Can autistic people hold down jobs, pay taxes or find love?
Many do — but the question we should be asking, according to waves of advocates, allies and autistic people voicing their concerns online, is why are we defining a person’s worth at all?
Reaction from the autism community has been swift and damning after U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s press conference last week. In discussing the CDC’s new report that autism numbers increased in 2022, Kennedy called autism an “epidemic” and claimed it “destroys families.”
“These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date,” he told reporters.
Kennedy’s comments come as the autism community is already grappling with his assertion that the U.S. will pinpoint the cause of autism by September, previous repeated pushes of a discredited theory that …