This is TOTALLY your fault.
Were you were too fat when you were pregnant? Did you take antidepressants at all in the year before you got pregnant with your child? Did you get pregnant too soon after having your autistic child’s sibling? Did you eat tuna while you were pregnant? Did you have a boy? Did you have your baby early or late? Did you vaccinate your child? Were those vaccines full of dead babies? Did you DARE not breastfeed? Did you breastfeed? Do you live close to a freeway? Did you use plastic bottles when you fed your child? Did you ever let your child watch TV? Did you or your child ever consume anything that had high fructose corn syrup in it?
Oh, and your child is STILL autistic? Why haven’t you cured him yet? Jenny McCarthy cured her son, and she’s a porn star…how come you haven’t cured your kid yet? Haven’t you heard about ALL of the others who cured their kids autism? You’re just not trying hard enough.
Because that’s what Autism Awareness is about! Guilt!
Sometimes, it feels like autism awareness is ONLY about finding a cause so we can find a cure. This does more to harm autism acceptance, especially for parents of children with autism, myself included. I worked hard to find out what caused my son’s autism because I wanted to cure him. I wasted time I could have just spent accepting him for who he is.
Yes, it would be nice to find out what causes autism. And I believe that we need to fund studies to get to that point. But the studies coming out lately?! Really? Who’s getting paid millions of dollars for those? Right now, the population of llamas is higher than it has ever been before (I made that up). So is the population of people with autism. Autism is caused by llamas! Someone pay me seven figures for that!
Autism Awareness needs to be about our kids, it needs to be about adults with autism who are happy with their autism. It’s about people with autism being treated equally. It needs to be about there being easier access to services, to respite, to better educational opportunities, to healthcare. And yet, here we are.
Lexi Mag 
Yep, amen, amen, and amen. To all of the above. "Raising awareness" is only a sweet and convenient idea, but it is high time to move beyond that as a goal. Raising awareness requires the least amount of work and funding from our elected officials, esp. our schools, the least amount of involvement of our communities and the least amount of transparency from organizations who raise money uder the autism banner. Acceptance, access to services and respite; those things require work, money, investment and a greater effort from all of the above.Great blog, BTW.
Love this! Let us all wallow in the guilt of how we ruined our children, one pathetic research grant at a time. Definitely coming back for more. 🙂
I love this! I'm going to link to it on my blog—it says what I'd like to say, but with a sassier attitude than I am usually good at!
I love you. LOVE. Anyone who offers to send me beef jerky is at the very top of my list.
I hope you do. And bring your friends. Blogging can be a lonely place. We can all make fun of each other. That's delightfulness to me.
Thank you! I appreciate it SO SO much.
ahahahahahahaaa. you should do that study. They'll pay you a million dollars.
I just heard on the news this morning that if you contract the flu while you are pregnant your chances double as far as having a child with autism.
Not only did I do all of the things that caused my son’s autism, but I also like llamas. Well, llamas that don’t spit at me. The cure is to find a school that discovers that your child is not Autistic while in the classroom. That certainly helped me. 🙂 Good read and I’d love if this “awareness” movement could highlight the awesome things about people on the spectrum.
Sincerely,
LlamaMama
I ate loads of spinach while pregnant and took multivitamins. That did it.
Hey there, Awesome posting. We have an issue using your web-site throughout web browser, could possibly examine this? For instance still is the industry leading and also a big element of individuals will neglect ones great publishing because of this issue.