Next, the introduction describes autistic rights advocates as a "pro-fester" group. They are not pro-fester, and neither are curebies. The pro-fester group are people like the teacher who said to Malcolm X as a child that he should become a carpenter rather than the lawyer he wished to become. They are the people who even know advise parents to institutionalise neurologically abnormal children, such as Doctor Huttenlocher, who advised Marisa Anders's parents to put her in a nursing home and not get attached to her, because Marisa, having Aicardi Syndrome, would be profoundly developmentally delayed and have difficult to control seizures and "would probably not live past her first birthday, and if she could accomplish that she would not live past puberty"(which is untrue, most Aicardi girls live past infancy and a number of them are teenagers or adults). Doctor Huttenlocher may have left the pro-fester group, since he later apologised to Marisa's parents after Marisa developed miningititis and only managed to survive due to the vigilance of her mother.
The pro-fester group are those who constantly ask Brette's mother whether she's sure she wants rescucitation for Brette whenever Brette gets seriously ill(Brette has lissencephaly, a neuronal migration disorder characterized by a smooth brain). Brette's mother, Karen Cockerill, says if Brette's NT brother Brady needed CPR and they said no rescucitation they "would lose our son to social services so fast our heads would spin".
On that same site there is also a mention of a woman who wondered, when the mother of another lissencephaly child, Olivia, was trying to raise money for "the Angel fund-raiser", why her mother had Olivia in the first place and why she still had her. Obviously the answer is maternal love for her wonderful profoundly developmentally delayed and multiply handicapped child, but it appears this woman doesn't understand how it is possible to love someone like that.
They are the ones who tend to support eugenics. They are the ones who now support prenatal screening, the modern form of eugenics, to prevent those "useless and worthless" disabled people from being born(eugenics has always been about preventing the birth of people viewed as expensive and worthless). Those are the pro-fester people.
Certainly the people who continually challenge assumptions about what they can and cannot do, as autistic rights advocates do, are in direct opposition to the pro-fester group, as are the people who say "don't give up on them, they can be fixed!" as the curebies do. We have a common enemy in the pro-fester group. The phrase "You're either with us or against us." is innacurate, as there are many groups with different points of view, who agree on some things but not others. We are "with you" in challenging limiting assumptions by the pro-fester group, but believe they should be challenged differently.
Then it mentions Misbehaviour of Behaviourists. It quotes Michelle Dawson's statement about a lack of proper ethical review of ABA. It describes her statements as "serious allegations". Then Bobby Newman's piece, Behavioural Flowers for Algernon, begins.
He talks about the article "The Ethics of Helping People", by B F Skinner. I have not been able to find that article, so I will just assume on faith that he is properly interpreting it. He states there are three options for helping someone with a lack of a certain skill.
a) We can do it for them.
b) We can circumvent the problem through adaptive technology.
c) We can teach that skill to them.
He gives the example of a child who can't tie their shoes, and having the option of either tying their shoes yourself, teaching them to tie their shoes, or getting velcro shoes for them. Then he says "what if a person's skill deficits were so diverse that (s)he was unable to independantly function in everyday society? We would be left with two of our three by-now familiar options", a) and c). This is not true. In fact, there is new technology to make it possible for people with diverse problems, who used to be unable to "independantly function in everyday society", capable of doing just that. For example, there are assistance dogs who help autistic people. But, anyway, he has missed the point. Option c) can be subdivided into two parts:
c1) Respectfully teach them the skill according to their unique needs.
c2) Teach them the skill while simultaneously teaching them(overtly or covertly) that only worthless people have trouble with that.
Option c2) should not be used under any circumstance. Autistic disabilities should be ameliorated by a combination of b) and c1), and a) if neither of those two are possible. The whole point of Ms Dawson's article was to challenge option c2), which is how ABA currently works.
Bobby Newman also missed the point with Flowers for Algernon. He characterizes the experiment in that book as falling under option b). It doesn't really fall under any of those, since b) doesn't take away the skill lack and they never really taught Charly those skills. But there is a far more important point made in that book, which Bobby Newman appears to have entirely missed. That is the point of the ethics of such treatment. Charly was far less happy when he was highly intelligent. And I would argue that the true Charly had disappeared, and reappeared when he lost those cognitive abilities. The kind of change that happened to Charly in that book is of the same degree as a lobotomy. The problem with a lobotomy, in my opinion, is not the disabilities it causes but the fact that they cease to be the person they previously were. I think the mother of Max, a two year old with Rubinstein-Taybi Syndrome, would agree. However, if ABA could truly make a child no longer autistic, that might actually be better. At least then they wouldn't have to pretend, the horrible kind of pretending that gays rebelled against and that autistics are now rebelling against. But a "cure" for me gives me the same kind of sick feeling that thinking about my own death does, whereas I think that kind of pretending can always be reversed.
Then he raises the issue of someone not wanting treatment for their disability by talking about cochlear implants. He says that "Within the deaf subculture, for example, there are some individuals who believe that deafness is part of their identity and not a disability. They would not voluntarily undergo the operations that might restore their hearing". Firstly, the majority of those deaf people never could hear, so it's inaccurate to say that it would "restore their hearing". Secondly, the issue is not about whether those people should get cochlear implants. They are not very useful for adults, just as ABA treatment is stated to be most effective in preschool, hence the term "early behavioural intervention". Next