Yes, it’s still World Autism Awareness Day, and the hits just keep on coming. Back at CNN …

Sperm donor linked to autism. CNN picks up the ‘Donor X’ story that ran earlier in ‘O’ Magazine. When Fordham University professor Gwenyth Jackaway’s son Dylan started showing signs of autism, she tracked down his sperm donor. Jackaway found out that ‘Donor X’ had also fathered other children with autism. Scientists say they do not yet have methods for screening sperm for genes that cause autism.

Celebrity author and former playmate Jenny McCarthy and actor Jim Carrey have posted a column on the CNN site saying that vaccines play a “major role” in causing autism among children. They say McCarthy’s son Evan has “recovered” from autism thanks to a gluten-free, casein-free diet, vitamin supplements and “detox of metals and anti-fungals for yeast overgrowth…”

We wish to state, very clearly, that we are not against all vaccines, but we do believe there is strong evidence to suggest that some of the ingredients may be hazardous and that our children are being given too many, too soon!

So-called “pillow angel” had hysterectomy, breast surgery and drugs to keep her small; no consensus among doctors on whether treatment is appropriate, ethical

Excerpt from Amy Burkholder story on CNN:

It’s been a year since the parents of a severely disabled child made public their decision to submit their daughter to a hysterectomy, breast surgery and drugs to keep the girl forever small. Today, the couple tell CNN, they believe they made the right decision — one that could have a profound impact on the care of disabled children worldwide.

“The ‘Ashley treatment’ has been successful in every expected way,” Ashley’s parents told CNN exclusively in a lengthy e-mail interview. “It has potential to help many others like it helped our precious daughter.”

While unwavering in their belief in the treatment, Ashley’s parents continue to insist on anonymity. (Editor’s note: Holiday photo above, from website that is purportedly run by parents, obscures faces of parents, siblings.)

In the year since Ashley’s parents went public, not only did the hospital that sterilized Ashley admit it broke Washington state law, but also the doctor who treated Ashley committed suicide.

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Two-year-old daughter has Down syndrome

From the [UK] Daily Mail, a feature on Laurence and Chelsea Kirwan, a plastic surgeon and his wife whose daughter Ophelia has Down syndrome. An excerpt:

The couple make their fortune from the quest for physical perfection. To become parents of a daughter with Down’s syndrome may have, to say the least, profoundly challenged their ideas of what beauty is, whether it resides in the spirit or the body and whether cosmetic surgery is truly worthwhile.

Laurence himself has admitted that he suffers what he calls “the curse of the plastic surgeon” – he is unable to look at a person without “mentally improving their face” in his mind’s eye.

So, perhaps it is no surprise he says he “may well consider” cosmetic surgery to correct his daughter’s features.

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Here’s a fascinating internet collection of public documents and video that documents the nation’s changing perception of intellectual disability in the postwar era: Parallels in Time II. Central to its story are the efforts of the administration of President John F. Kennedy in promoting public awareness and launching new programs for people with intellectual disabilities.

Assembled by the Minnesota Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities, the collection reminds viewers that as recently as the 1960s people with intellectual disabilities were routinely locked away, warehoused and abused in institutions. Photographs from the era show inmates who were physically restrained, malnourished, and lacked clothing.

Worth thinking about as you peruse the exhibit: President Kennedy’s sister Rosemary had an intellectual disability that was described as mild in childhood, but became completely incapacitated after being lobotomized in 1941 by Dr. Walter J. Freeman at the direction of their father, Joseph P. Kennedy. Rosemary spent the last 56 years of her life in an institution.

In a videotaped interview included with the exhibit, Elizabeth Boggs, a member of the President’s Panel on Mental Retardation, says the Kennedy family didn’t want Rosemary’s condition mentioned.

A partial chronology of exhibits:

1962 — Video of President John Kennedy explaining his legislative proposals to “help fight mental illness and mental retardation.”

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By Sandra G. Boodman in the Washington Post: a review of a “riveting” documentary on PBS’s “American Experience, scheduled to air Jan. 21.

One of the most horrifying medical treatments of the 20th century was carried out not clandestinely, but with the approval of the medical establishment, the media and the public. Known as the transorbital or “ice pick” lobotomy, the crude and destructive brain-scrambling operation performed on thousands of psychiatric patients between the 1930s and 1960s was touted as a cure for mental illness. (more…)

From the Boston Globe:

There is a role for aversive therapy if it is practiced with great restraint and respect. But such was not the case in August, when two emotionally disturbed teens in a Stoughton group home run by the Rotenberg center were given dozens of electrical shocks at the direction of a telephone caller posing as a medical supervisor. That caller was later identified as a former student.

The fact that the staff was so easily duped speaks to both poor screening of new hires and a dangerous lack of training. On that night, at least, the center resembled not a therapeutic environment but the infamous Milgram experiment, which measured the willingness of ordinary people to hurt a test subject based on nothing more than the verbal order of a phony scientist.

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From the New York Times:

Nearly a year ago, New York made plans to ban the use of electric shocks as a punishment for bad behavior, a therapy used at a Massachusetts school where New York State had long sent some of its most challenging special education students.

But state officials trying to limit New York’s association with the school, the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, southwest of Boston, and its “aversive therapy” practices have found a large obstacle in their paths: parents of students who are given shocks.

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