This column in the Daily Mail is one of the worst things I’ve read in a while. It’s not just shocking because someone wrote it but it was believed to offer an opinion that others would share.
Sadly, I believe it is the case that a majority of people would agree with this writer. But for me, the selfishness of this writer is just sickening. She writes of a few families with autistic children including a boy named Tom. She writes of their struggles and then says it would be better if the child were aborted. In order to cut to the chase I’ll give you the last few lines of the column:
In any case, that is a difficult question after the event: it is hard for a mother retrospectively to wish away a living child who, come what may, she loves.
But looking on, as a relatively dispassionate observer; looking at the damage done, the absence of hope and the anguish of the poor child himself, do I think that everyone concerned would have been better off if Tom’s had been a life unlived?
Unequivocally, yes.
Well the one thing which jumps out at me is she must understand that it wouldn’t be a life unlived, it would merely be a life cut very short. You can’t argue that a baby in the womb is not a life. That’s just not logical.
Look, the truth is that I’m sure autistic children make some aspects of life very difficult. But all children are difficult in one way or another. Children are difficult. And rewarding in ways we couldn’t fathom before having them.
So what this writer is really talking about is killing babies so we can be more selfish. But I guess that’s what it’s always been about. May God have mercy on us all.
January 15, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Hm. I daresay that for all his troubles, Tom may just disagree with her assessment.
January 15, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Probably his mother would also.
So far, there is not a known genetic basis for autism. No one knows for sure what causes it. So autistic kids are safe for a while yet from genetic cleansing.
Susan Peterson
January 15, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Opinion pieces like this make me wonder what a mess modernity would make of things should a “gay gene” ever be identified…
God Bless,
Ryan
January 15, 2009 at 6:14 pm
I couldn’t bring myself to read the whole column. Your excerpt was enough. My little boy is on the autism spectrum, although he isn’t autistic. He was just born very early–at the threshold of viability (24wks gestation). The night we were in labor, various medical professionals suggested that maybe we should do nothing to help him survive. “He was too early; he’d never lead a normal life.” They reminded my husband that we “hadn’t been married long (only seven months), surely we didn’t want such a burden.”
We disagreed. If God wanted to call our son to Him, that was His business. All we cared was giving our boy that chance to live.
He’s a happy five year old now. He has delays, he has issues, but he also has a vibrant joy about LIFE. When he smiles, it’s from his soul. He’s taught us patience, and compassion, and how to live life a day at a time.
I don’t know where we would be without him. I don’t want to know.
But I shudder to think how many children like him are left to die because people are afraid to give them the chance to live.
January 15, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Opinion pieces like this make me wonder what a mess modernity would make of things should a “gay gene” ever be identified…
Nothing. Suddenly, it will be a terrible thing to abort a child with the “gay gene”, where as – if you’re like me – it’s terrible to abort a child, period.
January 15, 2009 at 8:22 pm
🙁
~Zee
January 15, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Autism is treatable! My son has been diagnosed autistic after taking the MMR shot, but then we followed the DAN protocol (see http://www.autism.com) and now he’s almost recovered. Spread the word! I hope this helps somebody! Sorry for my bad English, I’m following you from Italy. God bless!
January 15, 2009 at 9:44 pm
I usually just lurk, however I am typing this with tears in my eyes.
What a horrid, horrid woman. My son is on the autistic spectrum, and I found that article to be one of the most disgusting I have read about ASD for awhile. Every once in awhile you get someone who has no idea what it is actually like to live with a child like this give their unsolicited and uninformed opinion that children like mine are a massive inconvenience and the world would be better off without them.
Now my son isn’t nearly as bad as the one he describes, but there have been periods where I felt like tearing my own hair out because I was at my wits end. There have been times I felt like a useless parent because I couldn’t make everything all better. But I can say without a shadow of a doubt that he is the child God meant for me, as are my other two. Our whole family has grown in wonderful ways because of what he has taught us, about ourselves, about him, about putting others first, about love, about trusting God, about … so many things. I am a much different and I think stronger parent than I would have been if he hadn’t been mine.
As anonymous said above, Autism can be treated, my son has benefited tremendously from therapy and an aide at school.
Mother Teresa said something like “I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish He didn’t trust me so much.” Some days that is how I feel, but we are all given burdens, and we are all given graces, often the burdens are graces, only we don’t realize it yet.
One last thought, if we could get rid of everything difficult and inconvenient, the mental image I have of mankind is the people in WALL-e. They didn’t seem very happy or fulfilled to me.
January 16, 2009 at 1:44 am
My son is on the autism spectrum, and all the other kids know he’s my favorite 😉 It’s OK, because he’s their favorite, too.
Articles like this give me a knot in my stomach — sometimes it’s just too much to bear to contemplate the people who wish my son was dead.
