Please speak for yourself when deciding whether or not autism is tragic or dangerous. My 21-year-old son on the spectrum will never get married or hold a job. He will live with us for the rest of his life. We only recently figured out who will care for him after we are gone. He is non-verbal, has a seizure disorder that isn’t controlled (which could be very dangerous) and he sometimes runs out the front door and across the street to the neighbors without looking. We live in fear that he might get mowed down by a car one day. Even though we’ve tried to work with that situation in various ways, he still does it from time to time.

Acceptance is important but sugar-coating how debilitating autism is for some people and some families is unnecessary and unkind. It’s a hard enough row to hoe without having people who ought to be understanding further marginalizing families like ours.

Also, please link the study you referenced because pretty much all studies on vaccines and autism I have seen are reviews of administrative data gleaned from insurance companies, and they are incredibly compromised by HUB (healthy user bias.) I’ve yet to see a study that was done in a way that might give us a true picture and that really takes a good hard look at regressive autism (the kind that sets in about 15 months old, quite often after a trip to the doctor). Even Temple Grandin and the former head of the NIH have said that we need to do a better job of really looking at this segment of the autism population — particularly since those are the ones that tend to have all the health issues.

I fully expect to get a bunch of shitty responses to my comment, yet another way that family’s like mine are punished and marginalized, so I’m letting those people know in advance, I will not be responding to them.