Medicaid Is Life for My Autistic Son
Medicaid is life for my mostly non-speaking autistic adult son. Cutting it would remove the very services that make his beautiful, interdependent life possible.
Medicaid is life for my mostly non-speaking autistic adult son. Cutting it would remove the very services that make his beautiful, interdependent life possible.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently announced that he would find the cause of autism in five months and “eliminate those exposures.” This kind of deeply disturbing statement can lead to real harm.
Needing assistance with daily life is more tolerated in our society when that assistance is in aid of making money than it is when it’s required for being able to live safely with basic human dignity.
The new cuts and push for disabled people to work terrifies me. Will we see an increase in suicide in the autistic community? Will autistic people be forced to mask and hide their disability so that they can keep their job?
How can education and disability policy best serve disabled learners, and also support those learners and their families?
If you have concerns about vaccines and autism, please listen to my story of becoming—but then un-becoming—a passionate anti-vaxxer autism parent.
Two autistic people could have the exact same motor challenges and each make different decisions about what is “good enough” for them, based on who they are as people and what their individual life circumstances are at the moment.
Since I was late diagnosed with autism, I feel like the people in my life are still adjusting—because now I am being the ‘real’ me, and not the person they thought I was.
When we trust progressive media outlets as both intellectually rigorous and socially just, their ableism goes unchecked—and so can be far more dangerous than that of their unapologetically prejudiced counterparts.
TPGA editors Carol Greenburg and Shannon Rosa are on the latest episode of Barry Prizant’s and Dave Finch’s Uniquely Human podcast. We discuss our own personal histories, our furious rejection of autism misinformation, and how journalists and outlets can do better by autistic people.