All I know is if I were a deaf person, and I found out my parents refused to me a chance to have hearing because of such malarkey, I’d immediately disown them. You don’t withhold something so vital from a person. It’s monstrous.
Oh hell yes. Would not even think about it for a split second. I have a 13 year old on the autism spectrum. She is an integral part of our family, her challenges have helped shape our family, but if you had given me that choice any time from the NICU to now, it’s not a choice, it’s a done deal.
Yep. I was sure the OP was going to add “…but (s)he’ll have lobster claws for hands” or something.
Aside from it being better to not have a cognitive impairment, there are a couple of factors (though I’m not sure if they’re fighting the hypothetical):
- Down’s doesn’t just affect cognition. There are physiological effects that are quite unpleasant.
- The existence of a cure changes the situation whether you take it or not. e.g. some employers right now might be willing to hire some guys with this disability even if it impairs their job performance somewhat. But if there’s an easily-available cure that you refused to take?
We autistic people often tend to not want to be “cured.”
What degree of hearing loss did she have before? People who are totally deaf or nearly so from birth, or early childhood, who have cochlear implants often discontinue using them, or use them only when having some degree of hearing is crucial. It’s because they can’t identify sounds, and that includes speech. Similar things have been said about totally or near-totally blind people who had their eyesight restored later in life; for example, they could eventually learn how to recognize colors, but they couldn’t identify objects unless they were touching them, just like they had when they were blind, and couldn’t identify people unless they spoke (or by their smell in some cases).
People who lost their hearing in adulthood and later had cochlear implants have compared normal hearing vs. CI hearing to regular vision vs. a cropped and pixellated picture, although the technology is improving by the day.
A while back, I saw a TV show, 20/20 or some similar program, about plastic surgeons who were operating on people with Down Syndrome to make them look more normal. I remember a young man who was profiled; he looked like a person with DS who’d had an operation to try and make him look normal, and sadly, he now LOOKED retarded. I will add that I remember that this boy was Hispanic, and I am aware that there may have been some cultural reasons why they did something like this. BTW, I am NOT talking about people who really do have some kind of facial problem associated with DS, like a swollen tongue which is very common and hinders their ability to breathe, talk, and eat. Definitely fix that! It would be cruel not to.
Sounds like puberty to me, without whatever impulse control a “normal” 12-year-old might have. He’s experiencing things that are hard enough to normal kids to deal with, never mind someone who can’t articulate them.
It’s an interesting question, especially when you come across what was formerly diagnosed as Asperger’s, now Autism is sort of a catch-all term. For the people that are higher functioning and can hold a job and function in society. I think the answer for someone that is severely autistic, the answer would probably be yes but what about someone that is more mild? I don’t know the answer.
Here is an anecdote from a man that was obviously higher functioning that tried a treatment currently being investigated called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation that he alleges allowed him to for the first time be capable of empathy and feeling the emotions of his loved ones. It seems it was both a positive and negative experience in some ways. It’s an interesting insight either way.
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/an-experimental-autism-treatment-cost-me-my-marriage/
Some people pooh-pooh the whole gluten-free thing as a treatment for autism, but it’s harmless to try it. I had a friend on another website, which has since shut down, whose son was diagnosed with “severe autism” as a toddler, and at the time, GF for autism was all the rage and they decided to try it. His condition improved so much that their doctors all believed that his diagnosis is actually some condition that hasn’t been formally identified yet, but they call it “autism” because it’s the best way to describe it.
People with metabolic disorders like PKU or maple syrup urine disease must follow special diets, of varying strictness, to avoid brain damage. Pearl S. Buck’s mentally disabled daughter was discovered in middle age to have had PKU, far too late for any diet to benefit her. At one time, people with PKU were thought that they could go to a regular diet at puberty, or even when they started school, but newer research indicates that they really should stay on it to some degree for life. It is vegan and they have to use supplements so they get adequate protein.
Some things are purely and unequivocally bad.
I say without compunction that if there’s a magic wand for purely physical problems like broken bones or missing limbs, you’d be stupid if you had the slightest doubt about using it.
But not everything is so clear.
Autism in particular is not a clear case of negative-only effects. I think Shodan’s statement is not fully, or not clearly, applicable to autism. Some stuff about it IS bad. Some of it is good. Some of what comes with autism is NOT something average people do. (I’m not saying they can or can’t, but observing that they in fact don’t.) I have seen valuable things happen that proceed from the fact that someone is autistic. (Not the same as when someone breaks their leg and tries to put a positive spin on it by pretending that unrelated good things happened “because” they broke it.)
On the other hand, ADHD (in me) seems unequivocally negative. Some people claim we’re “more creative” - we sure as hell have to be, because that’s one of the few skills not particularly affected by ADHD. I may be more creative day-to-day than you are, but only because I can’t plan worth shit. My creativity is the same thing as yours, except it’s kept in a smaller toolbox and gets used more often for stuff it shouldn’t have to be used for.
