Repressive Autism Advocacy: ASAN Does Not Represent Other People's Autistic Children

ASAN, the "Autism" Self Advocacy Network, is more than just a network for high functioning persons with PDD's or Autism Spectrum Disorders. It goes beyond simply representing the interests of its members and insists on challenging the rights of other persons, usually children, to receive representation of their interests through their parents and other caregivers. It attacks on a continual basis organizations like Autism Speaks, as it does in this latest press release, for attempting to help persons, primarily children, with Autism Spectrum Disorders recover from, or be cured of, their neurological disorder.

Autism Spectrum Disorders is the term commonly used today to describe the category of various neurological disorders listed as Pervasive Developmental Disorders in the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. The expression contains one word which is often used by ASAN, sometimes questionably, autism. I say questionably because some of the leading lights of the ASAN organization have Aspergers Disorder, a similar but distinct, disorder from that of Autistic Disorder from which the common usage borrows the term autism.

I also say questionably because some people with Aspergers Disorder or a high functioning variety of Autistic Disorder, actually purport to speak on behalf of all children and adults with Autistic Disorder, even though those persons, particularly children are usually represented, as is their right, by parents in the first instance, grandparents and other family members or state caregivers. ASAN actually goes so far as to attack organizations such as Autism Speaks which comprises many parents and family members of autsitic chldren precisely because they seek to overcome their own children's neurological disorders.

ASAN has the right to speak on behalf of its members and to tell the world that its members do not want to be cured. They have no right to oppose the treatment or cure of autistic children in the care of their parents or other caregivers. Under the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child a child has the right to available treatment for their medical conditions. The UN Declaration of the Child, 1958, expressly recognizes that the child will be represented in the first instance by his or her parents. Not by a stranger somewhere else in the world who shares the same or a similar medical diagnosis. Apart from the lack of a legal right the high functioning autistic and Aspergergian persons who comprise ASAN lack a common shared reality with many of the people who they falsely claim to represenet. They have no legal, informed or moral right to advocate on behalf of Conor Doherty or the other children of other people with whom they have little in common.

In attacking Autism Speaks, and parents and parent organizations seeking to treat or cure autistic children, ASAN is overreaching and attempting to suppress the rights of autistic children, the right to treatment and cure of their neurological disorders and their right to be represented by their parents.

In doing so ASAN betrays itself as a repressive organization.

It is time ASAN stopped pretending to represent other people's children.

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