estimate for ASD children.  As has already been mentioned preveriously in this forum, ASD is not nearly as easy to detect as down syndrome.  It is not an extra chromosome, it is most probably a gene or series of genes that are flipped in a particular order, more like eye color.  And, like eye color, it is not a "constant".  There is a range of ASD's (hence the use of the word SPECTRUM) and being able to fully figure out the coding for exactly what portion of the range it will fall in is going to be even MORE complicated.  In adition, we have to realize that all of this is talking about the actual genetics.  Down Syndrome and Spinabifida can all be detected from chemicals in the mothers blood or through the use of sonograms.  Because ASD is something that is so strictly genetic, it will require the use of the babies DNA to determine.  Of course, you could make assumptions by taking the DNA of both parents, but since this can be done before a child is even concieved, there's not reason for THAT to be done when considering abortion.  In order to get the babies DNA, the doctor would have to do an Amnio test.  I come from an extremely large family, and in the past ten years we've had dozens of babies born, delivered by just as many doctors.  While all of the doctors have offered to do an amnio, none of them have ever recomended it, because of the "uselessness" of such a test.  The ONLY thing it can do is to help someone decide to abort a baby.  If you already know you don't want to abort the child, then the only thing it offers is information in exchange for putting the child at risk, information you'll find out in a few months anyway.  If a mother was being tested in this way, it means that she's already decided she only wants to have a perfect child, and is so concerned about it that she's willing to have a test done that can cause miscarriage.  If that's the case, then nothing you do is going to change her viewpoint.  It is possible she'd abort the child, and that's true, but unless you personally are ready to open your arms to every aborted child in the world, it is very irresponsible of you to try to interfere with that.  

That being said, I whole-heartedly agree that there should be more information presented to women who's doctors are offering them an abortion for "medical reasons".  It is sad if they're only being given one side of the story.  On the other hand, how dumb are these people.  I won't even take a new medication just on my doctor's recomendation.  Perhaps it's different for women in third-world countries, but in most developed countries everyone, even the impovrished, can access the internet at public libraries.  If you're considering murdering your child, that seems like a big enough decision to go out of your way for a day to do a little research on your own.  I'm seriously concerned for any child that would be raised by people who don't ask multiple opinions on a subject.  I've belong to a church support group for parents of "special needs" kids, and the one thing we ALL agree on is that you have to look at at least three different independent sorces of information before you make any decision reflecting these children, and while that is a rule of thumb our group came up with, there hasn't been a new parent who's joined yet who hadn't already figured that out for themselves.  

Basically it comes down to this.  Abortion will be a desision between a woman and her doctor.  Stopping her from having information to make that decision might save the baby, but could also lead to a life of hell for the child.  You cannot assume what the "lack" of information will accomplish, so if the information is there, people should have a right to it.  On the other hand, for a "born child" that information unlocks the possibility for tons of good.  

Of course, none of this matters.  A test for Autism is not going to be anything like "real" this year, or next.  Something like that would be news worthy given all the hype over autisms relation to vaccination (in my opinion, another silly debate).  Personally, I think it's still decades down the road, but medical science might surprise me.  Still, your attempts to block it won't amount to anything.  You better bet would be to join up with some group against manufacturing babies, since the same technology to determine ASD could be used for athletic ability, eye color, and estimated body size.  If you tried to block the research THAT way, you might actually get somewhere...  in fact, you might even succeed in getting them kicked out of the US.  Of course, that still won't stop it, there'll always be some country willing to open it's border's to such research, but funding might get harder to come by.  Still, you have to realize that same type of research could be used to CURE some other deseases like MS or Parkinsons and some types of cancer.  It will be an interesting political fight I think.  If you really want to accomplish your cause, you ought to think about it like that, instead of using the "terror of aborition".  While that does have heavy political clout these days, it's just not realistic enough to hold water.