A recent Washington Post headline posed the blatantly eugenicist question, “Is autism preventable in certain cases after all?” and posited its answer as “some scientists say yes,” along with this deck: “Scientists are raising tantalizing questions about staving off autism, either before birth or in the early month [sic] of life.”

Tantalizing, maybe, if you get off on fantasizing about the erasure of people for having brains that don’t conform to Normie Expectations^TM. Tantalizing if you’re into “staving off” a human condition that has, through insistence of self-advocates and allies, led to a genuine, positive shift in attitudes, understanding, and acceptance about how People Should Be in schools, workplaces, and social settings. Tantalizing if you’re the kind of self-interested monster who thinks cookie-cutter humans are preferable to diversity as long as those cookie cutters are shaped like you.

I’m not going to link to the article (you can google the headline if you’re dying to give WaPo a click; I am not, and accessed it through Apple News). But I can say that although the piece seems to start at rock bottom, it just keeps digging itself deeper and deeper into eugenics, uterus-blaming, and ahistoric claims.

The “danger” that could be “staved” off ostensibly begins 1.5 years before a be-uterused person even conceives. A time when a lot of us have zero vision into our futures, zero intention of becoming pregnant, and zero expectation of reproducing. But based on this piece, in the interests of hypothetical future children, we would be expected to guard ourselves against “chemical exposures” that might involve “toxins, stress, and infections” to “prevent cases” – cases being carefully deployed here in place of autistic people – yea, verily, according to one doctor quoted in the piece, to “ideally reduce cases.”

If someone had said that to me 18 months before I conceived my first child, knowing what I know now, the incandescent rage of my response would have left the perpetrator a pile of ashes. How dare – how dare – someone so casually, off-handedly talk in this way about “reducing” autistic people as an “ideal.”

What the article fails to mention is that the person saying all of this, Jeanne Conry, is the founder, president, and CEO of the Environmental Health Leadership Foundation. This organization’s ungainly website gives a kitchen sink’s worth of scare words about “chemicals” and “prescription drugs” and “lifestyle choices” around pregnancy. It refers exclusively to “women” and “mothers” as though those are the only people who become pregnant and give birth. And there’s this huge red flag (you know it when you see it): “Adverse reproductive health outcomes have increased over the last fifty years, a trend that cannot be explained by diagnostic capability or genetics alone. Whether scientists are observing increased rates of cancer, neurodevelopmental disorders or birth defects, there is evidence to support the effect of chemical exposures on health.”

In other words, this is a person who, going back many years, is very invested in the idea that increases in, say, “neurodevelopmental disorders” cannot be explained by “genetics or diagnostic capabilities” alone and thus The Chemicals^TM must be lurking there in the gaps. To be clear, diagnostic awareness and shifts do, in fact, explain the increases in “neurodevelopmental conditions” (I mean, we all know “autism” lies buried between those lines). We don’t need to go around blaming pregnant people before they even become pregnant or talking about “toxins” to explain why autistic people exist.

But the WaPo headline references “some scientists” saying “yes” to the horrific question it poses. So far, we have no scientists saying that, as Conry does not conduct research, much less conduct research into autistic people. She is the founder of that organization and an OB-GYN.

The piece then cites what it calls a “peer-reviewed paper” that it claims is “generating buzz” in the autism research community for proposing a “three-hit” hypothesis for autism that involves genetics, exposure to The Chemicals^TM, and physiological stress involving mitochondria. Yes, mitochondria. Again. That “buzzy” paper actually is just a long-ass narrative review written by one guy and published in a niche journal called, yep, “Mitochondrion.” One can get one’s work published in this journal for the asking price of $3,320 before tax is added. The author, Robert Naviaux, has desperately been trying to make the term “cell danger response” a thing for many years now, but like “fetch,” his phrase doesn’t seem to be gaining the hoped-for traction. Naviuax has authored 11 of the 15 papers that turn up on PubMed in a search of that term, and six of those are single-author productions of his in the journal Mitochondrion. Six.

But sure, his sixth entry is a real buzzy one, at least according to this very gullible WaPo piece. The phrasing in the piece seems intended to imply that Naivaux’s article presents peer-reviewed original research findings, but it does not. It’s just his sixth outing and attempt to expand on his pet idea and to try to make “cell danger response” a thing. But sure, he’s a scientist, with a lab at UCSD and a focus on mitochondria. We’ve written in these pages before that mitochondria were going to be all the rage around autism, thanks to the wellness whisperers with a line straight to RFK the Lesser’s brain, and it remains true.

