Cure or acceptance?
Does one strive to do everything one can to cure, heal, recover a child from autism with the goal of the child “losing” her or his diagnosis? Or, does one learn to accept that one’s child is different, disabled, autistic?
Parents and others in the autism community tend to align themselves with one “side” or the other, and whether one puts oneself in the “cure” camp or the “acceptance” one tends to determine the types of therapies and treatments that one pursues. Be a “curebie” and you’re an annual attendee at DAN! conferences and (whether or not your …read more

Considering how many pressing issues there are to talk regarding children and adults—education, employment, housing, to name a very few—-why do we keep getting stuck talking about the hypothetical claim of a link between vaccines and autism?
Here’s some thoughts towards why the whole issue seems to have devolved into something approaching paranoia, not to mention pander for politicians (and all the more after what two of the presidential candidates have said about autism, vaccines, and the “autism epidemic”).
In a recent essay entitled The Paranoid Style in American Science, Daniel Engbar, associate editor at Slate, writes about critics of mainstream …read more

Right now (afternoon of April 23, Wednesday) over at Science Blogs there’s a number of posts about Barack Obama’s statement at a Monday rally in Pennsylvnia that evidence linking vaccines and autism was “inconclusive” and that further research is needed. (It’s also pointed out that Hillary Clinton has also embraced “anti-vaccination woo”.)
While the candidates’ views (here’s Senator John McCain’s) on vaccine and autism have become a sort of barometer for their views on science, it’s necessary also to consider their views on disability—on education, special education, employment, health care—more generally. Professor Michael Bérubé, who teaches American literature and cultural studies …read more

Writing about unstoppable Obama in the February 14th Huffington Post, writer Barbara Ehrenreich tries to describe his “mysterious and irrational” appeal: “He’s a ‘rock star,’ all flash and no substance, tending dangerously, according to the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, to a ‘cult of personality.’” If he “supposedly goes for the id,” Hillary Rodham Clinton is the “designated valedictorian” who reaches for the more rational, and controlling, ego and super-ego. “She might as well be promoting choral singing in the face of Beatlemania,” Ehrenreich comments, and (in what the February 26th Globe and Mail considers a “gratuitously nasty swipe”), suggests …read more