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If I were a pregnant women and my fetus tested positive for autism I would have the abortion. That's a value judgement on my part, but also one that I would be perfectly within my rights to make.
You're right that as a parent the decision to carry a child to term or not would be a decision within your rights -- as a pro-choice individual, I cannot possibly argue in favor of abortion rights but then at the same time argue that it should be illegal to get an abortion simply because I don't think someone else has a "good enough" reason. If I argued that way, I'd be no different from those who tried to restrict reproductive choice on religious grounds.
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Individuals with autism are generally speaking less capable of living independently.
Perhaps, but one must also keep in mind that "independence" is very relative to the culture one exists in. Nobody who lives in anything that could be called a "society" is entirely independent in the first place -- after all, most of us don't plant and harvest our own food, build our own cars, drill for and refine the fuel we use, build our own houses with our own hands, wake up without the aid of alarm clocks, dig wells and purify our own water to drink, or physically take care of all our own medical needs.
Autistic individuals are probably no less "independent" in the pure sense than anyone else -- if you put one of us out in the woods, naked and without any supplies, it's actually quite likely we'd be just as good as anyone else at finding food and water and shelter. It's just that there are fewer autistic than nonautistic people, and societies are set up by nonautistic people, so naturally the resultant social structure accounts largely for the needs of the majority. Living in a society is more of an interdependence than a true independence (and if anyone suggests I'm saying this because I'm female, I'll show them some good autistic violence! JUST KIDDING!) so when people say that autistic individuals tend to have trouble living independently, what they're really saying is that autistic people tend to have needs that require services that don't necessarily exist by default, and that figuring out how to address these needs represents a time and resource investment of uncertain magnitude.
This isn't some sort of postmodern relativism on my part -- it's an observation of objective reality. If you take the average upper middle class suburb-dweller and put them out in a wild environment without access to any of the technologies they've grown up dependent on (no cutlery, no cellular phones, no prefab clothing) it's even possible that this person might fare *worse* than the average autistic person, since autistic people often have higher sensory acuity and a survival instinct that doesn't tend to be as restricted by social norms. Just some things to think about, but more of a thought experiment than anything else since for all practical purposes, the hypothetical "lost in the woods without a cell phone" scenario is highly unrealistic, except perhaps in the context of an inappropriately-named "Reality Show" (and no, I don't watch reality shows).
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Just as anecdotal evidence, I've personally known two autistics, and in one case disagreements over how to handle an adult autistic (whether to put him [6'3" 240, sometimes violent, with a mother your size] in a full time care facility, or continue home care) eventually broke up the marriage.
I'm sorry to hear that -- but at the same time it's important to keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of prison inmates / violent criminals are not autistic. I went to school with a lot of nonautistic kids who were quite horribly violent -- at one point, a whole crew of them ran after me in the park, pelting me with rocks and trying to hit me with sticks. And they were supposed to be the ones with the "superior social skills".
Again, I'm just pointing out something I've observed in objective reality. Yes, autistic people are "sometimes violent". Autistic people are people, and *people* are sometimes violent. I'd be much more inclined to look into ways of eliminating irrationality and violent tendencies in *all* people (while of course not taking away their ability to legitimately defend themselves when needed).
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Again, it all depends on the severity of the autism.
There's actually a lot of fuzziness surrounding what constitutes "severity". Some people go by IQ tests, but autistic performance tends to vary depending on the type of test. Autistics actually exhibit superior performance on a test called the Raven's Progressive Matrix, while performance on more standard tests (such as the Weschler and Stanford-Binet) can be lower overall. And as far as communication capacity goes, it is impossible to tell at birth how well a person is going to be able to communicate when they grow up, or as they are growing up. I think perhaps the key here is "unpredictability" rather than severity -- once you know someone is autistic, you don't really know anything about what their eventual, potential, or even present capabilities are without a lot of careful observation and patience. In my personal opinion, people who (a) want predictability in their lives and (b) have little to no patience shouldn't be having kids in the first place, and I think that when people think they want a child they ought to very carefully examine the reasons why.
And as an aside, I decided a number of years ago that I didn't want kids at all, since parenthood sounds frankly annoying and I've got too many other things I'd rather be doing (not to mention the fact that my own hyper-acute senses don't jive well with screaming babies and bodily fluids spewing every which way). I know for a fact that I'm too selfish with my time and resources to be able to give over my life to another person in the manner that a parent needs to do. I don't see anything wrong with this -- it's not as if the population needs my input in order to maintain its numbers after all!
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The really interesting area of this dialog, and one which may be straying a bit off topic, is notion of *procreative choice*.
I don't think it's really off-topic yet, though procreative choice is a huge issue in transhumanism and could very easily have its own thread.
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However, the *state* is really just a tool used by society to maintain social order. The problem, as has been noted by many Libertarians (Elrond comes to mind), is Mill's ever present "tyranny of the majority". The tyrannical urge (for conformity, for homogeneity) is present regardless of the whether or not there is state apparatus to enforce it.
That is a really, really good observation and I'm glad you brought it up. I've been trying to think of a way to put into words the phenomenon in which there's no central governing body making dictates, but nevertheless, certain attitudes prevail and their tenets are enforced, sometimes through sheer mob mentality. As you might imagine, I've always been quite resistant to the notion of enforced conformity and homogeneity, but I recognize that it exists. This is actually one reason I think that autistic people, or autistic traits, have been produced by evolution -- as sort of a countermeasure to certain forms of social stagnation that tend to develop in groups of humans.
Human psychology has evolved to be heavily wired for social imitation and collectivism, as well as a tendency to agree for the sake of agreement, and to let one's actual sensory impressions fall to the wayside in favor of certain group-oriented memes (i.e., "The Emperor's New Clothes" -- that one kid who spoke out was quite possibly an Aspie, IMO
). I think that perhaps all humanity exists on a spectrum, and that too much tendency to conform will mean the end of any population, just as too little of a tendency to conform or respond to social signals will also be counterproductive in the long run. I'm all in favor of humans beginning to direct our own evolution through technological means, but I definitely think that some memetic engineering work is in order to assure that powerful groups don't attempt to engineer all the nonconformity-genes out of a population.
...and I'm going to run off and look at some stuff on lab automation right now, but I'll probably have further comments on this at some point. Thank you very much for engaging in this dialogue, by the way.
EDIT: That danged quote bug seems to be messing with how this post is appearing on my screen.
EDIT AGAIN: The quotes look OK to me now -- taking out the "name=" bit seemed to fix things.
Edited by Anne, 07 August 2006 - 04:10 AM.
