Many people are turning to third-party candidates after being faced with worrying comparisons between Donald Trump’s campaign and fascists of last century including instances of supporters pledging allegiance to him using right handed flat salutes and comparisons between violence at events to Hitler's brown shirts. However, unfortunately, Jill Stein, a candidate for the Green Party who has been courting voters turned off by Trump and Clinton, does not have a clean reputation on that front either. In fact, they have one major thing in common: they both are extremely ableist, especially in their treatment of ongoing debates on the cause of autism.
Stein has a carefully curated image of a health conscious candidate. As a former physician she uses her experience as a platform to talk about the problems that motivated her to go into politics. Some of her concerns are with issues such as cancer, which are valid things to worry about. I myself lost someone in the past few months to cancer, and of course I would support all efforts to stop such a terrible thing from causing further damage. However, in the same breath she compared cancer to autism, a condition which does not hurt its so-called “victims,” and which is a part of the identities of 1 in 68 American children and many more autistic adults, including family and friends of mine.
According to Stein, the increase in autism is an “epidemic” and a “public health calamity” which she implies is caused by environmental factors such as pollution, but it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see a connection between an increase in diagnoses with the acknowledgement that autism research wasn’t inclusive of women and girls until very recently.
Stein also doubled down on this controversy, saying that people have "real questions" about vaccines, saying that while vaccines were "invaluable" they also raised concerns. Specifically, she said that people felt the Food and Drug Administration as well as the Center for Disease Control could not be trusted to remain impartial with the medication and vaccine approval process, a tool that former anti-vaccine advocates say is commonly used in anti-vaccination fear-mongering. In reality, most of the members of the advisory committee on vaccine research are academics and physicians, not corporate lobbyists, as Stein implies.
I am all for raising questions about our climate and how our health is affected by it, but bringing autism into the picture is another story altogether. These outlandish and unproven claims from the mouth of a physician only fuel the fire of anti-vaccination advocates, many of whom would apparently rather see their children dead of treatable illnesses like whooping cough than alive and with autism. Think that’s a harsh thing for me to say? Autism Speaks, an organization boycotted by many autistics for reasons like this, made a documentary in which a mother of an autistic daughter contemplated murder-suicide. If that’s not bad enough, four days after the release a different mother murdered her 3-year-old autistic daughter. Not all anti-vaccination advocates are this way, of course, many have simply been frightened into submission by leaders of the movement, but the only way to separate ableists from those who believe ableists' lies, is to cut off their source propaganda, not hand the megaphone over to politicians who believe it themselves.
Make no mistake, this rhetoric, perpetuated by Jill Stein, was born out of eugenics. It is a movement, sustained with hatred of autistic people and the desire to get rid of what makes them who they are. It is the same radical foundation that caused the massacre of nineteen disabled people in Japan last week. If Stein truly wants to support autistic people, perhaps she should instead be diversifying treatment options for low income patients and supporting anti-discrimination initiatives, and above all else, listening to the voices of autism patients themselves, not anti-science hedge funds. Undoubtedly, the worst thing about being disabled, whether that disability is my own or that of my autistic friends, I can say with all certainty: disability is not what makes my life hard, the actions of those who hate disabled people do.
On several other initiatives supported by Stein for tax-payer funded alternatives to medicine like vaccines, one blogger in favor of third-party candidates criticized, “The Green Party believes itself to be a pro-science party, urging congress to listen to scientists when it comes to the environment, climate change, etc. Yet, it openly denies medical science in the same way Republicans deny climate science.”
And this proud disabled person couldn’t agree more.
To hear what actually autistic people have to say on this topic and many others, such as the organization Autism Speaks, anti-vaccination advocates, and more, please visit the Autistic Self Advocacy Network at autisticadvocacy.org. While you're there, please consider getting involved or donating to them.
