accidental feminist

Yes, Holden Caulfield said that. Whatever.

The point is, I was just reading a particularly well-written and no-holds-barred critique of the anti-vaccine movement in WIRED, and it just got me so mad.

Mad at the parents who, in the face of what must be a terrible mix of helplessness, guilt, and fear, would rather blame the closest correlative data they can get their hands on or spend the bulk of their waking hours protesting science and medicine than attend to the issue at hand: the fact that their child has special needs that require special attention and empathy. Mad at the parents who, by crusading against the “boogey man” of the vaccine industry, are basically telling their children: “You have an illness. This isn’t ‘you’; it’s some sickness inside you. If we could find a way to ‘cure’ you, you’d be ‘normal’ again.” It almost makes me cry.

And, you know, I get, on a very very small scale, what they’re going through. When Bassie was 3, we realized she could barely see: she was squinting at her little board books and sitting inches from the tv. We took her to the eye doctor. It could have been something really terrible. But it was just far-sightedness. Extreme farsightedness. As she got fit for her tiny little 3-year-old glasses I looked into her big, blue eyes that, with the magnification of her new lenses, looked like they were out of some animae cartoon. My eyes welled up with tears. Had I given her some genetic disposition to this? Had I somehow contributed to this in my raising of her? She’s going to be that nerdy little kid with glasses, and it’s ALL MY FAULT!

But then I looked at her again. She looked cute. She was smiling. She liked the purple frames with the orange trim. There wasn’t anything “wrong” with her; this was her.

Now, I know autism is a far more pervasive condition. And I know you can’t just slap a pair of glasses on a child and make him act “normal”. But following this red herring against vaccines only reinforces a parents’ own perception that there is some sort of sickness making the child act this way; like there’s a “real” child, stuck inside this fever-dream, waiting to emerge, wrap his arms around his loving mommy and daddy and say “My, God! How long was I trapped in that nightmare? Thank you for saving me!”

And this is just not the case. If you want to understand autism, you can learn a lot from people who are on the spectrum, but can communicate enough to share their experience, like Temple Grandin. They take in stimulus differently from most of us, and to varying degrees; and they process it differently. In some severe cases it’s hard for them to do very much taking in and processing at all. Yes, it’s abnormal. No, it’s not some “bug” you “catch”. It’s just a way you are.

And, oh, Jenny McCarthy. Look, we all remember you from “Singled Out”. You’re snarky and feisty and that’s great. But you’re not a scientist. You’re not a doctor. You’re the worst possible person to get involved in this discussion: you’re a mother in pain. And mothers in pain are not rational beings. Mothers in pain are not known for their restraint. Mothers in pain are sometimes able to tap into some reservoir of super human strength and lift cars off of their dying children to save them. Do not cross a mother in pain.

So, I know it’s tough, but stop blaming the shots your kid happened to get around the time he began to develop signs of autism, and maybe use your celebrity to help us understand more about what autism is, and how we can help children who are autistic, not try to make their “sickness” go away.