Writing in the Washington Post, Jayne Lytel recounts her journey with her son Leo, who was labeled as autistic at age 2. She put her life on hold to assure that Leo had appropriate early intervention services — in his case, up to 35 hours a week of seven different therapies. Now that Leo is nine, Lytel can report that he’s made great strides, no matter whether or not scientists decide he has “recovered.” An excerpt:

I won’t say that all the traits that led to Leo’s diagnosis have disappeared. But the ones that remain are not unique to children with autism spectrum disorders.

For all his achievements, he is a spirited little boy with hair-trigger emotions that can overtake him when he cannot bend the world to his will. His behavior is sometimes compulsive. In Freudian terms, he is all id.

As for me, I became the socially isolated person I worked so hard to keep Leo from becoming. My social network disintegrated in the years that I immersed myself in Leo’s recovery.

Jayne Lytel is author of  “Act Early Against Autism: Give Your Child a Fighting Chance From the Start” (Perigee).

See a Q&A with Lytel and Dr. Fred R. Volkmar, director of the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine, here.

John Railey, writing in the Winston-Salem Journal, says North Carolina governor-elect Bev Perdue should make good on her promise to recognize and assist people who were victims of the state’s involuntary sterilization program.

The state sterilized more than 7,600 people between 1929 and 1974 as part of a eugenics program that sought to “better” society by preventing “feeble-minded” people from reproducing.

As she ran for the Democratic nomination for governor, Perdue promised to financially compensate the victims through a foundation, and indicated that she wanted to make the health-care and education benefits a reality.

… As the state’s first woman governor, Bev Perdue should show the rest of the world that North Carolina really is a progressive place by delivering the help that this state has long owed these victims. North Carolina won’t ever leave this dark chapter behind until that happens.

From USA Today:

A new book by legal historian Paul Lombardo of Georgia State University says scientists, officials and even her own lawyer conspired against Carrie Buck in the landmark legal case that bears her name, in an effort to justify Virginia’s compulsory sterilization of “feeble-minded” people.

The book, “Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell” analyzes the facts and personalities behind the 1927 legal case that has never been overturned.

Writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes insisted that “three generations of imbeciles is enough,” and described Buck and her family as “manifestly unfit,” both physically and morally. Lombardo produces evidence, however, that Carrie Buck and her family were not imbeciles but were rather the targets of a eugenic agenda.

In the wake of the Buck v. Bell decision, Lombardo writes, about 30 states adopted involuntary sterilization laws, all based on the dishonest testimony and deceitful lawyering of Buck v. Bell.

It is estimated that 60,000 Americans were sterilized against their will in the first half of the 20th Century.

“Buck earns a place in the legal hall of shame not only because Holmes’ opinion was unnecessarily callous but also because it was based on deceit and betrayal,” writes Lombardo.

From the Los Angeles Times, AP/Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. Supreme Court this week declined to hear an appeal from a California man who has sued repeatedly over alleged violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The court’s action lets stand a federal judge’s ruling that bars Jarek Molski from filing further lawsuits without special permission.

Molski (left), who is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair, has filed some 400 lawsuits against restaurants and small businesses for alleged ADA violations, often alleging that he was injured in the course of his visit.  Targeted business owners often settled out of court, earning Polski hundreds of thousands of dollars in less than two years.

A federal judge in Los Angeles branded Molski a “hit and run plaintiff,” describing his lawsuits as extortion. The opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said Molski’s lawsuits were “probably meritorious in part,” as many of the businesses were probably not in compliance with ADA requirements, but that there was ample evidence that Molski had “trumped up his claims of injury.”

The appeals court’s decision can be found here.

From the Sacramento Bee, San Jose Mercury News:

A Sacramento Superior Court judge has ruled that California public schools cannot allow nonmedical staff members to administer insulin to students with diabetes. The judge sided with the California Nurses Association, which had challenged a 2007 rule that allowed trained, unlicensed school staff — not just school nurses — to administer insulin injections.

The ruling was seen as a major setback by parents of students with diabetes. They had filed a class action lawsuit in 2005 arguing that rules governing insulin injections, coupled with a shortage of nurses, were causing diabetic public schoolchildren to be denied an education in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

With fewer than a third of California’s public schools having a nurse on site, parents reported that they were being forced to come to school themselves to give the shots or keep children out of school. “I’m literally sick to my stomach,” said parent Lisa Shenson. “There are thousands of children in California who (now) will not be able to safely attend school.”

Some 14,000 California schoolchildren have diabetes. It is estimated that there are 23.6 million Americans with diabetes, or almost 8 percent of the population.

From the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Chicago Tribune and elsewhere:

Babies conceived with the help of medical technology are two to four times more likely to have certain types of birth defects than children conceived naturally, according to a study published online Monday in the journal Human Reproduction.

The report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found an elevated risk of heart defects, cleft lips and gastrointestinal defects.

Scientists emphasized that the problems were not lethal and that the individual risk of birth defects is small. For example, the risk of a baby in the United States being born with a cleft lip or without a palate is about 1 in 950, but the study found that the risk is 1 in 425 for babies conceived through infertility treatments.

About one percent of all births in the United States now occur with the help of infertility treatments, or double the rate recorded in 1996.

As the number of Americans with disabilities and chronic health conditions rises, caregiving promises to become a defining issue over the years to come.

The Wall Street Journal assembles a package of stories about ways that individuals and communities are changing the ways we are caring for each other.

For example:

Charlotte Frank (left), a former government official, has developed an informal network of people who share responsibilities for caring for neighbors and friends in the New York area. Called the Caring Collaborative, it uses a time bank to allow people to benefit from another’s skills and talents.

See also:

It takes a village — Older adults are developing networks to help them stay self-reliant as they age

After her mother’s death, Martha Stewart is reaching out to a new audience: Caregivers (With video)