We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation by Eric Garcia

Author:Eric Garcia [Garcia, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Psychology, Psychopathology, Autism Spectrum Disorders, Editors; Journalists; Publishers
ISBN: 9781328587879
Google: EM_0DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:25.508523+00:00

“Come Mothers and Fathers Throughout the Land”

In the same way that people worry about autistic people’s capacity for consent in sex, there is also this belief that autistic people are incapable of raising children or being good parents. The idea that autistic people could even be parents was dismissed for years; in 1988, researcher Edward Ritvo published a paper called “Eleven Possibly Autistic Parents.” He told Spectrum in 2017 that if he hadn’t included Possibly in the title, the paper would likely have been rejected. “Nobody believed it. They didn’t believe the parents had it, that autistic people could grow up and marry and have children.”

Sadly, the idea that autistic people can’t be parents persists today. In 2016, the writer Judith Newman released the book To Siri with Love, an extension of a 2014 New York Times article about how the iPhone personal assistant Siri helped her autistic son Gus navigate a neurotypical world. But in the book, Newman wrote, “I do not want Gus to have children,” adding, “if I had to decide based on the clueless boy I know today, it would be easy: Gus should not be a parent.” Newman said this not just because Gus was “still shaky” about where babies come from “but because of the solipsism that is so much at the heart of autism makes him unable to understand that someone’s needs and desires could ever be separate from his own.”

While the book received rave reviews and was named a 2017 Notable Book by the New York Times, multiple autistic people criticized it for this very argument. The way Newman talks about reproduction is horrific because she considers it her decision to make rather than her son’s. This infantilizes Gus and assumes he cannot comprehend a world outside of himself, denying the reality that he could ever care about anyone other than himself. By writing that Gus could never be a “real father,” Newman assumes that his disability automatically prohibits him from being a parent. Autistic writer and parent Kaelan Rhywiol wrote in a review for Bustle that she’d vomited twice while reading the book, adding, “I cried myself to sleep after finishing it. To know, without any hedging, what people like that think of people like me—it almost broke me.”

In 2014, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that parents with guardianship of autistic children could not arrange vasectomies for them without court approval. The case was raised after a mother in West Des Moines arranged one for her twenty-one-year-old son, Stuart, after she suspected he was engaged in a sexual relationship with a colleague. Stuart and his coworker both denied the relationship. In the end, although the Iowa Supreme Court ruled against the mother, she defended herself by saying, “When I went through guardianship originally, I was never told what I could and couldn’t do,” adding that her son had the mind of a ten- or twelve-year-old. The fact that this mother believed this decision was her prerogative is indicative of how autistic people are viewed and how their capacity to have real relationships is constantly questioned.

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