When the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services is announcing a news conference, most people would assume it’s to go over something important. Perhaps a new scientific breakthrough, or an update on a highly transmissible disease.
Instead, the American public gets a glorified episode of the Joe Rogan podcast, full of conspiracy theories and exaggerations about autism.
On April 16, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke at the Center of Disease Control after the agency filed a new report showing that autism rates had increased to one in 31 among 8-year-olds.
During this conference, Kennedy made multiple disparaging comments and claims about autism and people with it. Blaming environmental risks, dismissing the idea of better diagnostic tools leading to higher diagnosis rates as “indefensible” and calling autism a “disease.”
His most notable quote from the press conference was when he made a sweeping generalization of children with autism, saying: “They’ll never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
The way Kennedy views autism and people with it is straight out of Nazi Germany.
I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with the term Asperger’s syndrome – a now retired description for people with what was described as “high-functioning autism.”
However, what many people don’t know is the person it’s named after has deep ties to Nazi Germany and eugenics.
Hans Asperger, an Austrian doctor during the Nazi regime, conducted experiments on children and described children with “distinct psychological characteristics as ‘autistic psychopaths,’” according to the medical journal Molecular Autism. Asperger also published his research about 5 years before Leo Kanner published his studies on
autism.
Asperger, like many others in the Nazi regime, had no desire to actually improve the lives of children with autism. Instead, he used them as lab rats and conducted forced sterilizations and played a big role in the child euthanasia program.
Like RFK Jr., Asperger didn’t see autism as a neurodevelopmental disorder – but as a disease.
Kennedy’s description and generalization of children with autism also come dangerously close to that of Asperger’s, even if he doesn’t outwardly refer to them as “psychopaths” like Asperger.
Most importantly though, Kennedy’s words are cut and dry eugenics language.
According to Merriam-Webster, eugenics is “the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the populations’ genetic composition.”
Now, I’m not saying Kennedy is advocating for sterilizations or has the same mindset of Henrich Himmler, but the language he uses comes across that way.
Let’s start with his quote on children with autism not being able to pay taxes or hold a job. Kennedy is essentially saying children with autism aren’t truly living life, and to do so you must pay taxes or hold a job.
While both of those things are major aspects of the human experience, they are not requisites to being able to take care of yourself.
There are many people with autism who can do both of those things on their own, but even those who can’t still deserve to be seen as people. Besides, a good amount of neurotypical people hate paying taxes and doing their jobs – so how is that a basis for being able to live an independent life?
Kennedy is also incredibly out of touch with the comments on not being able to “write a poem or pick up a baseball.”
There are multiple sports programs for children with autism to participate in, as I can directly speak from experience on this. I have a younger cousin who participates in a program called Buddy Baseball, and he’s been doing that for the past few years now.
Even if I didn’t have first hand experience though – does anyone truly believe that most children with autism couldn’t even pick up a baseball? Or write a poem?
I think even my Republican and overall right-leaning peers know that this language is just plain wrong. I’m sure y’all have family members with autism – do y’all truly view them the same way as RFK Jr.?
I believe the overwhelming answer would be “no.”
The real dangerous part of his language however, is when he refers to autism as a “disease that needs a cure” and pledges to find one by September.
This is how leaders in the Nazi party talked about anyone who didn’t meet their Aryan criteria – Jewish, people with disabilities, Romani people and pretty much anyone who was not White, blonde and blue eyes.
This idea of a “cure” sounds eerily similar to a “final solution.” And what exactly is this “cure” that Kennedy proposes?
The fact of the matter is simply we have too much scientific research to still be talking like this – but we also have historical context as to why this language is dangerous.
We’ve already seen multiple children die from measles because of Kennedy’s outspoken criticism of vaccines. How many children with autism are now going to be put in harm’s way because their parents heard Kennedy refer to it as a disease that needs a cure?
I know parents and families of children with autism will speak out on this, but it’s time for those who don’t to use their voice. We cannot let elected officials with no background in the medical field make these decisions for our children.