Still on a quest for scientists, plural, who say “yes” to the evil question posed in the article’s headline, I took a look at two studies it cites just after calling Naviaux’s sixth manifesto “buzzy.” Y’all. Both “studies” are published in the same MDPI journal. That’s this journal group, about which you can read more here. These are studies cited in WaPo as extraordinary evidence for an extraordinarily heinous claim! As support for a eugenicist proposition that stretches credulity in the first place!

One of the authors on both studies, Raymond F Palmer, is a scientist, but a second author on both, David Kattari, is a mystery person who runs a mystery consulting company and uses a gmail address for his contact on one of the studies and gives the foundation that funded the study as his affiliation on the other. A third person, Claudia Miller, is author on the second study. She was a scientist – she’s now a professor emeritus – and has absolutely wild and wildly unsupported ideas about autism (example: exposure to mold causes autistic people).

So we have, at most, three scientists, the total sum of the “some” saying yes, per the headline of this piece. Two of them publish together in sketch journals, and the third one publishes the same idea in the form of narrative reviews over and over in the same journal, and none of them have published anything close to establishing mechanisms for “preventing cases” of autistic people.

The WaPo piece stretches these sources as far as it can to try to make the claim in its headline look substantiated, but readers, there is very much no there there. In the time-honored tradition of both-sidesing all things autism, the piece cites two researchers who actually do have a deep background in autism-related research. They both express strong skepticism about the “ideas” (I use that term loosely) posed by the headline and the desperate attempt to undergird its claims with something substantial.

You’d think that an outlet willing to go full-blown eugenicist and make absolutely extraordinary claims would bloody well have marshalled evidence of sufficient volume and heft to fill the Grand Fucking Canyon in its reporting. Instead, this is just a clickbait headline supported by material flimsier than tissue paper. Like the sources it cites to support that heavy-lifting “some” in the headline, it is just trying to make eugenics happen. Stop it, Wapo. It’s not gonna happen.

News you can use

• Think you know why autistic people stim? OK, but do you know why autistic people don’t stim under some circumstances? Turns out, it’s because of an awareness about negative social judgments about stimming. “This study shows that stimming is not only something Autistic people do privately to cope—it can also be a way of connecting with others, sharing feelings, and communicating. We also found that many Autistic people mask or hide their stimming as a way to stay safe in environments where they worry about judgment, not because they lack social understanding. This challenges old assumptions that Autistic people stim “for no reason” or do not understand social cues.”
• The Lancet doesn’t mince words in its headline – “Robert F Kennedy Jr: 1 year of failure” – or the editorial that follows: “The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm.”
• What can we say except no one should believe US Surgeon General nominee Casey Means as she scrambles to elide what she’s clearly said about autism and about vaccines?
• Theory of mind was at best a hypothesis and any support for it is collapsing. Durham University’s Travis Lacroix puts a calmly reasoned metaphorical stake to the heart of this damaging concept: “I clarify that the theory endures less because of its evidential strength and more because of historical, institutional, and epistemic dynamics that insulate research programs from falsification.”
• Sara Eileen O’Neil Woods argues, accurately, that we need more autistic health care professionals, and she’s got some ideas about how we can support them. She writes “Autistic adults in general are also well-served by autistic health care professionals. Even if autistic adults are not served directly by autistic health care professionals, their presence will help change their fields for the better, which will improve health care for autistic people.”
• When professionals eye parents and their belief in their autistic children with skepticism or dismiss them as hopeless optimists, they drain the moral energy parents need to keep seeing and appreciating their children in all aspects, argues Erik Raschke.
• Interested in writing in plain language for greater accessibility? Here’s a primer from Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network

People you should know

• Who could have predicted that a hot homosexual hockey romance show would lead to change in the presentation and perception of autistic people in media? A writeup at Mediabistro sums it up: “Shane Hollander’s character shows that autism doesn’t have to be loud to be meaningful. By making it just one part of who he is, ‘Heated Rivalry’ offers a refreshing model of acceptance—one where autistic people can simply exist, thrive, and be loved exactly as they are.”
• Ledger Mann is a nine-year-old autistic boy who’s developing emergency kits for first responders to use with autistic clients.

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