The US is proposing creating a register of those with autism

If you haven't seen the news, Roberr F Kennedy Jr has proposed that there is setup a register of people with autism in the USA.

He also proposes a bunch of misinformation about autism to justify this (e.g. it is a preventable disease caused by environmental toxins)) -

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2025-04-23/is-rfk-jr-creating-an-autism-registry-what-to-know

News these days can be very biassed in its reporting so it helps that Snopes has researched the article in more depth:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/04/22/rfk-jr-registry-to-track-autism/

My concern is that this is opening the door to eugenics. Look at his statement: "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, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted,

It does not take much of a stretch of the imagination for a regeime already leaning heavily on facist methodology to start to build registers of the undesirables - those they can get rid of because they are a burdon on society.

Once the US starts to normalise the process then other countries are going to believe thet can do the same - the Pandoras box will have been opened.

It is a very troubling time to be autistic.

Parents Reply Children
  • It will be interesting if/when there are genes for autism found, one would be able to compare them to ancient DNA samples and most likely find that they've been there all along.

    I do think Kennedy has a point about all the environmental toxins, but his ideas about autism are wrong. We do live in a heavily poluted world, micro plastics have been found in the fluid in human eggs, there are micro-plastics everywhere in the world, even in places like antartica. We've known about the dangers of plastic for decades, about what we actually do with the stuff when we've finished using it, throwing it away and burying it seems to have been the solution for was too long. I'm amazed that it took a David Attenborough documentary showing how poluted with plastic our oceans are before a lot of people actually took any notice.