Great post. If someone gave me a magic wand and said I could “cure” my daughter today, I wouldn’t do it, because she’d no longer be the girl I love, she’d be someone different.
I see multiple problems with that approach. One is, should you have the right decide she shouldn’t have “the cure” if one existed? What if she would want to be cured? Another is, why wouldn’t she be the girl you love? I mean, you don’t love her just because she has autism right? If she had never had autism, you still would have loved her, right? Also how would she be someone different? She would just be your daughter without autism. Your daughter is defined by more than just autism. She a person and would still be that same person if her autism were cured. If your daughter had cancer and that got cured, would she be someone different after she was cured? Myself, if I had kid with autism and there was a cure, I’d want him/her to have it(but I will not be so arrogant to deny the possibility that my opinion would be altered if I actually had a child with autism). Why would I want to deny him/her the opportunity live free of autism, to be free of all of its problems?
Call me stupid, clueless, bigoted or whatever, but I don’t get it.
edit: I really hope I haven’t offended by any of what I said in this post, because that wasn’t my intent. Keep in mind that I have no family members with autism. I don’t know anyone that does. So if I have offended, it is because of my own ignorance of the issues.
I’m not offended, they are fair questions.
Cancer does not fundamentally change your brain the way autism does. My daughter has challenges that neurotypicals do not,
neurotypicals? You mean people without autism?
but she also sees the world differently and some of those differences are positives rather than negatives.
I should learn more about these positives.
I suppose you could say that cancer changes your attitude and maybe you find some positives in that, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter who you are as a person the way autism does.
Again, something I need to know more about.
Another way to look at is this - if I could go back and have my first daughter not be stillborn, would I? I don’t know, because it would change the course of our history. Our second child might have been a boy instead of a girl. We might have only had one child, and almost certainly wouldn’t have had three…so our younger daughter would basically cease to exist. “Curing” my daughter’s autism would essentially erase her from this world, replaced by a different girl.
Here we are talking about the problems of altering history as opposed to the issues of curing something. I’d love to go back in time and break my father’s fall so he’d still be with us, but I don’t think I should be allowed to mess with history like that.
Lastly, the argument that she should be the one to have the choice is a compelling one, however I don’t think she is old enough to make that choice (if the choice were available to us). If we were given a magic wand and were told we could choose to wave it any time in the next ten years, I might feel differently ten years down the road.
But here is the problem. If I am understanding autism at all, in order to truly cure it, it would have to be done sometime early in brain development, way before she was 18 and could decide for herself. This brings up yet another issue. Are people with autism capable of making their own decisions? We are talking about a problem with the mind here. What if “curing” your daughter were the only way to bring her to a state of mind where she could make her own decisions?