January 16, 2009 at 1:45 am
“absence of hope”
That pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it? How terribly the world needs hope in Christ. (Not so much the Obama version of hope.)
January 16, 2009 at 3:05 am
It must be materialism. How can someone feel that way unless they believe there is nothing eternal, no hope for life beyond the pain? But of course there is great lessons to be learned and love to be experienced. So i think there must be materialism, no good outside pleasure, pleasure understood as good feelings, no eternal joy – no true blessedness. How can a life be better off if it never existed unless we are just a process without soul?
At the very least folks who think only in terms of their self can understand that we can learn virtue from the experience. So, there also must be no virtue.
The power of prayer is truly all I can think of when reading this.
January 16, 2009 at 4:28 am
For people to think that way…I just can’t believe it. My son is on the autism spectrum and he has been the biggest blessing to our family. What foolish people.
January 16, 2009 at 7:33 am
My brother’s eldest is quite a long way along the autistic spectrum. He will never be able to live an independent life (he’s in his twenties now, and needs a lot of looking after.)
In many ways, it’s been very hard work, frustrating, exhausting, maddening…
Nobody who knows him could wish him dead though.
And there’s the paradox of love in all this somewhere…
January 16, 2009 at 7:57 am
Almost all of my friends could be placed in the high-function Autistic spectrum.
For a long time, my folks thought I might be autistic– this is before the “high function autistic” thing was in our area.
To use the local phrasing, to heck with her….
January 16, 2009 at 10:54 am
I don’t have a child with autism but I do have a child with type one diabetes. I know when a child has a chronic illness there are many negative things and it can be hard to find positives but to focus like this on the negatives is just wrong. I wonder what Tom’s mother thinks of all this? If someone were to write about my child like that and about the negatives only I would be quite upset.
January 16, 2009 at 1:51 pm
There is no concept in the secular world of growing in virtue and how difficult things -suffering- make us stronger, help us to grow in grace, redemptive suffering for the Body of Christ etc. What she didn’t say is that it would be easier had he not been born-that’s true for a lot of things with children-children are hard work and once they are here you make sacrifices to accommodate the new blessings in your life. But what she specifically stated was that everyone would be better off! No one would be better off. Being better off is harder work, not easier. Being better off is the difficult work of growing in grace. That family needs Tom more than he needs them. God knows how best to help us grow and what the body of Christ needs to grow more holy. On one hand it is of course an abhorrent comment that made me nauseous. On the other hand I feel sad for her that in her secular narrow minded box she cannot see beyond the circumstance of a difficult interaction as a blessing to grow more holy for Christ and Tom is that special gift to assist in the accomplishment. Instead she would suffer in vain in her own selfishness.
January 16, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Don’t believe the “absence of hope” nonsense.
My 10 year old daughter has an autism spectrum disorder. We were told by experts when she was 2 that she would probably never speak and have to be institutionalized for life. I refused to go along with that assessment. We kept her out of the public school system, paid for our own speech and occupational therapists and, after much hard work, she is a beautiful, vibrant, happy (and talking – too much sometimes!) girl. She does school work at her grade level. Yes, we have problems but work through them and she is getting better little by little.
I realize we are lucky that our story is not typical of so many autistic children but I could not imagine, under any circumstances, wishing that she had never been born. Every child is a gift from God – even the imperfect ones.
January 16, 2009 at 5:19 pm
What really jumps out at me from the article (aside from the fact that personally I’d love to strangle the author!) is that the real problem she’s describing is a total lack of decent support services in the UK for the autistic. It is exhausting, mentally and physically and emotionally, to care for a profoundly autistic person 24/7. These parents need some paid respite care (from a trained outsider, not stressed-out grandparents,) really good therapy for the child (which won’t cure anything but usually provides some relief) and professional training in the most effective ways to manage the meltdowns and outbursts.
No one family can manage this alone. It’s pathetic that the author’s best solution is to eliminate the child rather than help solve the real problem…
January 16, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Who is really the disabled person, here? The child who is autistic, or someone whose soul is so broken that she wishes another person dead?
Sure, caring for a disabled person, whether a child, an elderly person or someone who is chronically ill can be difficult, demanding, exhausting, but you know what? You’re not supposed to have to do it alone!
Only a fractured, individualistic, materialist, selfish, self-centered society would look at caring family members and, in effect, say, “Tough luck.” Only a Christian society can bring hope and healing.
January 17, 2009 at 8:22 pm
That was a really ugly article. The really sad part is that it is perfectly logical from the author’s premises, which are materialism and relativism. In that case, it makes sense to minimize pain. That’s probably why more than half the Belgian infants who die before age 1 don’t just die — they are killed by medical intervention.
It’s like Pope John Paul II said: the temptation is to put them out of *our* misery.
OTOH, the comments here from parents of autistic / autism spectrum children really do give me hope.