I know nothing about Down Syndrome so I can’t say much about it.
I have an adult daughter with autism, and if there were a way to “cure” her I’d take it, especially when she was younger.
If my son, now an adult, had this “cure” available as a child I would choose yes for him
If available now I’m not so sure. If he could somehow also be endowed with the education and socialization skills that he missed due to incompetence, misdiagnosis and bigotry, then again yes
If without this skill set then I would have to weigh the psychological shock of being “normal” in someone who has always used a different way of coping with the world
Yeah, he will never be a doctor or nurse, but he can and does prepare their lunches, skillfully and with pride. He travels alone, goes shopping, hangs out with friends, in short has the same sort of activities you do.
That he is “only a cook” or that he has difficulty speaking and thinks differently is somehow “bad” is really bigotry and labelling.
I wonder how many of you get up cheerfully looking forward to going to work?
There are times when I wish my behaviour wasn’t so abnormal. I also wish my autism had been diagnosed sometime before the age of 32 so I could’ve gotten help for it earlier.
Doesn’t mean I want to be cured.
Yes, I absolutely would. I have a brother on the autism spectrum (undiagnosed in childhood). If I could wave a magic wand and remove his autism, I certainly would. And so would he. In his particular case, autism has created all sorts of barriers to the life he wants. He has never held a job, had a romantic relationship, or even formed a single real friendship. He is lonely and often unhappy. He is also extremely intelligent, kind, and funny. If his social and communication deficits were removed in an instant, I think it would be only a benefit.
(Slight digression: Sometimes I wonder what his life would have been like if he had been born 20 years later. The resources available have improved immeasurably, and societal attitudes have changed as well. Then again, I see friends who have young children with ASD, and they are really struggling despite the apparent improvements.)
In any case, I would accept any and all magical cures for a child with Down Syndrome (or autism or other disabilities). In a heartbeat.
If you are in the class that understands the concept of “autism”, the concept of “cure” and the concept of “concept”, then you are not in the class that people are talking about curing. When people (well, when* I*) think about curing autism, I’m thinking of those who spend 70 years curled into a ball and making random noises. I have known people (with autism or other disorders) who make Rainman look like Einstein, and trust me, neither they nor their caretakers are better off with them like that
Makes perfect sense to me. There’s no inverted commas around community when it comes to the deaf, it’s a real thing, with its own language and culture.
Quite aside from the fact cochlear implants aren’t a magic cure and involve a serious surgical procedure on a small child, even if they worked with no side effects, would you want your kid to be at a school where you didn’t speak, and could never learn, the language? Want your kid to only have friends, plus probably a partner and maybe future kids, who you could never comfortably communicate with? Yes, you can teach your kid to sign at home, and when they grown up they might teach their spouse and kids to sign a bit, but they’re not likely to be fluent.
You’re likely thinking ‘well, sure, but they’re missing out on so much!’ but most deaf people don’t think they are. They don’t think they need fixing, they’re not missing what they never had.
There’s even some scientific backing; kids with implants can actually wind up with poor language skills in both sign and spoken language for life, because implants are …uh… implanted so early. The partial failure rate is quite high, where the recipient can ‘hear’ in that they will react to sounds, but can’t process spoken language. By the time someone realises that they’re really not understanding fully, just lipreading and guessing the rest, they’ve missed the period where infants absorb language easily, but the assumption was that they could hear and the focus has been on spoken language, so no-one taught them much sign language either. Without a ‘mother tongue’, further language acquisition is far harder than normal and they’re likely to get no or poor qualifications. This isn’t common in deaf families that routinely sign, of course, but it’s something deaf people are well aware of, and maybe have friends messed up by.
The science fiction show Eureka actually dealt with this situation midway through one of their seasons. Some of the major cast members were tossed into an alternate dimension(and stayed there for the rest of the series) where, among other changes, the female’s son(who had been severely autistic in the original dimension) was now not only not autistic any more but was highly intelligent. They dealt with the difficulties of her adjustment to the situation for quite a few episodes after that in quite a realistic way, in my opinion.
I forgot all about that. I can’t remember if he remembered. I know that she did, but did her son?
He was from the alternate dimension and was non-autistic from birth-she was from the original dimension and had to do all the adjusting about what his needs, wants and capabilities were compared to his original self in the home dimension.
Yeah, this.
Once you have the ability to play god, you can’t avoid playing god. Choosing not to use this cure has serious implications, probably more serious than using it.
And as a parent, you’re playing god with your kids’ lives damn near every day, anyway. Every decision you make has an effect on how your kid will grow up. This is just one more choice on the spectrum of choices you make, that the kid just has to put up with.