as small as a world and as large as alone

11:07am June 3, 2013

girljanitor:

goldenheartedrose:

girljanitor:

goldenheartedrose:

timelord89:

SHIT!!!!!!!!!! That’s it any time I see anyone trying to donate to Autism Speaks, I am literally going to do my best talk them out of it. Why the hell would they think it is okay to put this in a video? I fucking hate it when parents murder their disabled children and people actually feel sympathy for those pricks, this is dangerous shit.

You should also know that three weeks after this video aired, a mother DID murder her autistic child. I’m not saying that this video was the cause, but it was widespread enough to be the tipping point.

Also, if you want an Autism Speaks reference to pass along, here you go: http://goldenheartedrose.tumblr.com/anti-autismspeaks

This is what Autism Speaks does.

Makes a video of a mother talking about how she wanted/wants to murder her autistic child, and she says, “The only thing keeping me from doing it is having a child.” (She’s talking about her other Allistic daughter, not the one that’s right there in the same room with her.)

The effects? Here’s the dedication from ASAN’s recent book of essays:

If I’m not mistaken (and I might be), the person I referenced was Katie McCarron.

I cry every time I read that list. That is Autism Speaks’ legacy (along with all the abuse, particularly of the JRC). That isn’t to say there weren’t organizations before A$ that did the same things. There WERE. Ableism is prevalent and pervasive in our society. But this is the message they’re sending - your life is tragic, your life is unworthy. Better off dead than to be autistic.

Yes, really.

Bolded for truth.

holymotherofrowling also put together a pretty impressive post with a few details and quotes on the media depiction of these murders as well as responses from the murderers themselves:

holymotherofrowling:

These are just some of the autistic people murdered by their parents, caregivers, and others entrusted with their care (their killer is in parenthesis - I put that in because it’s easier to find the cases if anyone feels the need to check my facts or something).  This needs to stop.  What’s almost as bad is reading the comments on the articles about these cases and seeing parents saying that these murders are “understandable.”  Murdering your kid isn’t understandable.  This is just one of the reasons I hate Autism Speaks - they perpetuate the idea that autistic children are just burdens, which is incredibly dehumanizing.  And dehumanizing us makes people consider us less of a loss.  We’re not burdens.

• Ryan Davies (Alison)
• George Hodgins (Elizabeth)
• Mason Scott (Christie Michelle)
• Matthew Goodman (staff of The Lindens Neurobehavioral Stabilization Program)
• Kenneth Holmes Jr. (Micaela Jackson)
• Terrance Cottrell, Jr. (Rev. Ray Hemphill)
• Stephanie Jobin (staff of Brampton group home)
• Brahim Dukes (Dewey Gillespie)
• Casey Collier (staff of Cleo Wallace Center)
• James Joseph Cummings, Jr. (James, Sr.)
• Jason Dawes (Daniela)
• Marcus Fiesel (Liz and David)
• Unnamed 7-year-old daughter (Unnamed mother in Martigues, France)
• Joseph, Charles, and Everett “E.J.” Conant (Everett)
• Zain and Faryaal Akhyer (Saiqa)
• Lillian Leilani Gill (Sharon)
• Daniel Leubner (Michelle)
• Justin Malphus (Joyce)
• Patrick Markcrow (Wendolyne)
• Pierre Pasquiou (Annie)
• Jacob Grabe (Allen)
• Tony Kohr (Seow Cheng Sim)
• Charles Mancill (staff of group home)
• Chad Jackson (Yodi)
• Abubakar Nadama (Physician trying to “cure” his autism)
• Mark Owens-Young-Rogan (His mother)
• Glen Freaney (Yvonne)
• Casey Albury (Janine Albury Thomson) She said after: “I did it. I strangled my daughter. She was a misfit. People were scared of her because she was different. I wish it could have been quicker. I’d wanted to kill her for a long time.”
• Angelica Auriemma (Ioanna)
• Eric Bland (Delores Johnson)
• Dale Bartolome (Delfin)
• Gabriel Britt (Terrence and Renee)
• Katherine McCarron (Karen)
• Jeremy Fraser (Kristen LaBrie)
• Tiffany Pinckney (Alison Cox)
• Jude Jordan (Gigi)
• Ulysses Stable (Jose)
• Wayne Winter (staff of group home)
• Unnamed 9-year-old boy (Denise Snyder)
• Benjamin Barnhard (Margaret Ferne Jensvold)
• Chase and Olivia Ogden (Rene)
• Michael Renner-Lewis (staff of Parchment High School)
• Christopher Melton (Tracy Hawks)
• Rylan Rochester (Stephanie) I find this particularly disgusting: “She said she felt she and her husband couldn’t have fun while caring for a severely autistic child, according to the affidavit”
• Benjamin McLatchie (Daniel)
• Matthew Vick (staff of group home)
• Willie Wright (Southwest Mental Health Center)
• Walter Knox Hildebrand Jr. (Stuart Allen)
• Jeremy Bostick (Jeffrey)
• William H. Lash IV (William H. Lash III)
• Ajit Singh-Mahal (Satpal Kaur-Singh)
• Charles-Antoine Blais (Danielle)
• Christopher DeGroot (Nicholaas and Agnes) - He was buried alive and his parents only received 6 months in jail)
• Daniel Corby (Patricia)
• An 11 year old boy in NSW: http://au.news.yahoo.com/local/nsw/a/-/local/13658708/man-and-woman-charged-with-childs-murder/

And then of course, no matter where you go, you’ll see something like this image, along with an article ABOUT “MOTHER-BLAME”, which I happened to come across looking at a website called sociological images:

Mothers often felt that they were their child’s only advocate, with his or her health and future dependent on making just one more phone call, getting one more meeting with an expert, or trying one more school. Accordingly, they were simultaneously exhausted and filled with guilt.  I wondered, when I came across this Post Secret confession, if this mother was experiencing some of the same things.

