Carol Sarler - Having a child with autism wrecks your life, abort them if we can ever test for it ...

Easily the most ignorant and condescending article on autism that I have seen in a LONG time. (It's not new, just resurrected on Facebook this week.) There may finally be someone that all facets of the autism community can reach common ground on ... Carol Sarler.

Wisely, the Daily Mail and Carol Sarler are not allowing comments on her article, Why can't we face the truth? Having an autistic child wrecks your life ... | Mail Online. If they were they would surely hear the opinions of some actual autism parents.

Last year, I gave them Charlotte Moore's book, thinking, foolishly, that it might afford comfort.

It actually meant nothing; they simply could not see Tom in George and Sam. Autistic children, like any other children, presumably reserve the right not all to be the same.

But if there's a chance of a Tom, and a chance of a test to indicate his condition, then - with the obvious proviso that it never be mandatory - I would urge its opponents to think less of Mozart and Einstein and more of otherwise everyday people: Cath, John, Helen, Bill. And Tom.

I would not be impertinent enough to ask Cath if she wishes she'd had such a chance.

In any case, that is a difficult question after the event: it is hard for a mother retrospectively to wish away a living child who, come what may, she loves.

But looking on, as a relatively dispassionate observer; looking at the damage done, the absence of hope and the anguish of the poor child himself, do I think that everyone concerned would have been better off if Tom's had been a life unlived?

Unequivocally, yes.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1116602/Why-face-truth-Having-autistic-child-wrecks-life-.html#ixzz1kUMzr7dh