BECAUSE APPARENTLY MURDERING YOUR DISABLED CHILD IS SOMETHING FEMINISM NEEDS TO DEFEND, FOR FUCK’S SAKES?????

um, guys? It wasn’t just Katie McCarron who was murdered immediately after the video. There were at least two others, including an autistic man whose parents locked him in the house and set it on fire. Unfortunately, not being young and cute and having a giant movement behind them, practically nobody remembers this. I can’t even remember their names because I didn’t hear them repeated a zillion times like I heard Katie’s name repeated. They didn’t have grandparents who went public and stood up for them. They had nothing.

The mother in this video has never acknowledged what she did and the effect it had on other people. It would still be possible for her to redeem herself, if she were to acknowledge what happened and dedicate her life to undoing as much damage as she can. Some can never be undone, people are dead, but she could be working to make sure that nobody thinks it is okay for parents to kill their disabled children. There is so much she could do from her position of authority. But all she does is complain that she was misunderstood, that it was a suicidal urge (and therefore the homicidal elements don’t count, because killing your kids is part of suicide?), that autistic people who won’t automatically give her a pass for what she did are horrible unforgiving ungrateful people who don’t understand her and don’t understand what parents go through and are just terrible people in general. And taking that stance, she is still doing the damage. This video is trotted out to defend murderers of autistic people.

After this video came out, an article also came out that said that every parent of an autistic child, if they were honest, has thought of murdering us from time to time. My mother was so upset by this that she sent me an email that seemed desperate to let me know that I had always been wanted, that even when doctors wanted me aborted she chose to have me, that she’d never wanted to murder me. I am still furious that anyone made her feel like she needed to say all that to me.

I’ve experienced people trying to kill me for being disabled. Not my parents. But people. In a mental institution they once let me know I was a waste of space and that they weren’t going to stop a pseudo anaphylactic extrapyramidal reaction that was making my throat close up. If someone hadn’t come by and saved me I wouldn’t be here. More recently, doctors acknowledged that I needed a feeding tube to survive – and then attempted to persuade me, day in and day out, while I was very sick with pneumonia and exhausted and not up for a fight, that I shouldn’t get the tube. According to my pulmonologist they only changed their minds after people from tumblr started calling the hospital and demanding they treat me right and saying the world was watching what happened to me. Now some of the same doctors are trying to say that I’m unable to take care of my tube, and I fear that if it comes out again or clogs again I will have a bear of a time getting them to replace it properly. It’s a constant struggle to prove I have a right to exist, and videos like this absolutely do not help.

If my parents were so inclined – fortunately they are not – they could come across the country and shoot me to death and get away with it. That’s what the statistics show, even when parents like Katie’s mom, who weren’t the primary caregivers of their children, claim to be so stressed from the care of us that they have to kill us. It’s horrifying. And people get away with killing disabled people all the time, especially through subtle medical neglect that never gets detected. Or means that are actually totally legal in some countries even when they are against the disabled person’s wishes. There are parents now that are out there campaigning for the right to kill their children with severe developmental disabilities with the help of the medical system, and people sympathize with them, not with us.

The worst thing in some ways for me, about this video? Besides the fact that she said all this in front of a daughter who clearly understood what she was saying? And the fact that it sparked off murders that the video was then used to justify? Is that I’m constantly being told that I’m being unfair to the woman who is in it. By people who claim to be on the side of autistic people. It works like this: she left autism speaks in order to campaign against quackery. There is a large community of largely nonautistic people who fight against autism quackery. Which is a good thing to fight. But they tell me that she is such an important person in the fight against quackery that I need to overlook what she did to autistic people when she wrote this. That it was a long time ago and it shouldn’t matter.

I’m willing to overlook a lot of what people did a long time ago, because people change. People do awful things and then they become better people and don’t do them anymore. I am the last person to say that someone should be shunned forever because of something they did that they truly wouldn’t do anymore. And I’m not trying to encourage people to hate her or harass her or anything.

However. What she did was huge. It had a huge effect because she’s a very public figure doing a very public very bad thing. She has never come to terms with the effect of what she has done. She has never made amends of any kind for what she has done. And if someone does something that huge and that awful, then… They need to dedicate themselves to doing the opposite of this, as much as possible. And she doesn’t. She just gets defensive about it and dedicates herself to anti-quackery. Someone in such a public position doing such an awful thing, needs to use their position of power, and she has great power in the autism community, to undo as much of it as possible. If it were me, if I had said something like that once that had such devastating effect, I would dedicate the rest of my life to preventing the murder of disabled people, to denouncing what I had previously done. She is clearly capable of such acts because she has done this with quackery. But I will not trust her until she does this with murder as well. Because murder of disabled people is such a horrible and real thing and her actions have contributed to murders. It’s been studied. When parents attribute murder of disabled children to parental stress and overwork and stuff, more disabled people die, because people who were right on the edge of killing us get a justification for it and get pushed over that edge. So with her influence comes so much responsibility that she has never taken. And that – not that I am a horrible unforgiving person who can’t possibly understand that human beings make mistakes and that I need to stop saying bad things about people who do so much good for the anti quackery movement – is why I don’t trust her. Still. As long as she continues to defend herself, as long as she doesn’t do anything to undo what she has done, as long as she treats autistic people who complain about this like we are the ones doing something terrible to her… I have no trust. And being against quackery doesn’t make me okay with someone, that’s not my measure of someone’s ethics.

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